Supply Chain Attack | Supply Chain Security

Overview

What is supply chain security?

A supply chain attack is a strategy used by cybercriminals, where they break into a less secure network in order to infiltrate others that may be better defended. Cybercriminals want to use the attack as a doorway into other companies that are their real targets. As businesses outsource more and more of their activities, they become more vulnerable to this type of exploit. Consequently, supply chain attacks are on the rise.

Multiple forms of protection, designed to complement each other

Get comprehensive real-time protection against malware-less supply chain cyber threats in inbound email.
Break through clutter and distraction to help employees recognize supply chain attacks and act appropriately.
Leverage the power of DMARC to protect business partners from supply chain cyberattacks that use emails to spoof your brand.

Challenges & Solutions

A complete approach to safeguarding business systems, employees and reputation

Cybercriminals will exploit everything they can — including a company’s commitment to being a great business partner. They’ll impersonate you, your customers, and your suppliers to exploit the brand reputation you’ve taken years or decades to build. Supply chain attacks have emerged in recent years as a growing, spreading menace: Nearly half (47%) of respondents to Mimecast’s State of Email Security (SOES) survey saw an increase in phishing emails making fraudulent use of their company’s brands.

Mimecast can help you resist all forms of supply chain attacks, to protect your email, technical infrastructure, brand and employees.

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Help employees recognize sophisticated supply chain attacks

Agile businesses train employees to prioritize quick response to customers, partners and their own remote colleagues. Now, with the industry’s most effective security awareness training, you can keep cybercriminals from using that agility against them.

In just a few minutes a month, Mimecast Awareness Training’s mini-sitcoms and easy-to-customize phish testing help employees recognize risky social-engineered messages that impersonate partners, empowering them to follow established risk-reduction processes more scrupulously. Since risks linked to human behavior aren’t static, Mimecast Awareness Training tracks trends and refocuses training as appropriate to address new gaps or emerging supply chain attacks.

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Deep content inspection blocks email-based supply chain attacks in real-time

Mimecast's Targeted Threat Protection - Impersonation Protect gives businesses automated protection against supply chain attacks and other impersonations in email, at scale. Its deep inspection of content helps you block supply chain cyber threats without slowing delivery. Real-time scanning detects header anomalies, domain similarities across international character sets, suspicious new sending domains, suspect content and terminology, and more.

It provides fine-grained control over how suspicious messages are handled, together with easy, centralized policy management and reporting. Plus, Mimecast’s off-the-shelf integrations and powerful open APIs enable rapid sharing of new attack data across a business’s security infrastructure — empowering endpoints, web gateways and other tools to recognize new supply chain attacks arriving via non-email vectors.

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Protect business partners against domain spoofing that exploits your brand

No matter how hard an organization works to protect its own people against external supply chain attacks, cybercriminals can impersonate your brand to attack partners and customers. And the bigger the brand, the more attractive the target. Mimecast DMARC Analyzer helps you defeat domain spoofing, protecting customers and suppliers — and your reputation.

DMARC is as practical as it is powerful. With DMARC Analyzer, you can quickly identify email that uses your domains without authorization and instruct ISPs not to deliver it. Simple deployment and step-by-step tools help you gain 360-degree visibility over email, track performance, and continually improve enforcement, so you can deflect more email-based supply chain attacks over time.

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FAQs

What is a supply chain attack?

In supply chain attacks, cybercriminals target vulnerabilities at companies within a larger organization’s supply chain and then use access to that supplier’s network to infiltrate the larger organization or other business partners. These attacks can take many forms, all of which exploit the growing complexity of connections among companies’ partners, suppliers and customers.

How do supply chain attacks work?

Supply chain attacks often work in roughly the following way: a hacker group crafts a phishing email purported to come from a trusted partner but containing a malicious URL. The email may leverage the services of legitimate cloud or email providers, making it look more authentic. When clicked, the malicious URL might install a backdoor into the recipient’s network, giving the threat actors a beachhead for wider attacks against the recipient’s own systems and its entire supply chain.

Why is supply chain security important?

Cybercriminals have recognized that the complexity of modern supply chains makes them vulnerable and potentially attractive targets. It’s easier for companies to secure their own organizations than that of their business partners, suppliers and customers, any of which may require occasional access to the company’s corporate network. As organizations rely ever more on connections to external providers – and to third party services, delivered via the cloud – they become more vulnerable to attacks that seek to breach their networks or those of their partners.

What are the best practices for supply chain security?

As with most forms of cybersecurity, safeguarding against supply chain attacks involves understanding your business’s primary risks and addressing them through layered defenses encompassing people, process and technology. Organizations can audit supply chain partners’ security systems, helping to mitigate risks arising when both parties share access to business systems. Further, inbound supply chain phishing attacks can be limited through deeper inspection of email content and more effective employee security awareness training. Wider use of DMARC can help organizations resist more attacks that spoof their own identities.

Security awareness training & user behavior

Make employees an active part of your defense with award-winning content, real-life phish testing, user risk scoring, and targeted end-user support.

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Email security & resilience

Get world-class protection, offered with total deployment flexibility, with Mimecast Email Security. Our AI-powered detection blocks the most sophisticated email threats.

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