Cyber criminals will always opt for the path of least resistance – targeting the weakest link in a supply chain gives them an easy route in to much bigger prey. Relying on hardware, software, and services from third parties makes manufacturers particularly susceptible to supply chain compromise.
Manufacturers of all sizes are attractive targets for cyber attackers. Small manufacturers lower down the supply chain may not have the resource to fully protect their systems, giving adversaries an easy foothold to gain access to bigger fish further up the chain. Conversely, large global manufacturers may be the target at the top of the supply chain, and can be compromised by a weak link further down, allowing attackers to steal valuable data and intellectual property, disrupt operations, and damage the manufacturer’s reputation. Your supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
56% of organisations have experienced a breach that was caused by one of their vendors[1]
The software threat
Once manual and labour-intensive, the manufacturing sector is becoming increasingly reliant on technology and automation, and must adapt to keep pace with the risks this poses. William Evanina, of the US NCSC, notes that “software supply chain infiltration is one of the key threats that corporations need to pay attention to, particularly how software vulnerabilities are exploited”[2].
Large, global manufacturers are all too aware of the ramifications of a data breach, so system defences are much more robust than they were a decade ago. Traditional attempts to compromise a system are therefore more likely to be identified and stopped, so cyber criminals are turning to software providers in the supply chain to give them a back door. Adversaries exploit vulnerabilities in the software to gain a foothold – when the seemingly innocuous software is rolled out at the manufacturer, the malicious elements are rolled out with it. Manufacturers are unwittingly affording attackers free rein throughout their network. Evanina summarises that “the impacts to proprietary data, trade secrets, and national security are profound”.
In September, InfoSecurity Magazine reported that state-sponsored attackers had targeted the VPNs that connected suppliers (such as Rolls Royce and Expleo) to Airbus. The aviation giant had already reported unauthorised access to data from a breach back in January, but was unaware at that point that the scope of the attack was much bigger, and that their IP was at stake. “The hackers were after technical documentation regarding the certification process for parts of Airbus aircraft, while other stolen docs indicated interest in the A400M military transport plane, and the A350 propulsion and avionics systems”[3].
Yet manufacturers themselves are not always the end goal. Breaching their systems simply provides a gateway to gain access to their big name customers’ trade secrets. And they’re vulnerable – the continuation of production is often prioritised over keeping systems up-to-date, so manufacturers leave themselves open to disruptive ransomware attacks by exploitable weaknesses in unpatched software.
Working from the bottom up
The manufacturing supply chain isn’t all big engines and multi-million pound contracts. Without small manufacturers providing key products and services, such as microchips, software, and – quite literally – the nuts and bolts of the operation, the supply chain would collapse. These critical links may naively believe they are too small and unimportant to be a target for cyber attacks, but the reality is quite the opposite. Small manufacturers rarely have the resource and cyber skills in-house to adequately secure and protect their systems, making them an easy target for cyber attackers looking to weave their way in. Operations, IP, and customer details are all at risk – a low effort, high reward payday for adversaries.
Moving money
Supply chains are effectively long links of transactions, handling business, products, and finances. Financially-motivated groups will target anywhere large sums of money are changing hands – for manufacturers, this means big contracts and the large transactions that support them. Cyber criminals observe the supply chain at work, to identify when and how money moves, so they can tailor their attack accordingly to maximise their chances of success. A convincing spoofed email requesting payment details, sent precisely when a deal is due to be closed, has more chance of succeeding than an opportunistic phishing attack.
What can be done?
Manufacturers must balance their reliance on the supply chain against protecting their IP, operations, and reputation. The MoD has a keen eye focused on defence supply chain security, so it’s imperative that manufacturers are able to demonstrate they are not the weak link, and that they are taking steps to safeguard their information and systems against compromise from third parties.
