supply chain attack

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a cyberattack that targets less-secure elements in an organisation's supply chain, such as software vendors, hardware manufacturers, managed service providers, or open-source code repositories, as a means of compromising the ultimate target organisation; by infiltrating a trusted supplier or corrupting widely used software updates, attackers can gain access to thousands of organisations simultaneously; the SolarWinds attack of 2020, in which adversaries compromised the software build process of a widely used IT management platform and distributed malicious updates to thousands of customers including US government agencies, became the defining example of supply chain attack sophistication