Transforming supply chain resilience with Threat Intelligence

Traditionally the primary mechanism for managing down cyber supply chain risk has been through preventative measures. Due diligence review of a new vendor or supplier requires the completion of a lengthy questionnaire, validation of security controls declared within the questionnaire, evaluation of third-party attestations, and extensive back and forth communication with key stakeholders. These efforts often take a blanket approach to evaluating all vendors in the same way regardless of the context of the business services being provided. The process is cumbersome, lacks scalability, and is difficult to align and enforce across the entire vendor acquisition process.

What Is Supply Chain Cyber Risk Management?

As organizations grow more interconnected through digital services, software providers, and outsourced infrastructure, the attack surface continues to expand—especially across the supply chain. Supply chain cyber risk management is the practice of identifying, assessing, and mitigating cybersecurity threats that originate from third-party vendors and partners.

Unlike traditional risk assessments that focus on operational or financial concerns, cyber risk management targets vulnerabilities that can be exploited by threat actors—such as exposed credentials, unpatched systems, or malware delivery vectors. The goal isn’t just to avoid working with high-risk vendors, but to continuously monitor the security posture of all third parties in real time, helping organizations reduce the risk of compromise without slowing down operations.

The primary goal of this evaluation is to prevent engagement with any vendor or service provider that is likely to experience a cyber event of some kind, usually meaning a breach. Of course, the goal of avoidance is good and admirable. Cyber breaches, particularly for those vendors who are operationally critical or who process data, have the potential to create massive financial losses, legal implications, impacts to brand reputation, and, ultimately, losses in competitive advantage. Organizations can and should continue to attempt to avoid breach events as much as possible.

While prevention is good, the ultimate reality is that prevention has proven to be virtually impossible. By almost every cyber attack metric available, the frequency of third-party based cyber attacks have continued to rise at a meteoric rate. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group reported that the ransomware gang Cl0p likely made between $75 and $100 million as part of the MoveIT attack, indicating that these types of supply chain attacks will continue into 2024 and beyond. Many of the victims are those that represent best-in-breed cyber security programs and would have sailed through any evaluation as part of vendor onboarding. The incentives for threat actors to continue in their efforts, financial or otherwise, continue to ensure threat actors find ways to be successful in compromising their targets.

Third-party and supply chain based cyber attacks become increasingly attractive as the compromise of one third-party is a likely entry point for multiple end victims, MoveIT being a prime example of this dynamic. Additionally, as larger, more mature organizations have continued to harden their own defenses, third-party organizations and providers with less developed defenses and built-in organizational trust become increasingly viable as the starting point of a major compromise or attack.

A threat intelligence approach to third-party risk management increases scalability and overall resilience. This kind of approach accomplishes a few key outcomes.

Threat Intelligence identifies specific cyber risks

A well informed cyber risk identification and quantification framework requires threats, vulnerabilities, and business contexts be identified in the risk assessment process. While it’s tempting to flag leaked or exposed credentials as a risk, it’s more properly identified as a vulnerability. "A threat intelligence-led approach escalates the threat of a leaked credential when the following criteria are met: the credential is from stealerware logs, the compromise date falls within the password reset policy and the credential has access to privileged systems or that the vendor processes confidential information." In this framework, the risk is rightly identified as a potential compromise of data confidentiality. The insight into the specific password stealer ensures that remediation efforts and conversations with the vendor go immediately to action rather than quibbling over the validity of the finding.

In another scenario, a current approach might be to provide a vendor with a list of publicly exposed CVEs and the assets affected. While this can be helpful from a compliance perspective a threat intelligence led approach does not report on every vulnerability but rather those that are known to have been exploited or are highly likely to be exploited in the future; and, indeed, this type of insight extends beyond looking CVSS alone. For this example, the remediation and action of these findings can be coupled with a vendor’s path management and network segmentation policies with remediation focusing on the exploitability of the vulnerabilities and the criticality of the affected assets.

Key Challenges in Managing Cyber Supply Chain Risk

Modern supply chains rely on hundreds—if not thousands—of third-party relationships, many of which are deeply embedded in day-to-day operations. But despite their critical role, traditional approaches to cyber supply chain risk management often fall short due to a few key challenges:

• Lack of continuous visibility: Most assessments are point-in-time and miss emerging threats or newly exposed vulnerabilities. Over-reliance on vendor-provided data: Security questionnaires and attestations can become outdated quickly and often lack context.
• Difficulty prioritizing risk: Treating all vendors equally doesn’t account for their role in your business or how likely they are to be targeted.
• Slow remediation cycles: Without actionable insights, teams may spend valuable time on issues that pose minimal risk, while critical threats remain undetected.

These challenges underscore the need for a more scalable, dynamic, and intelligence-driven approach to securing the digital supply chain.

Benefits of a Threat Intelligence-Led Approach

By integrating threat intelligence into supply chain cyber risk management, organizations gain more than just a high-level view of vendor security posture—they gain the ability to take targeted, timely action. A threat intelligence-led approach offers several distinct advantages:

• Contextual risk insights: Go beyond CVSS scores and focus on vulnerabilities actively exploited by threat actors.
• Faster, more accurate decision-making: Equip teams with enriched data to quickly validate findings and initiate remediation.
• Scalability across third-party ecosystems: Monitor thousands of vendors simultaneously without the need for manual deep-dives.
• Alignment with business risk: Prioritize threats based on the vendor’s role, data access, and exploitability, not just generic severity.