Five boring but really important security mistakes you need to stop making
Cyber security can be dull, but ignoring it won't make the problem go away. Turning a blind eye to your cyber defences leaves your business vulnerable to state-sponsored and ransomware attacks.
Download our free PDF guide to find out the top five critical security mistakes your manufacturing business is making, and what preventative measures can be put in place to solve them.
Find out more about how CORVID can benefit the manufacturing sector.
Footnotes
More CORVID blog posts
An introduction to cybersecurity for decision-makers
Cybersecurity is an industry, a field of academia, a buzz-word, a science, an art and a bogeyman. And whilst cybersecurity cannot be avoided within any organisation that relies upon computers and data: there needs to be a way by which senior decision-makers can be involved in, and make decisions on, cybersecurity matters.
Cybersecurity is a highly specialised subject. It is complex and requires significant of knowledge and experience that is different from normal IT-knowledge. Knowing jargon and buzzwords does not mean that someone is an expert so always check the credentials of your “trusted advisors”.
Despite its overuse as a term, cybersecurity is fundamentally about protecting computer systems and data.
There are rules
Most territories now have laws around Data Privacy and many industries have regulations around information security. These must always be complied with and, irrespective of whether they are useful, they are necessary to operate in specific sectors.
Whilst the regulatory requirements may originate from the best of intentions: it is likely that organisations will need to do additional things to have the right type of cybersecurity for their specific profile and operations.
Why does anyone need cybersecurity?
Questioning why cybersecurity is needed is a good starting-point as it helps anchor solutions and initiatives to the fundamental driver behind activity in this space.
- The more you rely on (take advantage of) IT, therefore
- The bigger an impact to the organisation if something goes wrong, therefore
- The more you need cybersecurity
Cybersecurity needs to be seen as an enabler to using IT. Without cybersecurity, reliance upon IT is an incredibly risky thing to do. In-fact, one of the oldest risk equations in InfoSec (Information Security) works as follows:
Threat[1] x Impact[2] x Opportunity (Vulnerability)[3] = RISK
In mathematics if anything is multiplied by zero then the answer is zero. If there were no Threats there would be no Risk. If there was no Impact there would be no Risk and if there was no Opportunity to compromise a system there would be no Risk.
There are formal methodologies to measure the level of risk to an organisation as a result of a computer security breach. Sometimes formal assessments are useful to help shine a light on the scale of the issue. But if you are not required to undertake them then, in most cases, there is little benefit in going down this route.
Cybersecurity is a cost and, like other costs, it should be managed. For many organisations this means that the goal is to spend as little as possible on cybersecurity whilst having a proportionate level of protection considering the risk. Getting that proportionality right can be a challenge. Cybersecurity is routinely both a victim to underspending, where there is a lack of appreciation of the subject, and a cause of overspending, where the expenditure has not been objective focussed and consequently failed to achieve a useful outcome.
There are three fundamentals that an organisation needs to do regarding cybersecurity:
- Prevent an incident from occurring[4] – not all incidents can be prevented
- Detect an incident that has occurred – anti-virus cannot detect all incidents
- Respond well to an incident that has occurred – a good response can negate the impact of an incident
There may be exceptions to the above; but in-general all cybersecurity expenditure should be aligned to at least one of those three. Therefore, mapping initiatives against them can be a useful activity. Combining this with an articulation of effectiveness (a metric is best) is useful as it helps focus the initiative on the right outcomes for the organisation. At the risk of repetition: remember that cybersecurity is highly specialised. It requires specialist tools in the hands of specialist practitioners. Whilst an organisation could build their own Security Operations Centre (SOC), the question of “why?” should be raised. A company could generate its own electricity: but why would it do so?
Cyber expenditure almost always consists of both:
- Anticipated expenditure – the cost of the tool, service or technology
- Additional impact – specialist and (or) additional people, extra-training, recruitment, facilities and a distraction from core business
The following matrix (with a made-up example) is provided to help characterise cybersecurity initiatives. It is intended to be completed quickly, on the back of a post-it note, to help rapidly focus attention on the nature of the investment and whether the benefit, costs and approach have been considered. It is not intended to replace a full-investment case.
