The holiday season is the perfect time to rewatch some favorite festive movies! While some prefer their holiday movies to be as sappy as possible (Hallmark, we’re looking at you), others relish the annual opportunity to watch an 8-year-old boy exact his revenge on two bumbling bad guys in the 1990 classic Home Alone.

That’s an excerpt from the fact sheet accompanying the May 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO). It refers to one of seven ambitious measures in the EO: shoring up security of that notorious playground for hackers, the software supply chain. Knowing that organizations lack visibility into the components that comprise their connected assets, bad actors can have a field day exploiting vulnerabilities to penetrate networks and take control.

Rusty Cumpston and Jon Geater saw an opportunity to solve a huge supply chain trust problem and were inspired to build RKVST (pronounced as “archivist”), a platform aiming to bring integrity, transparency, and trust to digital supply chains. RKVST enables all partners in the supply chain to collaborate and work with a single source of truth, which can be helpful for tracking nuclear waste, storing historical flight data to optimize aircraft flight plans, and much more.

On Nov. 22, 2022 Microsoft announced research findings about an ongoing supply chain attack against IoT devices running Boa web servers. The Boa web server, an open-source small-footprint web server suitable for embedded applications, was discontinued in 2005, but many software development kits still use this lightweight server on IoT hardware. Since being discontinued, vulnerabilities were discovered in Boa that make every version out there exploitable.

PA Consulting recently joined forces with RKVST to host a Hackathon, looking to identify new and innovative propositions for digital supply chains. Could the teams of PA consultants and analysts identify opportunities to help their clients using RKVST technology? Short answer: YES! Many of today’s business challenges can be addressed with a reliable evidence ledger. If you want the long answer, read on.

Supply Chain attacks are not new, but this past year they received much more attention due to high profile vulnerabilities in popular dependencies. Generally, the focus has been on the dependency attack vector. This is when source code of a dependency or product is modified by a malicious actor in order to compromise anyone who uses it in their own software.

Continuing our ongoing series of expert predictions, the following come from Netskope Threat Labs, including what we see on the horizon for software supply chain, phishing, and ransomware.

Supply chain risk continues to make headlines, from Solarwinds and Kaseya to last week’s announcement of a patch for the OpenSSL vulnerability, and the latest cybersecurity review from the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre highlights the serious threats posed by supply chain attacks.