Digital lives are intertwined across a broad spectrum of the internet via software. Software applications are the pillars enabling technological advancements while delivering value and solving real-world problems. The solutions software offers are reliable, precise, and trustworthy, boosting adoption and confidence among end users.

The cumulative benefits from software have elevated the investment of time and money, introducing advanced solutions with better features on every iteration. The rise has exploded recently, adding many bite-sized packages and dependencies into the market to develop and deliver software fast.

The additions are responsible for impacts, both positive and negative. One such negative impact with many implications is a software supply chain attack. Let’s understand this in more detail.

What are Software Supply Chain Attacks?

Using legitimate software and dependencies as hosts to perform or apply carefully crafted attacks on organizations and individuals are known as software supply chain attacks. A software supply chain attack can cause a broad impact, resulting in instant, ongoing, or futuristic threats. The attackers target enterprises and software companies, generally intending to impact individuals on a gigantic scale. The unfathomable consequences are the result of cascading and interconnected software supply chain attacks. Let us understand the impacts and the resulting outcomes.

Top 6 Impacts of Software Supply Chain Attacks

Like wildfire, software supply chain attacks, once introduced, can amplify alarmingly impacting targeted systems and their loyal users. A domino effect can be observed, affecting nearly everything remotely connected. Let’s explore six significant impacts of a software supply chain attack:

Unknown Exploitations on Dependent Systems

Software supply chain attacks target widely used software applications. They alter a part of the codebase by manipulating the development processes to exploit the dependent systems and impact the users. Every service across the ecosystem, dependent on the vulnerable software, becomes a victim and a part of exploitation. The attacks advance with severe consequences and n-dimensional vectors that tear down the service integrity.

Risk Exposure Amplification

The dependency on third-party software delivers exceptional benefits for organizations, however, with a risk involved. A software supply chain attack on the third-party component can cause a chain reaction, impacting every dependent software, leading to the amplification of security risk and privacy violations. The attacks can go unnoticed for a long time, making isolation and remediation a complex task.

Disruption in the Field

The amplification can be a problematic factor for some fields, and for others, not so much. Popular niches such as finance and healthcare, when impacted, get disrupted, altering the course of action for billions of individuals. The reliability and necessity factor of some fields precedes others, with higher trust expectations concerning security and privacy. An anomaly in the system or departing from following security best practices can put a company out of service.

The Need to Rebuild from Scratch

In worst-case scenarios and due to a lack of security controls, the impact from third-party resources usually introduces vulnerabilities in internal systems and infrastructure, enabling back door access and data exposure to unauthorized entities. An informed approach to evade and deplete the attack surface is to switch from depending on third-party software to rebuilding in-house solutions from scratch. If the dependency is critical, the infrastructure has to be torn down from the inside out and rebuilt from scratch.

Financial Losses and Manipulative Diversions

The rebuilding can be costly if an organization is still on legacy architectures. Even for cloud-enabled companies, redeploying and reintegrating affected services can cost time and money. Legal and regulatory fines that precede the attacks are hefty, with occasional ransom demands from the attackers when highly sensitive or intellectual properties are involved. Attackers can manipulate the individuals or divert the organization’s focus to attain huge gains.

Market Shifts with Trust Depletion

Lack of privacy and security, monetary losses, along with an imminent response from stakeholders and users result in loss of trust. The mistrust leads to service abandonment and shifts in markets. Attackers are prepared to benefit from this outcome from stock markets or competitors, usually by shorting the stocks or selling data.

Remediations

Software supply chain attacks, when implemented all the way through, can turn an organization or software integrity upside down. Learning and applying solutions to stop the attacks from occurring is essential for the security-first development strategy:

1. Promote peer and code review with automated build and security checks for a trustworthy development process.
2. Put robust access controls in place with extensive security measures to avoid vulnerabilities.
3. Adopt dependency management and version control systems for control and visibility.
4. Keep Zero Trust Security and Disaster Recovery Systems as fail-safe switches to swap between environments to reduce exposure.
5. Have Incident Response Systems with advanced monitoring and alerting implementations for supervision.

Conclusion

Attacks on the software supply chain can have serious, multidimensional effects. They have an impact on the targeted organization as well as its partners, clients, and the larger industry as a whole. Organizations must have a strong security posture while staying on par with enterprise-grade security best practices and implementations. An Incident Response System with a Zero Trust Security mindset is crucial for businesses that rely on third-party resources.