I protect against supply chain threats for critical infrastructure | Founder | Security Architect | Cyber Informed Engineering | Author | SANS SEC547 Instructor
If your Cyber Supply Chain Risk program is not supported by technical risk teams, your program is probably a useless checkbox. The reality is supply chain risk management, and yes, cyber SCRM, touches every aspect of the business. Not just cyber. Because it requires an all-of-business change in how we procure, implement and operate technology. But I see a lot of programs spun up out of the procurement group or a compliance function without truly understanding the risks they are tasked with managing. Will your SCRM team know how to read and validate a network security architecture diagram? Will they understand what a good disaster recovery plan looks like? What about that critical API your business depends on and how they provision high availability for that? What about the actions YOU need to take? For instance, testing software updates before deploying into production. Or do you trust them because you did a vendor assessment 8 months ago? C-SCRM might have more wasted investment than any other area in modern cybersecurity programs. There's a reason many CISO's struggle to derive value from the spend. But it's not because it's not useful. You are just doing it wrong. Rethink your approach, stop doing what everyone else is doing and use some common sense. The scale of the problem is massive and you probably have the wrong people doing the work in the wrong areas. Start with a solid Business Continuity Plan (BCP), understand the business risks and identify your most critical dependencies. Who in your organization understands how these work? These are the folks that need to be part of the conversation, not only non technical people executing a toothless assessment program. Do some threat modeling and do not forget to model the accidental vectors (like broken software updates and human error). What are your opportunities to reduce the risk? You won't be able to fix everything, but maybe there are places you need to plan for and train on manual process or implement additional mitigating controls. Some may be vendor-supplied controls, some are things you will need to handle yourself. It is quite likely that exercising your BCP/DR/IR plans is the most reasonable approach to deal with these concerns. Questionnaires and assessments might be part of the solution, but ask yourself if your process is actually helping reduce risk in your program. Or is it just noise? #cybersecurity #scrm #supplychainrisk #businesscontinuity #bcp #criticalfunctions
This is one of the more insightful posts I've read this year. If someone claims there was nothing unique and noteworthy in there I'd confidently suggest they're full of it. Thanks for the perspective Tony Turner
Great advice and an insightful post. Systems are increasingly more complex (and ever more inter-connected) that we have lost sight of what matters. No-one person can understand all of the issues (and even if they did, they would't have the time to be able to address the growing number of challenges). As businesses rely ever more on technology, we need responsibility and accountability to be taken by the senior leadership. They need to be measured on the preparedness of the organisation to handle issues with the supply chain and need to be providing support to the whole organisation in terms of resources (financial and technical) to have the capability to keep on top of the issues proactively and not wait for an event to occur when inevitably a short-term approach is implemented.
It's interesting that you highlight the importance of having technical risk teams involved in Cyber Supply Chain Risk programs to ensure they're more than just a checkbox exercise. What are some common pitfalls you've seen organizations encounter when trying to implement an effective SCRM program, and how can they be avoided?
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Founder | Senior Security Advisor | Cybersecurity Consultant & Architect
3moTony Turner All valid points when it comes to BCP and DR. Mostly they exist on paper/in theory, but who is actually testing them prior to releasing patches and updates? A full interruption test, not only a parallel test is necessary. A checklist review or tabletop exercise is not really helping in preventing any outages or disruptions.