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Supply Chain Attacks on the Rise as One of the Biggest New Threat Vectors as Organizations Scramble to Close Gaps

Global research survey discovers companies lack visibility, awareness to combat supply chain attacks despite the majority having experienced breaches

Sunnyvale, CA – July 23, 2018 – CrowdStrike® Inc., the leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, today announced the results of its global supply chain survey, Securing the Supply Chain, produced by independent research firm Vanson Bourne. The study surveyed 1,300 senior IT decision-makers and IT security professionals in the US, Canada, UK, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Japan, and Singapore across major industry sectors.

The survey concludes that although nearly 80 percent of respondents believe software supply chain attacks have the potential to become one of the biggest cyber threats over the next three years, few organizations are prepared to mitigate the risks. More specifically:

  • Two-thirds of the surveyed organizations experienced a software supply chain attack in the past 12 months. At the same time, 71 percent believe their organization does not always hold external suppliers to the same security standards.
  • The vast majority (87 percent) of those that suffered a software supply chain attack had either a full strategy in place, or some level of response pre-planned at the time of their attack.
  • Only 37 percent of respondents in the US, UK and Singapore said their organization has vetted all suppliers, new or existing in the past 12 months and only a quarter believe with certainty their organization will increase its supply chain resilience in the future.
  • 90 percent of respondents confirmed they incurred a financial cost as a result of experiencing a software supply chain attack. The average cost of an attack was over $1.1 million dollars.

While supply chain threats can occur in every sector of the economy, the industries that mostly experience these attacks are biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, hospitality, entertainment and media, and IT services. Following last year’s NotPetya attack and with GDPR in effect, organizations are more concerned about vetting their suppliers and partners. In fact, 58 percent of senior IT decision-makers whose organization has vetted software suppliers in the past 12 months stated that they will be more rigorous when evaluating their partners, and nearly 90 percent agree security is a critical factor when making purchasing decisions surrounding new suppliers.

Although almost 90 percent of the respondents believe they are at risk for supply chain attack, companies are still slow to detect, remediate and respond to threats. On average, respondents from nearly all of the countries surveyed take close to 63 hours to detect and remediate a software supply chain attack, while the leading organizations aim to eject an adversary in less than two hours, also known as “breakout time,” according to prior CrowdStrike research. However, the study indicates that organizations are looking to adopt leading approaches to breach protection such as behavioral analytics, endpoint detection and response, and threat intelligence, with three quarters of respondents using or evaluating these technologies.

“Fast-moving, advanced threats like supply chain attacks require organizations to adopt new best practices in proactive security and incident response. Our Services team has been called in to support many companies that have suffered business-critical consequences as a result of these prevalent threats,” said Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike Services and chief security officer. “The new attack methods we see today call for coordinated, efficient and agile defenses. CrowdStrike is supporting customers with a compelling combination of endpoint protection technology, expert services, and intelligence to uncover critical investigation information faster, accelerate incident response, and enable companies to get back to business as quickly as possible.”

According to Gartner, “Software- and hardware-based supply chain attacks are also trending up… Consequently, monitoring higher layers for behavior indicative of an attack is crucial to obtain better protection against advanced adversaries. EDR capabilities are a prerequisite to enable behavioral-based attack detection.”[1]

CrowdStrike is the pioneer of cloud-delivered endpoint protection. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform is the new standard for endpoint protection. Recently, the company was recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Endpoint Security Suites, Q2 2018 report and was positioned the highest in ability to execute and furthest in completeness of vision in the Visionaries Quadrant of the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP).[2]

For additional information, review the Supply Chain Survey Report here or read a blog by Dan Larson, CrowdStrike’s vice president of Product Marketing here.

About CrowdStrike®

CrowdStrike is the leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform offers instant visibility and protection across the enterprise and prevents attacks on endpoints on or off the network. CrowdStrike Falcon® deploys in minutes to deliver actionable intelligence and real-time protection from Day One. It seamlessly unifies next-generation AV with best-in-class endpoint detection and response, backed by 24/7 managed hunting. Its cloud infrastructure and single-agent architecture take away complexity and add scalability, manageability, and speed.

CrowdStrike Falcon® protects customers against all cyber attack types, using sophisticated signatureless AI and Indicator-of-Attack (IOA) based threat prevention to stop known and unknown threats in real time. Powered by the CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, Falcon instantly correlates over 100 billion security events a day from across the globe to immediately prevent and detect threats. There’s much more to the story of how Falcon has redefined endpoint protection but there’s only one thing to remember about CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.

You can gain full access to CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent™ by starting your free trial here.

Learn more: https://www.crowdstrike.com/

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About Vanson Bourne

Vanson Bourne is an independent specialist in market research for the technology sector. Their reputation for robust and credible research-based analysis is founded upon rigorous research principles and their ability to seek the opinions of senior decision makers across technical and business functions, in all business sectors and all major markets. For more information, visit www.vansonbourne.com

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

© 2018 CrowdStrike, Inc. All rights reserved. CrowdStrike®, CrowdStrike Falcon®, CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent™, Falcon Prevent™, CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight™, Falcon Insight™, CrowdStrike Falcon® Discover™, Falcon Discover™, CrowdStrike Falcon® Intelligence™, Falcon Intelligence™, CrowdStrike Falcon® DNS™, Falcon DNS™, CrowdStrike Falcon® OverWatch™, Falcon OverWatch™, CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight™ and Falcon Spotlight™ are among the trademarks of CrowdStrike, Inc. Other brands may be third-party trademarks.

Contacts
CrowdStrike, Inc.
Ilina Cashiola, 202-340-0517
Ilina.cashiola@crowdstrike.com

[1] Gartner, Roadmap for Improving Endpoint Security, Published:19 June 2018 ID: G00343353, Analyst(s) Peter Firstbrook

[2]  Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, Published: 24 January 2018 ID: G00325704, Analyst(s): Ian McShane | Avivah Litan | Eric Ouellet | Prateek Bhajanka