SUPPLY-CHAIN SECURITYCybersecurity Guidance for Supply Chain Risk Management

A vulnerable spot in global commerce is the supply chain: It enables technology developers and vendors to create and deliver innovative products but can leave businesses, their finished wares, and ultimately their consumers open to cyberattacks. A new update to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) foundational cybersecurity supply chain risk management (C-SCRM) guidance aims to help organizations protect themselves as they acquire and use technology products and services.

The revised publication, formally titled Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Practices for Systems and Organizations (NIST Special Publication 800-161 Revision 1), provides guidance on identifying, assessing and responding to cybersecurity risks throughout the supply chain at all levels of an organization. It forms part of NIST’s response to Executive Order 14028: Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, specifically Sections 4(c) and (d), which concern enhancing the security of the software supply chain.  

Released today after a multiyear development process that included two draft versions, the publication now offers key practices for organizations to adopt as they develop their capability to manage cybersecurity risks within and across their supply chains. It encourages organizations to consider the vulnerabilities not only of a finished product they are considering using, but also of its components — which may have been developed elsewhere — and the journey those components took to reach their destination. 

“Managing the cybersecurity of the supply chain is a need that is here to stay,” said NIST’s Jon Boyens, one of the publication’s authors. “If your agency or organization hasn’t started on it, this is a comprehensive tool that can take you from crawl to walk to run, and it can help you do so immediately.”

Modern products and services depend on their supply chains, which connect a worldwide network of manufacturers, software developers and other service providers. Though they enable the global economy, supply chains also place companies and consumers at risk because of the many sources of components and software that often compose a finished product: A device may have been designed in one country and built in another using multiple components from various parts of the world that have themselves been assembled of parts from disparate manufacturers. Not only might the resulting product contain malicious software or be susceptible to cyberattack, but the vulnerability of the supply chain itself can affect a company’s bottom line.