Final notes
No matter how much is spent on cybersecurity, and no matter what you are told, no company or product can guarantee safety. All anyone can do is make it less likely that an organisation will be compromised or reduce the impact of compromise. The inverse, i.e. not spending any money on cybersecurity, does not guarantee that an organisation will suffer a security breach. Not every organisation gets hit and some organisations are lucky. However, a strategy requiring luck is not recommended.
Whilst cybersecurity should be on the agenda: it should not monopolise it. Cybersecurity should be frictionless and, ideally, left to the professionals who should take the pain of it away. If cybersecurity is routinely causing you pain it is worth asking whether it is being managed as well as it could be.
Footnotes
[1] “Threat” refers to the groups or persons who do the attacking: Hackers, Nation States, Hacktivists. The entities that undertake the attack.
[2] Impact is not just the confidentiality breach of information. Depending on the circumstances, availability or integrity compromises can be highly impactful.
“Impact” is the impact to your organisation if they succeed in stealing, destroying, changing or making your systems and data unavailable.
[3] “Opportunity (Vulnerability)” is a measure of how accessible the systems and data are to attackers. Very secure government systems are not directly connected to the Internet and this reduces the Opportunity of attack considerably.
[4] Attackers have access to all the same technology that the defenders have and despite the prevalence of firewalls and anti-virus (both of which are much needed by the way), they are still able to breach organisations security and gain access to systems and data. Prevention is better than cure, but it’s just not practical to rely solely on this element.
Patching up life support: why critical care is at critical risk
Keeping people alive is unquestionably more important than patching software, but unpatched software is vulnerable to exploitation, and won’t keep anyone alive if it leads to a breach of your IT systems, rendering them unavailable.
After WannaCry exploited unpatched Windows XP vulnerabilities and cost the NHS £92m, healthcare providers across the country carried out a mass upgrade to Windows 10. Making the move to the newer OS is synonymous with increased security (you’d be worried if it wasn’t…), but there is growing concern that it was seen as a tick box, one-off exercise. Now the OS that was exploited is no longer in use, healthcare providers feel safer. This is a dangerously complacent assumption – new vulnerabilities are identified almost daily, creating an ‘arms race’ between attackers and vendors; one looking to exploit the other looking to get patches out.
The issue is further compounded as not all systems made it to Windows 10 – legacy IT systems remain where the service they provide can only run on the legacy OS. This particular stumbling block can make the health sector an easier target. Cyber attackers aren’t renowned for being a particularly moral bunch, so if they can shut down a hospital’s life support system and demand a hefty a ransom to get it back up and running again, they’ll take that payday without a second thought as to the consequences.
Let’s not forget that despite its wealth of valuable confidential data, the healthcare sector isn’t always necessarily the prime target for cyber criminals.
In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, certain threat actor groups have claimed they won’t be targeting healthcare providers, but can’t rule out accidentally compromising systems if they’re not patched properly. Without a robust patch management programme in place, the sector can easily become an unintentional casualty of cyber attackers looking to exploit any vulnerabilities in any business. Just look at WannaCry.
The NHS is the nation’s beating heart, and healthcare providers know better than anyone that a beating heart stopping is a very bad thing. You can’t fix vulnerabilities you don’t know about, but you can guarantee threat actors will find them. You need full visibility of where your IT estate’s weaknesses are, and clear guidance on how to fix them. Even if you’re not a target, an unpatched infrastructure leaves you open to exploitation by opportunistic cyber attackers and widespread malware campaigns.
We’d like to offer all healthcare providers a free introductory scoping call to discuss how CORVID can help you identify and patch vulnerabilities and strengthen your cyber defences. Simply let us know what time is best for you, and we’ll do the rest.