This shift empowers teams to focus resources where they matter most—on the threats most likely to impact the organization.

Threat Intelligence detects early signs of compromise

This kind of approach understands the nature of the cyber crime ecosystem, the various motivations and tactics of threat actors, and creates alerting and notification schemes that can be aligned with an organization’s risk appetite. In this case, a threat intelligence led approach is able to capture not only reported cyber attacks and breaches, but also instances where initial access is likely to be obtained or sold. Visibility into these findings requires a significant level of network intelligence and coverage of command and control infrastructure, as well as linkages to the threat actors likely to take advantage of these compromises. Additionally, detection of database or access brokerage on underground forums or criminal marketplaces ensures that organizations are not dependent upon their vendors being aware that a compromise has occurred or on their reporting it immediately if it is known.

Threat Intelligence scales supply chain risk management

The average company or organization has well into the thousands of third-party vendors and suppliers. These third parties include technology providers, business services and staff augmentation, manufacturing, logistics, and, in many circumstances, joint venture partners and customers. The third-party attack surface is extensive and expanding; threat intelligence ensures actions impacting all of these third-parties are identified and alerted on with detailed context, even if that vendor did not receive a full review prior to onboarding. Because threat intelligence works in the context of the business relationship, key events that actually represent risk can be defined, monitored, and alerted at scale, ensuring organizational resources are able to be deployed efficiently and effectively.

Combined, these three outcomes have the potential to create an increased level of resilience across the supply chain. Organizations are then equipped to continue to realize the business benefit of enabling key vendors and partners without suffering an undue risk to operational or financial loss. Learn more about how Recorded Future is helping organizations enhance their supply chain resilience through an intelligence-driven approach to cyber risk management.

Key Challenges in Managing Cyber Supply Chain Risk

Organizations face mounting pressure to secure not just their own networks, but their entire digital supply chain. As threat actors increasingly target the weakest links in business ecosystems, security teams struggle with limited visibility into vendor security postures while facing resource constraints that make manual monitoring nearly impossible.

• Blind Spots in Vendor Security: Organizations lack real-time visibility into third-party security postures, often discovering breaches only after they've occurred. Relying on vendor self-reporting and questionnaires leaves critical visibility gaps.
• Inefficient Manual Research: Security teams waste countless hours conducting manual research on vendor security postures without centralized intelligence. This labor-intensive process prevents scaling risk management efforts across hundreds or thousands of suppliers.
• Fourth-Party Risk Complexity: Beyond immediate vendors lies the murky world of fourth-party risk—the suppliers of your suppliers. Organizations struggle to identify these hidden dependencies where cascading failures often begin, creating significant concentration risks.
• Alert Fatigue vs. Critical Insights: Teams struggle to balance comprehensive monitoring with actionable intelligence. Without actionable insights, teams may spend valuable time on issues that pose minimal risk, while critical threats remain undetected.
• Executive Communication Barriers: Translating technical supply chain risk data into business-relevant insights remains challenging. Security teams need better tools to communicate third-party risk effectively to executives and boards making strategic vendor decisions.

Benefits of a Threat Intelligence-Led Approach

By integrating threat intelligence into supply chain cyber risk management, organizations gain more than just a high-level view of vendor security posture—they gain the ability to take targeted, timely action. Threat intelligence helps organizations move from reactive to proactive by delivering real-time insights about vendor security postures. By replacing point-in-time self-reported questionnaires with continuous monitoring and contextual intelligence, organizations can make faster, more informed decisions about their digital ecosystem.

• Early Threat Detection: Organizations gain the ability to discover compromised suppliers before public disclosure, with numerous Recorded Future customers reporting they identified vendors mentioned on ransomware extortion sites or experiencing security incidents before the vendors themselves were aware.
• Evidence-Based Decision Making: Intelligence-driven insights enable security teams to evaluate potential vendors objectively, prioritize relationships during RFP phases, and make defensible decisions to delay or reject partnerships based on verified security concerns.
• Automated Research at Scale: Threat intelligence helps automate time-consuming research across thousands of vendors, freeing security resources while ensuring consistent evaluation. As one customer noted, "Recorded Future automates a great deal of research so I don't have to."
• Proactive Risk Mitigation: Armed with actionable intelligence, teams can implement preventative measures like blocking domains from compromised suppliers or requiring enhanced security controls before incidents impact their organization.
• Enhanced Internal Communication: Threat intelligence provides tangible data for communicating risks to leadership and business stakeholders, enabling more productive conversations about third-party relationships and supporting board-level reporting with objective metrics.

“Third-Party Intelligence from Recorded Future has helped us proactively identify and mitigate risks before they impact our organization. For example, we detected that a supplier was mentioned on a ransomware extortion site, which prompted immediate internal review and outreach to the vendor. In another case, we identified weak security hygiene in a third party—including exposed credentials and outdated SSL configurations—which led us to delay onboarding until corrective actions were taken. These insights have been critical in improving our third-party risk posture and decision-making process.” – Cybersecurity Specialist, Large Enterprise Insurance Company