How the enterprise supply chain has created a global attack surface

Modern enterprise supply chains have expanded to include hundreds or thousands of third and fourth-party suppliers, dramatically enlarging the attack surface beyond an organisation's own perimeter. Geopolitical instability adds further risk, as seen during the Ukraine conflict where organisations were impacted through indirect supplier connections. The recommended approach is pragmatic risk tiering: identifying 'tier one' suppliers with access to critical assets, applying deeper scrutiny to those relationships, embedding security into procurement from the start, and continuously monitoring access justification rather than applying blanket assessments to all vendors.