Explainers & Guides
4 Proven Cybersecurity Strategy Tips for CISOs
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The cyber security conversation in boardrooms has long been dominated by the familiar spectres of ransomware and headline-grabbing data breaches. Yet as we move through 2025, a more intricate and insidious threat vector is quietly redefining the risk landscape: the vulnerabilities embedded deep within the digital supply chain.
Today, the most consequential cyber risks are not those that strike directly at a company’s own systems, but those that exploit the hidden dependencies, foreign entanglements, and operational blind spots of its suppliers. According to the World Economic Forum, over half of large organisations now identify supply chain complexity as the single greatest barrier to cyber resilience, eclipsing concerns about direct attacks. The digital ecosystem has become so densely interconnected that a single compromised supplier can trigger systemic disruption across entire sectors.
In the past year alone, we have seen a threefold increase in software supply chain attacks, with adversaries targeting everything from open-source libraries to the physical infrastructure underpinning critical services. The operational, regulatory, and geopolitical implications of these risks are profound, yet too often they remain underestimated or misunderstood at the highest levels of corporate governance.
For boards and cyber security leaders, the challenge now is not simply to defend the perimeter, but to map and manage the labyrinthine web of third-party exposures that define modern enterprise. The following analysis examines the ten most underestimated supply chain cyber risks for 2025 - risks that demand urgent attention if organisations are to maintain operational resilience in an era defined by complexity and interdependence.
The proliferation of cloud-based tools and remote work platforms has made shadow IT a persistent blind spot. Employees, often with the best intentions, adopt unvetted software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to improve productivity. These applications, operating outside formal procurement and security reviews, create invisible attack surfaces. In the event of a breach, forensic analysis frequently reveals that attackers exploited overlooked integrations or data flows.
Action: Security teams should conduct regular audits of cloud application usage, and shadow IT, with automated discovery tools to identify and assess all external connections.
Open-source software has become the backbone of digital infrastructure, but its supply chains are increasingly targeted. Attackers embed malicious code in widely used libraries, knowing that these components will be trusted and adopted at scale. The SolarWinds incident was a wake-up call, but many organisations still lack a comprehensive inventory of their software dependencies.
Action: Insist on a real-time software bill of materials (SBOM) for all critical applications, and mandate rapid patching protocols for high-severity vulnerabilities.
A growing proportion of critical components and services are sourced from suppliers operating under foreign jurisdictions, some of which could be subject to state influence or opaque legal regimes. This creates latent risk: suppliers may be compelled to comply with foreign government requests for data access, or their operations could be disrupted by sanctions, export controls, or diplomatic tensions. The risk is magnified in sectors such as semiconductors, telecommunications, and cloud infrastructure, where concentration in a handful of countries is common.
Action: Mandate a comprehensive mapping of supplier jurisdictions and implement contractual clauses requiring notification of any government data access requests or legal actions that could impact service continuity.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are now prime targets for attackers seeking to compromise the software supply chain at its source. High-profile incidents - including the SolarWinds breach - demonstrated how attackers can infiltrate a supplier’s build environment, inject malicious code, and propagate tainted updates to thousands of downstream customers. The complexity and automation of modern CI/CD pipelines make them difficult to monitor and secure, especially for smaller suppliers.
Action: Require suppliers to provide evidence of secure CI/CD practices—including regular third-party audits, least-privilege access controls, and continuous monitoring of build environments for anomalous activity.
The risk of physical tampering or the insertion of hardware backdoors at the supplier level has recently been making headlines. Investigations have uncovered backdoors in Chinese-manufactured solar panels and hardware implants in supply chains serving both commercial and military targets. The 2024 exposure of a supply chain attack on Hezbollah, executed via compromised pager devices, illustrates how physical infrastructure can be weaponised for espionage or even sabotage.
Action: Insist on supply chain traceability for all critical hardware, including origin audits, tamper-evident packaging, and random post-delivery hardware inspections.
