Understanding your unique cyber risk is a natural starting point for your organisation as you seek to shore up your defences and keep the hackers out. Technology brings progress, but can also add layers of complexity to your estate.

This has been exacerbated by the increasing adoption of cloud – cloud-based silos have formed across many organisations and can make it very difficult for you to know exactly what you have, where it is, and who has access to it.

For industries who rely upon extensive supply chains to service their operations, the challenge is undoubtedly aggravated. However, there’s risk for any organisation that counts a supply chain amongst their ecosystems.

Your supply chain security is only as good as its weakest link. That’s a fact. All the time and effort made in training your staff, buying best of breed technology, aligning your security and operations strategy, and prioritising security in your budget forecast can be quickly undermined if even just one of your suppliers has failed to do the same.  

Full transparency across every aspect of your operation is needed. Understanding your risk is the first step to quantifying, prioritising and addressing the threats that you face. And even if you are already quantifying risk across your supply chain are you doing so effectively?

In a recent Gartner report, only 38% of respondents considered completion of third-party risk assessments to quantify their supply chain cyber risk important.

There’s a temptation for many organisations to prioritise the security protocols of their key suppliers, focusing less on the fringe members of their ecosystem. Understandable, yet the effects can be catastrophic.

With a raft of resources at their disposal, cyber criminals frequently harness phishing and ransomware attacks; as AI makes these attacks more difficult to spot, a distracted employee – even in one of the smallest, seemingly innocuous companies that form your supply chain – can in a single moment, open your door and let them in.

According to the 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report, over a 12-month period, ransomware attacks affected 73% of UK organisations.