Supply Chain Attack
When the software you trust is the threat.
Practice responding when a trusted vendor or software is compromised, affecting your environment.
Overview
Supply chain attacks exploit the trust you place in vendors, software providers, and service partners. When SolarWinds, Kaseya, or your critical vendor is compromised, your environment becomes a target. Supply Chain exercises test your ability to detect compromise through trusted channels, assess impact when the threat vector is software you installed yourself, and coordinate response with affected vendors and customers.
What We Test
A supply chain scenario stresses the decisions your team makes when the compromise originates from a trusted vendor, software update, or service provider.
Detection Through Trusted Channels
Whether your team can recognize malicious activity arriving through a vendor connection, software update, or managed-service provider, where default trust slows detection.
Vendor Compromise Response
Your process for assessing exposure when a named vendor or software provider discloses a breach, including who owns the decision to disconnect.
Third-Party Communication
Coordination with the affected vendor, contractual notification obligations, and how you verify the vendor's remediation claims.
Blast-Radius Assessment
Identifying every system, dataset, and downstream customer that the compromised vendor touches across your environment.
Containment Decisions
Balancing the operational cost of severing a vendor integration against the risk of continued compromise.
Regulatory & Customer Notification
Whether your team correctly identifies notification triggers when a breach reaches you through a third party.
Our Approach
We facilitate a discussion-based exercise built around a realistic supply chain compromise scenario tailored to your actual vendor ecosystem.
Scenario Design
We build a scenario around vendors and software you actually depend on, drawing on real incident patterns such as the SolarWinds Orion and Kaseya VSA compromises.
Injects & Escalation
We introduce staged information (vendor advisory, anomalous traffic, customer report) that forces decisions under uncertainty.
Decision Capture
We document the choices your team makes, where they hesitate, and which playbooks they reach for.
Debrief & Gaps
We map decisions against your incident response plan and contractual obligations, then deliver prioritized gaps.
Common Findings
These are issues we frequently discover during supply chain attack engagements:
No Vendor Inventory
HighTeams cannot quickly enumerate which vendors have access to which systems, so blast-radius assessment stalls at the first inject.
Unclear Disconnection Authority
HighNobody is sure who can authorize severing a critical vendor integration, costing decision time during the scenario.
Notification Triggers Missed
MediumTeams treat a third-party breach as the vendor's problem and miss their own customer or regulatory notification obligations.
Over-Trust of Vendor Claims
MediumTeams accept a vendor's all clear without independent verification, leaving residual compromise unaddressed.
Common Questions
Do you use real vendor names?
What if we're a software vendor ourselves?
How do you simulate the technical investigation?
Should we include our software vendors in the exercise?
Other Tabletop Exercises Options
Ransomware Response
Walk through a ransomware attack scenario from initial detection through recovery and post-incident activities.
Data Breach Response
Practice responding to unauthorized data access, including notification requirements and regulatory response.
Insider Threat Scenario
Test response to malicious or negligent insider actions, including investigation and containment.
Business Email Compromise
Respond to executive impersonation and payment fraud scenarios targeting finance teams.
Ready to Strengthen Your Defenses?
Schedule a free consultation with our security experts to discuss your organization's needs.
Or call us directly at (445) 273-2873