The prolific attack on SolarWinds and their partner ecosystem will forever change how we view supply chain security and the role email communication plays in it. As the events and details surrounding the attack continue to unfold, we have learned from the company itself that for at least nine months an “email account was compromised and used to programmatically access accounts of targeted SolarWinds personnel in business and technical roles”.
This key discovery into how SolarWinds started – from a compromised email account – puts a spotlight on the recent findings in Abnormal Security’s “The Rising Threat of Vendor Email Compromise in a Post-SolarWinds Era” Q1 2021 Threat Research Report. In this report, Abnormal goes in-depth into the world of vendor email compromise (VEC) and outlines the rate of acceleration as well as the financial threat these attacks pose to businesses without proper controls in place.
Supply chain communications are trusted and typically convey a sense of urgency, making it easy for these types of attacks to blend in with legitimate and valid emails. Since the attacks come from trusted yet impersonated or compromised vendor accounts, organizations often cannot detect when an attack is underway until it is too late.
Additionally, enterprises that use traditional security solutions find emails from compromised vendors are able to bypass existing controls. This gap in protection is highly problematic for security teams who have invested in protection but are still susceptible to vendor compromises.
Abnormal Security stops socially engineered VEC attacks that bypass traditional solutions and make their way into unsuspecting employees inboxes in the following ways:
For enterprises with thousands of vendors in their supply chain, it’s a monumental challenge to have real-time insights into which ones are known risks to your organization. VendorBase automates this process and removes the manual burden of remediating and investigating VEC attacks from compromised vendors. VendorBase tracks the reputations of an organization’s vendors and customers, and improves detection accuracy of advanced social engineering attacks. Benefits include:
Download a copy of “The Rising Threat of Vendor Email Compromise in a Post-SolarWinds Era”.