How to find hidden data breaches and uncover threats in your supply chain

In this article, we’ll help you:

• Understand how breaches can stay hidden inside your supply chain
• Determine if your supplier relationships are increasing your risk
• Assess your exposure across your entire supply chain

The cyber pain in the supply chain

A company’s supply chain is like a body’s nervous system: a mesh of interconnected manufacturers, vendors, sub-contractors, service delivery firms, even coding and collaboration tools. The connected enterprise is an efficient enterprise.

Provided that the supply chain works.

Supply chain topics tend to focus on manufacturing and labour. Yet there’s far less attention being given to another aspect of the supply chain, no less important: cybersecurity. When one node of the interconnected enterprise is breached, the pain can spread thick and fast.

If your workforce eats, sleeps, travels or makes buying decisions, company data is at risk. Just think about the InterContinental Hotels or Uber data breaches. Was your CEO a customer?

Why a cybersecurity data breach is not just about your organization

Modern business runs on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and many of the world’s most successful companies are SaaS vendors, such as Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify, Zoom, or DocuSign. They hold data on thousands of other companies, and those companies’ customers and partners.

Even if SaaS is not your company’s business model, the same principle of interconnectedness applies. Let’s say you’re an advisory firm in financial services, legal or accountancy – your clients’ account details, documents, intellectual property is a perfect reflection of just how tangled data in the modern enterprise is.

Now let’s imagine one of those companies – or your own – suffers a breach. It’s normal to prioritise sealing holes in one’s own organization first. That’s step one. But in the interconnected supply chain, a breach creates a network effect that can have ramifications outside of the immediate havoc.

Does your supply chain pose a cybersecurity risk?

If your company relies on, or even just uses, SaaS services, third-party collaboration and coding tools, data, dashboarding or document storage services, your risk is real.

A recent study by NCC Group estimated that supply chain attacks increased by 51% in the last six months of 2021, and the BlackHat 2022 conference featured a number of talks highlighting the vulnerability of supply chains not just between companies connected by business operations, but also software coding practices.

When CISOs talk about attack surfaces, they’re really talking about the need to first define and then protect company assets. In the modern supply chain, that could be anywhere.

So how do you even begin to evaluate your risk in a networked economy? Not only is it about remote working, human flaws and siloed access systems, it’s about the inherent complexity of supply chain vulnerabilities.

• Where – The Internet has many murky corners. Where exactly your breached company data will end up is hard to predict and even harder to find, not least because the Dark Web is, well, dark.
• What – The kind of information a hacker may have on your company could be the beginnings of a research mission before a potential cyber attack, or a complete download of your entire active directory of users, ready for ransomware demands.
• Who – There are different levels of associated risks depending on who has been breached, and whose details are lurking in the hands of attackers. Hackers often target high-profile or senior leadership individuals to create additional publicity.

Mitigating the “when” becomes a matter of urgency.

Now Lab 1, a new cyber intelligence platform, has launched CiGraph, which transforms a gigantic dataset of global breaches, ransomware attacks, and compromised data into an alerting and analysis service.

Knowledge is power – and speed of reaction

The average time to detect and contain a data breach was 287 days according to IBM 2021 Cost of Data Breach Report, a week longer than the year before. Lab 1 wants companies to react faster to cybersecurity threats and contain breaches that occur not just within a company’s own perimeter – but across their entire supply chain.

Lab 1 tools go from granular to global so that teams can respond rapidly to specific threats. For example, you’ll know if your Managing Partner’s taxi account has been compromised, or if your shipping partner has suffered a breach that may make your entire customer database vulnerable.

To turn breach information into action, Lab 1 offers Blast, a real-time alerting service; Radius, a detailed breach report, and Fallout, an impact assessment with recommended remedies, and company reports for an aggregated normalised view of risk.

So how does Lab 1 work?

Lab 1 scans the Internet – both Light and Dark – to discover compromised company data, before extracting, analysing and contextualising to build a picture of compromised data assets across the entire network of the company, its vendors and suppliers.

As with any machine learning technology, Lab 1’s CiGraph gets smarter the more data points it scans. Even now, Lab 1 already amassed over 24bn data entities, creating insights of the interconnected economy – at scale.

Although the immediate value of Lab 1’s CiGraph is in providing insights of breaches that have already occurred, the long-term vision is to enable businesses to build more resilient supply chains by selecting vendors with stronger cybersecurity ratings.

After three years of data research, Lab 1 has launched an onboarding waitlist. To avoid staying in the dark, head to lab-1.io/, where Lab 1’s CiGraph is waiting to reveal just how much more it knows about your supply chain than you do.