Guarding Against Cyber Threats

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2017

Transformation is a topic that comes up in almost every conversation I have with supply chain managers these days. Executives from companies as diverse as J&J Vision Care, the division of Johnson & Johnson that manufactures contact lenses, and Thrive Markets, a startup selling health and wellness products to its members, have talked about how they have had to remake their supply chains to meet new customer demands. Transformation is also the theme of this issue of SCMR.

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Not too long ago, Goodwill Industries found that its customers’ payments data had been breached by cyber criminals. Data from 868,000 payment card accounts was stolen. The entry point for the attack? Hackers had used malware to penetrate a third-party vendor’s systems.

A year earlier, Target made news when it suffered a huge and highly publicized breach in which data from 110 million customers and 40 million payment cards was stolen. The national retailer’s systems were initially breached via a connection with one of its vendors, an HVAC provider.

Goodwill and Target are by no means alone. Cyber breaches are proliferating year over year, affecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data; recent research by IBM indicates that just between 2014 and 2015, the number of such security incidents increased by 64%. These statistics probably reveal just the tip of the iceberg; they refer only to the security incidents that are detected and declared.

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