What is Supply Chain Detection and Response?

Supply chain detection and response (SCDR) is a solution for supply chain incident responders that drives critical issue identification, vendor responsiveness, and time to incident resolution. SCDR solutions provide risk intelligence, AI-driven workflows, and collaboration capabilities to improve the security posture of your organization and your suppliers.

SCDR shares principles from other detection and response approaches like extended detection and response (XDR) and cloud detection and response (CDR). Those principles are applied to your ecosystem of vendors, partners, or other third-parties.

Why is supply chain detection and response needed now?

Organizations struggle to operationalize supply chain cybersecurity in an environment where these types of risks are more complex and impactful. The struggles manifest themselves in the following ways:

• Visibility: Who are my suppliers, what is their business impact, and how secure are they?
• Actionability: What do I do when a vendor is high risk or is breached?
• Ownership: Who has the skills and accountability to respond to incidents in the supply chain?

As a result of these struggles, most of the time it’s the supplier who has the weaker security posture in the relationship. Today we see that pretty much every organization has a supplier who has been breached and that the cost of responding to incidents in the supply chain is rising.

How does supply chain detection and response help?

SCDR transforms the way you respond to supply chain incidents.

Let’s think about how traditional third-party risk management (TPRM) works today.

Vendors “pass” their periodic questionnaire-based assessments but are still breached. There is a reliance on volumes of data that can’t identify the most likely attack paths. Incident response plans mostly focused on first-party breaches. Suppliers take three to four weeks to remediate issues that can impact your security.

TPRM is great for developing controls that prevent supply chain breaches but it is not equipped to respond when a critical vendor has a security incident.

A security operations center (SOC) typically owns incident response. But the SOC is equally unequipped to answer the call for supply chain cybersecurity. They don’t always understand a supplier’s impact on the business and can’t properly prioritize action. The flood of internal alerts overwhelms their ability to respond to supply chain incidents.

Today, there is a gap at the intersection of 1st and 3rd party risk, where supply chain incident response lives.

The only way to close that gap is to deploy a dedicated team of supply chain incident responders to focus on resolving third-party risks as an extension of the SOC.

The supply chain incident response team operates like a threat hunting and active resolution team instead of a bureaucratic and report generating team. It implements a proactive incident response approach that improves supply chain security postures and reduces issues resolution times.

SCDR is the technology that powers supply chain incident responders.

How does supply chain detection and response work?

SCDR relies on comprehensive and continuously updated risk intelligence to create the insights needed to drive desired outcomes. Advanced AI and data analytics drive intelligent user experiences to streamline identification and remediation workflows. Incident response capabilities empower suppliers to prioritize and remediate issues.

There are three critical pillars of a comprehensive supply chain detection and response solution:

• Continuous threat and risk monitoring: Instant and continuous identification of security issues, threat actor behavior, and active incidents that impact an organization and its suppliers.
• Supplier lifecycle management: Manage vendor-related data, track vendor engagement, and consolidate vendor-provided evidence and documentation to help streamline risk reduction and oversight.
• Supplier collaboration and remediation: Turns supply chain risk insights into action with tools and workflows that enable suppliers to efficiently resolve the specific issues that are identified and prioritized with the highest criticality.

Within each of those pillars is a variety of features that enable the supply chain incident responders to achieve their goals. Supply chain incident responders use SCDR tasks that are essential for their role like:

• Identify unreported vendors: Use transaction data or integrations with internal systems to ensure supply chain dependencies are accounted for
• Assess a vendor’s security posture: Determine a vendor’s potential for harmful security events with attack surface issue data and evidence of security controls implementation
• Monitor supply chain risks: Detect critical issues, zero-day vulnerabilities, an indicators of compromise like malware infections or leaked credentials
• Tier supply chain cybersecurity strategy: Categorize vendors according to their business impact and incident likelihood to prioritize engagement and response actions
• Engage high risk vendors: Alert vendors about their exposure to security incidents, deliver recommended remediation actions, and request evidence of issue resolution
• Validate incident resolution: Track the progress of remediation actions and review evidence that incident response plans were completed
• Regularly report to stakeholders: Communicate the status and outcomes of the supply chain incident response program with stakeholders in the SOC or business

Drive supply chain incident response with SecurityScorecard

SecurityScorecard is the SCDR leader. Our SCDR solutions meet you where you are based on your business needs and requirements.

On one end of the spectrum, we have customers that want to leverage their own staff & resources with minimal ongoing assistance. For them, we offer an intuitive supply chain detection and response platform.

On the other end, we have customers that prefer to achieve the outcomes of a supply chain incident response team without deploying dedicated resources to that purpose. For them, we offer co-managed and fully-managed service delivery options from our partner network.

Want to see SCDR in action? Contact us to meet with our experts.