Emerging Threat
How to deal with emerging threats in your supply chain
Unpredictable, high-impact events that defy conventional expectations - this is the essence of ‘black swan’ occurrences. In the context of cyber security and third-party risk management, such events represent significant risks to individual organisations, sectors or entire economies.
As organisations increasingly rely on convoluted supply chains - involving sometimes hundreds of external vendors and service providers - increased awareness of potential disruptive black swan events, and securing a corporate supply chain against them, takes on heightened importance.
Heading further into 2024, fostering vigilance and putting comprehensive risk mitigation strategies in place are essential for safeguarding operations and ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data across corporate supply chains.
A black swan event is characterised by its extreme rarity, severe impact, and defiance of expectations based on past observations. These events are not just worst-case scenarios or risks accounted for in standard risk models. Rather, they are fundamentally unpredictable occurrences that can even reshape our understanding of what's possible.
These events appear highly implausible right up until they occur. Yet, once they’ve happened, in retrospect, the signs and indicators proving their potential inevitability become glaringly obvious. This phenomenon points to a critical flaw in human judgement - our tendency to dismiss or underestimate possibilities that fall outside of our normal normative experiences.
Significantly, black swan events can cause domino effects, with cascading impacts that have far-reaching consequences, challenge core operating assumptions and upend established norms across entire industries.
In our hyper-connected global economy, organisations in international supply chains are increasingly connected through complex networks of third-party vendors and service providers. This intricately linked ecosystem creates unforeseeable concentration risks and interdependencies that can be particularly susceptible to black swan events.
A disruptive incident striking a widely-used software platform, for instance, could rapidly proliferate across countless client systems, bypassing security controls never designed to account for such an unexpected vector. This knock-on effect would then lead to devastating breaches that can comprise highly valuable corporate and personal data, or even lead to business failure.
Such events dramatically highlight how modern supply chain security relies not just on an organisation's own cyber defences but those of all interconnected parties. A single unanticipated point of failure can unravel digital security foundations and response frameworks in ways previously unimaginable.
To illustrate the potential scope and impact, let's examine several examples of past black swan incidents.
The WannaCry ransomware attack of 2017 presented a wake up call, in which a vulnerability in an outdated Windows system led to a worldwide data breach affecting over 200,000 Windows OS systems. Notable organisations impacted by the attack included FedEx, Honda, and even the UK’s National Health System (NHS). This black swan incident crippled vital systems and impacted operations across industries.
The emergence and global spread of COVID-19 was an extreme outlier event that profoundly disrupted economies and physical supply chains worldwide. The rapid transition to remote working, meanwhile, where staff had to operate outside secured corporate infrastructures, severely tested cyber security resilience and incident response capabilities and led to a marked increase in successful cyber attacks.
In 2023, disruptions to a critical cloud software platform provided by ION Trading hamstrung operations across major financial institutions, derivatives houses and corporate clients. This concentration risk event demonstrated the vulnerability posed by vendor dependencies and intricate digital supply chains.
Let's now discuss several realistic, yet hypothetical, black swan event scenarios that could severely test supply chain security resilience in 2024. As you read these, remember they are hypothetical and based on speculation.
Should escalating geopolitical tensions between the United States and China boil over, China's leadership could potentially escalate restrictions on rare earth extraction and separation technologies and impose aggressive export controls on rare earth minerals crucial for semiconductor manufacturing and advanced electronics.
With China producing over 60% of global rare earth supply, and processing 90%, such disruptive trade actions could cripple production capacities across the technology sector. This anticipated supply chain bottleneck then could have cascading aftershocks across industries reliant on electronics and computing components.
From a security perspective, the resulting supply scarcity and competitive pressures could incentivize nefarious procurement behaviours, exposing companies to heightened supply chain security risks like compromised components, counterfeit parts or software implants.
A sophisticated cyber offensive targets the core routing infrastructure governing the UK's internet backbone and access points. Threat actors succeed in deploying malicious software updates that trigger widespread border gateway router failures.
As these critical routing stations become crippled, the UK's national infrastructure for routing internet traffic grinds to a halt. Internet access is effectively severed for large regions of the country, disabling cloud services, remote connectivity tools, and even voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) communications.
