Digital supply chain attacks are happening more often, inflicting widespread damage and threatening your future operations. Here’s one simple solution.
How would you know if your digital supply chain is under attack?
From aerospace and defense projects to engineering and infrastructure programs, modern manufacturing processes rely on digital supply chains. These interconnected cloud highways streamline production workflows and improve efficiency across the supply chain. But they also put organizations at risk.
Cyberattackers have turned their attention to smaller less security-diligent supply chain partners as an entry point to target larger enterprise organizations. As it only takes one security gap across the entire digital supply chain to cause a widespread data breach, your operations are at risk even if you have state-of-the-art cybersecurity protection in place.
Here’s why you need to secure your digital supply chain in 2025.
Since 2018, supply chain attacks have risen 2,600%. In the UK, for example, 79% of businesses suffered a security incident due to their supply chain or external partners in 2023-2024; a 22% year-on-year increase.
According to the NATO Review, there are two principal reasons underlying the rise in supply chain attacks: the increased outsourcing of business functions as workflows digitize and the strength of individual organizations’ cybersecurity defense “prompting attackers to look for easier entry points to access the data and systems of their intended targets.”
Be it through HR software, SaaS applications, legal consultants or suppliers of custom parts, every third-party partner represents a potential security risk. When you consider the fourth-party or first-party vendors of these organizations, as well as the proliferation of IoT devices and employee-owned devices, digital supply chains offer an endless range of external attack surfaces to exploit.
In 2024, IBM found the average cyber breach cost $4.88 million. However, the average supply chain attack to organizations in critical industries like aerospace and defense cost $82 million.
Just as the seamless digital supply chain networks enable seamless collaboration and more efficient workflows, they also enable attackers to infiltrate a huge array of systems simply through one breach.
In recent years, two of the most well-known supply chain attacks primarily involved SolarWinds and MOVEit, but ended up affecting thousands of companies. For example, the SolarWinds attack affected 18,000 SolarWinds customers, a handful of Fortune 500 businesses, and even the US State Department. Meanwhile, the MOVEit software attack compromised over 2,000 entities, including the BBC and British Airways, costing north of $10 billion.
Digital supply chain attacks don’t just hit your finances: they can have devastating operational, reputational and regulatory consequences too.
While supply chain attacks can temporarily disrupt or even shutdown production, their impact on your future operations is more precarious. For example, losing your intellectual property (IP) or trade secrets in an attack can lead to a loss of competitiveness. Leaking customer records or sensitive data can lead to regulatory non-compliance and fines (i.e. GDPR fines of up to €20 million). Inadvertently involving your customers or partners in cyberattacks can lead to lost sales and market confidence, which is hard to recapture.
Supply chain attacks can even make you ineligible for future contracts. For example, all members of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) must be CMMC compliant by mid 2025 to work on DoD contracts. If you lose control of files that are considered CUI (Controlled Unclassified Information), you will be CMMC non-compliant.
With the endless array of potential security gaps, securing and monitoring your whole digital supply chain is an impossible task.
Instead, secure all the files you share externally with automatic Zero Trust protection. From engineering drawings in CAD files to PDF contracts in shared folders, embedding Zero Trust protection at the application layer ensures your files are protected even when moved outside of your business, shared with a sixth-party vendor or even stolen by attackers.
As such, it doesn't matter if your digital supply chain is under attack - you’re still protected.
