Lessons in External Dependency and Supply Chain Risk Management

In this webinar, John Haller and Matthew Butkovic of the CERT Division of the Software Engineering Institute will discuss real-world incidents, including recent industrial control system attacks and incidents affecting Department of Defense capabilities, and the lessons that organizations should take away. The session will focus on the lifecycle of supply chain relationships and introduce concepts to help organizations manage them more effectively.

Managing the risks of depending on external entities and supply chains to support critical services has increasingly become an area of concern for both the federal government and private critical infrastructure organizations. External dependencies may consist of business partners that your organization relies on, cloud services such as data processing, or storage facilities. Or these dependencies may take the form of reliance on public infrastructure such as transportation or the electrical grid.

The webinar speakers, John and Matthew, will discuss the HAVEX malware attacks on industrial control system vendors, which were reported to the security community in June 2014.  For supply chain risk management, a key lesson from the HAVEX case is the importance of having a process to identify and prioritize external dependencies. The speakers will also explore and discuss methods for addressing this problem in a realistic, reliable way.

Also covered in the webinar are the lessons for third-party risk management that organizations should take away from recent attacks on DoD-affiliated transportation contractors. The speakers will explain how to correctly scope and build security programs around key, organizationally critical services.

The speakers will discuss how your organization can learn from these incidents, including best practices around forming relationships with external entities and managing the relationship over time to support your organization's incident management and situational awareness processes. The webinar closes with a recap of key supply chain risk management capabilities and an update to CERT research into the state of these capabilities across U.S. critical infrastructure sectors.