For enterprises dependent on internet-driven supply chains, unified communications and remote support capabilities, an outage such as this would be crippling on both operational and security fronts.
A seemingly innocuous but deceptively poisoned malware variant succeeds in infiltrating safety-critical operational technology (OT) systems used by major rail transport providers like Alsthom, Hitachi and Siemens to control their locomotive fleets.
This malicious code could potentially trigger systematic failures, causing undesired emergency braking, failure to recognise hazard signals, or even intentional collisions/derailments in a worst-case scenario.
Given rail's critical role in logistics and physical supply chains, such widespread disruptions across the UK's rail networks could grind the delivery of goods and services to a halt while gravely endangering public safety. Physically isolated OT networks previously thought secure could now be gaping security liabilities.
Innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies increasingly drive core business processes and decision support systems across industries. However, the sheer complexity of these systems' codebases and machine-derived decision models creates new attack surfaces.
A potential black swan scenario sees a state-of-the-art AI/ML system compromised by sophisticated attackers through techniques like adversarial machine learning. The intent could be to bypass existing security models by tweaking the AI system's inputs and decision-making parameters over time.
Compromised AI systems controlling automated supply chain logistics, warehouse/freight operations, predictive analytics or risk scoring could introduce crippling blind spots, exploitable process vulnerabilities and flawed decision outputs at scale.
Mirroring the disruptive events surrounding ION Trading in 2023, a more severe variation sees a catastrophic system failure or breach impact a mission-critical IT service provider supporting core operations across multiple global banking titans and financial institutions (imagine something along the lines of Kronos, but more advanced).
This single point of failure could create cascading systems outages and data compromises proliferating across organisations processing hundreds of trillions in assets, disrupting financial transactions and markets worldwide.
Beyond the immediate operational impacts, such an event could precipitate a crisis of trust and institutional liquidity problems as contingency protocols prove inadequate. Clearing operations, trades, customer data, and market-making activities could all be jeopardised.
These event scenarios, while hypothetical, highlight the profound interconnectivity risks facing modern supply chains and third-party ecosystems. They also underscore how traditional risk mitigation approaches are often outmatched against security outliers we've yet to conceptualise.
While black swan events are by their nature unpredictable, organisations can still take substantive measures to enhance their resilience and craft robust response frameworks against them. Key mitigation strategies include:
Go beyond one-time vendor assessments to implement continuous monitoring of critical third-party partners' security and data handling practices. Collaborate closely with suppliers on an ongoing basis and help them harden their security postures. We are only as strong as the weakest link in our supply chains, so don’t treat suppliers as a mere security risk, but as partners, in whose security you have as much a stake as your suppliers do themselves.
Develop granular cyber attack incident response playbooks addressing communications, containment, recovery and organisational coordination. Routinely test these response frameworks through simulations and red team exercises.
Implement comprehensive internal security awareness initiatives that foster a risk-conscious culture across all departments and levels of the workforce. This reduces the likelihood of oversights enabling initial exploitation vectors like social engineering or inadvertent data exposure.
Actively participate in industry associations and information-sharing groups promoting collective security against emerging cyber threats and newly discovered vulnerabilities that could be exploited by threat actors and affect your critical suppliers. This extends visibility into the broader threat landscape.
Build cyber resilience programmes operating on the assumption that certain systems or data stores have already been compromised. Adopt a worst-case mindset to foster more rigorous defences, achieve full infrastructure and asset dependency mapping, and adopt data compartmentalisation strategies.
Leverage security solutions such as Risk Ledger to simplify, visualise, and mitigate corporate supply chain security risks. Risk Ledger helps organisations across all industries reduce their risks to potentially unforeseen security breaches in their extended supply chains and supports enhanced incident response speeds.
In our hyper-connected world, maintaining robust supply chain security is an exercise in comprehensive risk management extending well beyond an organisation's own digital perimeters.
While no organisation can realistically plan for every possible black swan event, institutionalising a culture of cyber resilience rooted in continuous adaptation and rigorous contingency planning is the optimal path to mitigating catastrophic impacts.
Services such as Risk Ledger provide an exceptional level of security confidence through the knowledge that your third-party providers comply with necessary safety protocols and that you have the visibility into your extended supply chain ecosystem, endowing you with an early warning system that will allow you to spot potential threats early.
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