Page 35 - FCW, March/April 2021

WHAT
CYBER RISKS LURK IN THE GOVERNMENT’S SUPPLY CHAINS?
The Biden administration
has ordered a wide-ranging assessment of the vulnerabilities
in manufacturing and technology supply chains. Experts say agencies might be shocked by what they find.
BY JUSTIN KATZ
As the government continues to assess the scope and scale of the breach involving SolarWinds’ Orion software, senior Biden administration officials and analysts are rais- ing concerns about the potential for similar breaches in the future.
Because the hackers targeted a third party to gain access to public- and private-sector networks, the inci- dent has been termed a supply chain attack. In response, the White House issued an executive order on Feb. 24 directing key departments to assess the risks to critical supply chains.
The executive order calls for reviews for certain prod- ucts — such as semiconductors and high-capacity bat- teries — in the next 100 days and mandates year-long reviews of supply chains connected to defense, health, transportation and agriculture, among other areas.
President Joe Biden has made cybersecurity a top pri- ority of his administration, and now experts are wonder- ing what agencies will discover when they start evaluating the cybersecurity risks to their supply chains.
“Most likely what will happen is we will find what we already know, which is that these industries are all incred- ibly cyber vulnerable,” said Kathryn Waldron, a resident fellow in cybersecurity and emerging threats at the R Street Institute. “They’re all incredibly attractive targets for malicious actors, and probably their cybersecurity is not as good as they think.”
Waldron and others believe the government will uncov- er fundamental problems with the public and private sectors’ ability to assess their cybersecurity postures. “We don’t really have a lot of great metrics or systems of measurement for cybersecurity, and so I think actu- ally determining whether or not an industry has a good cybersecurity posture in general is not something that we’re really able to do well as a country, both from a government standpoint but also maybe from an industry standpoint,” she added.
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