Securing Supply Chain Cyber Risks @ Scale

February 4, 2025

A Worrisome Weakness For Many Manufactures

Securing supply chain cyber risks at scale feels like an unclimbable mountain we haven’t begun to ascend. The growing complexities of cybersecurity risks are impossible to ignore. With rising tensions in geopolitics and technologies like artificial intelligence touching every business, cyber incidents are getting more sophisticated. So are the perpetrators. While 2024 global cyber crime statistics are not yet in, expectations are approaching $10T in total losses. That would put the criminals just behind China as the world’s third largest economic powerhouse. The bad guys are killing it. 

Meanwhile, the cyber skills gap keeps widening and more companies of all sizes are being targeted. It’s no wonder that regulatory demands are increasing, as keeping a business secure becomes more challenging. Now, we’re forced to recognize the vulnerabilities we face as a group. For we are all dealing with the interconnected nature of our own cyber ecosystems…. A growing network of business partners and suppliers that form a fragile reliance on each other to practice proper cyber hygiene. Nowhere is this issue more complex than the Manufacturing Supply Chain of many global businesses.

“As risks evolve, organisations must strengthen resilience through collaboration & vigilance” 

-The World Economic Forum 2025 Outlook

Recently at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Accenture presented its latest 2025 Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 with the WEF. According to the report, 54% of large organizations identify supply chain challenges as the biggest barrier to achieving cyber resilience. The reasons were clear; increased complexity of supply chains, and limited visibility into suppliers’ security measures. Together, these have made supply chains the leading cybersecurity risk. The risks identified extend well beyond their direct business partners; they stretch to third-party software vulnerabilities that create the potential for cyberattacks to spread throughout entire ecosystems.

Contributing Factors

Here were some of the contributing factors for elevating supply chain cyber risk above all others. 

  • The 2024 global IT outage -the largest in history, exposed the vulnerabilities tied to reliance on a small number of critical providers. The Airlines, banks, healthcare systems, retailers and ATMs worldwide were affected, leading to an estimated US$5bn in losses. The incident highlighted the systemic risks of supply chain dependencies.
  • Escalating cyber threats– 72% of respondents to the Global Cybersecurity Outlook survey reporting an increase in cyber risks. The rise in ransomware, AI-enhanced attacks like phishing and deepfakes and the growth of supply chain breaches signal a shift in the cybersecurity landscape.
  • Third-party risks & oversight challenges–  One of the most significant cybersecurity hurdles is lack of visibility across their supply chains. During the 2024 Annual WEC Meeting on Cybersecurity revealed that 41% of participants consider improving third-party dependency visibility as the top priority for enhancing supply chain cyber resilience.
  • Enforcing security standards on third-party suppliers– This is increasingly difficult. The survey supports this, with 48% of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) citing third-party compliance as the main challenge in implementing cyber regulations effectively.
  • Differing baseline security requirements– differences across industries complicate matters further, making it tough to enforce consistent standards throughout the supply chain.

What Can Be Done?

Supply chain executives need innovation to help their organizations get visibility of 3rd Party Supplier risks.  They must begin to baseline resilience and enforce standards. Large Supply Chain leaders need companies with the ability to quickly discover cyber risks within each organization, and document, remediate and even insure these businesses against loss.  At TEKRiSQ, thats all we do.

We’ve recently built a modern, interactive experience that makes supply chain cybersecurity fast, easy & affordable. With support for thousands of comapnies at a time, it delivers at scale what Supply Chain Executives truly need. 

interactive cyber risk assessment supply chain

TEKCHEK helps manufacturing supply chains serve heir interconnected partners & suppliers with collective capabilities to drive cyber resilience. Now, businesses can quickly understand their cyber risks and get solid recommendations for pragmatic solutions. All of these can easily put in place within minutes. It serves Supply Chain Executives receive key information needed to make the business ecosystem more resilient to risk.

 

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