Many sectors have become dependent on a small but highly specialised number of suppliers for essential software, hardware, or business services. This concentration risk means that a compromise, outage, or regulatory action affecting a single supplier can have disproportionate, systemic consequences. The outsourcing of IT and security functions to managed service providers (MSPs) could create one such systemic risk, as a compromise at an MSP can cascade across its entire client base. The interconnectedness of these relationships is often poorly understood at board level, yet the regulatory and financial fallout from such breaches can be severe.
Action: Perform regular concentration risk assessments and develop contingency plans to diversify critical suppliers, reducing reliance on any single supplier for essential operations. Extract contractual guarantees of security standards from MSPs, including the right to audit and clear segmentation of access privileges.
The shift to multi-cloud environments has outpaced many organisations’ ability to monitor and secure their digital supply chains. Misconfigurations, unclear shared responsibility models, and opaque subcontractor arrangements are common. Attackers exploit these ambiguities to move laterally or exfiltrate data.
Action: Require cloud providers to supply detailed security architecture diagrams, and ensure continuous monitoring of all cloud resources.
The regulatory environment for supply chain security is becoming more fragmented and unpredictable. New data localisation laws, sanctions, and cross-border data transfer restrictions can render long-standing supplier relationships non-compliant overnight. The risk is not just legal but operational, as abrupt supplier exits can disrupt critical services.
Action: Maintain a live register of regulatory exposures across the supply chain, and develop contingency plans for rapid supplier substitution.
When a supply chain breach occurs, the absence of coordinated incident response plans between organisations and their suppliers can amplify damage. Delays in communication, unclear lines of responsibility, and incompatible response protocols are common. The result is often a slow, public, and expensive recovery.
Action: Integrate critical suppliers into incident response exercises and ensure that contractual agreements specify roles, responsibilities, and notification timelines.
Artificial intelligence is now weaponised for highly convincing phishing and impersonation attacks. Deepfake audio and video can be used to impersonate suppliers, executives, or partners, tricking staff into authorising fraudulent transactions or sharing sensitive information.
Action: Implement multi-factor verification for sensitive communications, train staff to recognise signs for possible AI-generated deception, and use AI-based detection tools.
The risks outlined above represent serious risks that can undermine the operational resilience of even the most sophisticated enterprises. Some of the potential impacts should these risks be successfully exploited by threat actors, could include:
A single compromise within a supplier’s CI/CD pipeline or a critical technology supplier can rapidly propagate across the customer base, triggering widespread operational disruption. The interconnectedness of modern supply chains amplifies the blast radius of any attack.
Many of these risks originate in environments over which organisations have limited visibility or influence. Traditional supplier risk assessments, focused on questionnaires and certifications, are insufficient to detect dynamic threats such as insider activity, open source vulnerabilities, or physical tampering.
Geopolitical and trade risks can force abrupt supplier changes, disrupt compliance with data sovereignty laws, or expose organisations to regulatory penalties. Public exposure of a supply chain compromise—especially one involving foreign dependencies or hardware backdoors—can erode public trust and confidence.
Supplier concentration and foreign jurisdictional leverage can create single points of failure, undermining business continuity and strategic autonomy. Organisations that fail to diversify their supplier base or map their dependencies risk systemic outages from events entirely outside their control.
Responding to supply chain incidents - especially those involving compromised software updates or hardware - often requires costly forensic investigations, mass patching or replacement programmes, and legal or regulatory settlements.
The supply chain cyber risks of 2025 demand a fundamental shift in how organisations approach third-party risk management. Board-level oversight must move beyond focusing on compliance to empower security teams to embrace continuous, intelligence-driven monitoring of supplier environments, with a focus on the risks that suppliers themselves face. This includes demanding transparency into CI/CD security, open source dependency management, and physical infrastructure integrity, as well as scenario planning for geopolitical shocks and supplier failures.
Operational resilience in this environment is not a static achievement but an ongoing process of adaptation, diversification, and vigilance. The organisations that succeed will be those that treat their supply chain not as a black box, but as a living system - one whose security is only as strong as its most vulnerable link.
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