Supply Chains Have a Cyber Problem

In May, JBS S.A., the world's largest meat producer, suffered a ransomware attack disrupting beef production in the United States, Canada, and Australia. That came after another ransomware attack, then against Colonial, disrupted gas supplies in the eastern United States and drove up prices. If it wasn't before, it's now painfully clear that the intersection of cyberattacks and supply chains creates a wicked new form of risk—and the stakes are as much about national security as they are economics.

Last December, for example, hackers breached the company SolarWinds and compromised a software product called Orion. Orion, sitting within the software supply chain of numerous government agencies and nearly all of the Fortune 500's firms, gave the hackers unfettered and trusted access to sensitive systems for months without detection. This was the most prominent example to date of what cybersecurity analysts call a “supply chain attack”—one in which hackers gain entry to an organization's systems through its computer hardware or software vendors.

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