/
Supply Chain Attacks

Supply Chain Attacks

What is a supply chain attack?

As described by AI, a supply chain attack is a cybersecurity attack in which an adversary compromises a trusted third party—such as a vendor, supplier, or service provider—to gain indirect access to a target organization. Rather than attacking the organization directly, the attacker exploits the fact that modern systems rely on externally developed software, services, or infrastructure that are inherently trusted and often integrated deeply into operations. Once a component in the supply chain is compromised, the attacker can distribute malicious code, gain access, or exfiltrate data through normal, expected interactions.

What distinguishes a supply chain attack is the abuse of established trust relationships. The malicious activity is introduced through legitimate channels, such as routine updates, shared services, or embedded components, making it difficult to detect and often allowing the compromise to spread to multiple downstream organizations simultaneously. As a result, supply chain attacks can scale quickly and have broad, systemic impact well beyond the initially compromised entity.

See links below for additional information.

What is the impact to FOLIO?

  • The FOLIO project requires several different supply chains to operate (npm, maven, python, go, GitHub Actions, etc.).

  • Supply chain attacks could impact the project’s infrastructure, individual developer machines, deployments of FOLIO, etc.

  • If sensitive information is exposed (e.g. AWS credentials, etc.) via a supply chain attack, an attacker can use that to exploit other systems (lateral movement, installation of malicious software, etc.)

Curated guidance for specific supply chains

These child pages contain curated, FOLIO-specific guidance for each supply chain the project uses. This is a work in progress. Check back for updates & additions.

Additional Information