Third-party incursions are yet another reminder of how fast and widely supply-chain assaults may spread, as seen most recently at Twilio and Mailchimp.
All of these cases have one thing in common – they were service supply chain assaults, which are intrusions in which the attackers used access granted to third-party services as a backdoor into the target companies' critical core systems.
Hackers pay attention and return for more when an attack on one institution opens the door for prospective strikes on many more. Attacks involving phishing and social engineering are frequently used to acquire unauthorized access.
This amplification effect has led to an increase in attacks by third-party vendors. Hackers now have a way to reach more targets more reliably and successfully due to the level of access or data that is potentially exposed throughout the supply chain.
Companies are rapidly incorporating third-party apps into the fabric of their enterprise IT as digitalization and the rise in cloud-based, remote, or hybrid work progress to boost productivity and streamline business procedures. These linked apps increase productivity across the board, which is why they have gained so much attention recently.
Twilio suffered a phishing assault that affected 125 customers, resulting in the exposure of 1,900 Signal users' phone numbers and verification credentials. DigitalOcean was one of 214 accounts impacted by the vulnerability of Mailchimp's internal tooling caused by social engineering assaults.
The firm wants to implement new technologies to increase automation and productivity, but security and IT teams are becoming more underfunded and overworked. Traditional third-party review procedures and security governance models are under pressure due to the quick expansion of new integrations between third-party cloud apps and core systems, which is overwhelming IT and security teams and ultimately leading to the creation of a new, expansive, largely unmonitored attack surface.
Similar supply chain attacks will inevitably continue to take place if these integrations spread without adequate comprehension and mitigation of the specific vulnerabilities they bring. In fact, 93% of businesses in 2021 had a cybersecurity compromise of some type as a result of unreliable third parties or weak supply chains.
