Software supply chain cyber attacks look set to be one of the biggest cyber threats facing organisations in the coming years. This week, the US intelligence community issued a new warning regarding future attacks…

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The US intelligence community has issued a new warning on cyber attack risks.

The Foreign Economic Espionage Report, which was published by the US’s National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), warns that China, Russia and Iran are most likely to be behind future attacks.

“Software supply chain infiltration is one of the key threats that corporations need to pay attention to, particularly how software vulnerabilities are exploited,” William Evanina, the NCSC’s director and the US’s top counter-intelligence official, told the BBC.

“To get around increasingly hardened corporate perimeters, cyber-actors are targeting supply chains.

“The impacts to proprietary data, trade secrets, and national security are profound.”

The report details that despite the opportunities that technologies including AI and the IoT offer, they will also introduce vulnerabilities to U.S. networks – for which the cybersecurity community is not prepared.

The severe impact of cyber attacks was in evidence in June last year following the NotPetya attacks, ,  which cost nearly a billion dollars in collective damages. The White House called out Russia following these attacks issuing the following statement – “In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyberattack in history. This was also a reckless and indiscriminate cyberattack that will be met with international consequences.”

Experts believed that Russian hackers launched 2,000 “NotPetya” attacks in the early hours of June 27.  NotPetya was designed to masquerade as ransomware, but was soon revealed to be wiper malware with the purpose of destroying computer systems, erasing data and disrupting business operations.

Cyber attacks on the rise

One of the consequences and subsequent risks of living in a hyper-connected world is an increased vulnerability to indiscriminate cyberattacks.

According to Chain Store Age, “nearly 80 per cent of IT security professionals across the United States, Canada, UK, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Japan, and Singapore believe software supply chain attacks have the potential to become one of the biggest cyber threats over the next three years. Yet, few organisations are prepared to mitigate the risks.”

Whilst many organisations have response strategies in place to deal with cyber attacks, they are not necessarly holding external suppliers to the same security standards.

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Read more on Supply Chain Dive