COMMENTARY: Software supply chain attacks have become a top concern for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) and their clients. With global losses from these attacks projected to reach $81 billion by 2026, MSSPs are under mounting pressure to bolster defenses against a new breed of sophisticated adversaries exploiting third-party vulnerabilities. The urgency is clear:
- 80% of organizations experienced a third-party breach within the last year.
- 77% admit to limited visibility around their third-party vendors*.
MSSPs face significant operational challenges, including alert fatigue, integration complexities, and talent shortages. Traditional cybersecurity stacks, often composed of disparate, multivendor solutions, exacerbate these issues by creating silos and increasing management overhead.
This fragmented approach hinders MSSPs' ability to effectively detect and respond to sophisticated threats, particularly those targeting supply chains. To address these challenges, MSSPs are increasingly adopting unified Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) integrated with Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities. This combination enhances threat detection, streamlines operations, and delivers greater value to clients.
Harnessing TIPs with XDR to Guard Against Supply Chain Threats
Supply chain attacks often target third-party software dependencies, exploiting vulnerabilities and evading traditional security measures. In effectively combating these threats, no approach has proven valuable to MSSPs in growing customer engagements as a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP). It has the ability to detect and assess risk, spot anomalous behaviors, and automate the perpetual hunt.
MSSPs leveraging a Threat Intelligence Platform with extended detection and response (XDR) to assess those risks, immediately ID anomalous behaviors, and accelerate comprehensive threat hunts via automation are uniformly enthusiastic about both operational ROI and the deeper value delivered to customers.
A Threat Intelligence Platform aggregates, correlates, and analyzes threat data from multiple sources in real-time to support proactive cybersecurity measures, but it’s also used to enrich alerts by correlating enriched data across multiple indicators and sources, a TIP identifies patterns and relationships that distinguish legitimate threats from benign activities. This process reduces false positives by filtering out non-malicious events, allowing analysts to focus on genuine security incidents.
Leveraging a TIP with XDR gives the MSSP visibility to supply chain risk with an ability to proactively protect their clients. This puts MSSPs on a forward footing as threats evolve. This approach is more important than ever in the face of both the current turbulent economic climate and increasing competition among security services providers.
Key Advantages to MSSPs in TIPs with XDR Integration
- Automated Threat Enrichment: Integrating a TIP with XDR enables the continuous enrichment of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) with real-time intelligence, allowing security teams to connect the dots between isolated threat indicators and potential vulnerabilities within the software supply chain. This empowers MSSPs to rapidly identify supply chain threats, such as dependency confusion attacks or malicious package injections, and map them to known tactics and techniques used by adversaries.
As it sounds, automated enrichment automates the enrichment of threat data by aggregating information from diverse sources—such as open-source intelligence, commercial feeds, and internal logs—and enhancing it with contextual details like geolocation, domain reputation, and known threat actor profiles. This comprehensive enrichment works remotely at the MSSP’s SOC and drives immediate customer responsiveness while providing security teams with a more complete understanding of potential threats.
- Proactive Threat Hunting Across SIEM: Once a TIP identifies a potential supply chain risk, such as a malicious campaign against or vulnerability in a particular business software, MSSPs can initiate a targeted threat hunt across the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). This proactive approach uncovers traces of malicious activity and provides visibility into how supply chain threats may have infiltrated the customer environment.
The extensive visibility XDR provides to the deployed security technologies often results in an overwhelming volume of alerts, inundating SOC teams and hindering their ability to effectively prioritize threats. By integrating automated alert enrichment through a TIP and utilizing the response capabilities of XDR systems, organizations can significantly reduce false positives. This approach enables defenders to focus on genuine threats that require immediate attention and reduce the operational burden of triaging a massive amount of alerts. The role that automation plays is an important consideration for both MSSPs and their customers, given that SIEM analysts across the ecosystem are overburdened, a serious issue that will otherwise only continue to escalate.
- Unified Threat Intelligence: By combining data from multiple intelligence sources, MSSPs gain a comprehensive view of the threat landscape. This “single source of truth” reduces noise, prioritizes high-risk threats, and enhances decision-making for security teams, ensuring that alerts are actionable and context-rich.
Unified Threat Intelligence (UTI) becomes a distinct advantage for MSSPs. It guides them in developing effective threat-hunting strategies and implementing robust risk mitigation tactics, helping them differentiate their services. By delivering precise, actionable insights, UTI enables MSSPs to proactively address emerging threats, thereby maintaining superior service quality and client trust.
- Automation and Efficiency: The integration of TIPs with XDR automates detection and response workflows, significantly reducing mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR). This allows security analysts to focus on strategic threat mitigation rather than manual data correlation and triage.
This enables security analysts to focus on strategic threat mitigation rather than manual data correlation and triage, facilitating client growth and account expansion without imposing additional costs on the MSSP. Importantly, this enables both client growth and account expansion without burdening MSSPs with spiking costs.
Practical Use Cases for MSSPs
- Detecting and Mitigating Software Supply Chain Threats: Leverage real-time threat intelligence to identify indicators linked to supply chain software vulnerabilities. For example, if a TIP detects a malicious package in an open-source library, XDR can be used to trace its presence across the customer’s environment, initiating automated or guided responses to neutralize the threat.
- Automated Threat Hunts: Use curated intelligence to launch automated threat hunts across SIEM and other security tools. This approach not only identifies potential compromises related to supply chain threats but also provides critical insights for strengthening defenses against similar attacks in the future.
- Reducing Alert Fatigue: With enhanced intelligence and automated enrichment, MSSPs can dramatically reduce false positives. By prioritizing critical alerts and correlating them with known supply chain risks, security teams can achieve higher operational efficiency and ensure faster threat resolution.
Taming the Ever-Increasing Complexity of Supply Chain Security
The frequency and sophistication of supply chain attacks demand that MSSPs move beyond traditional reactive models. By operationalizing threat intelligence and integrating it with XDR, MSSPs can shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture, hunting for threats before they cause significant damage. This proactive stance is crucial as clients face heightened regulatory pressures and growing expectations for supply chain transparency and security.
As the complexity of supply chain threats continues to escalate, MSSPs can gain clear advantages – both operational and business model expansion and revenue stability – by leveraging the synergy of TIPs with XDR. This integration enables better threat visibility, faster incident response, and a more resilient security posture. By automating threat enrichment and facilitating targeted threat hunts, MSSPs can provide comprehensive protection for their clients, ensuring the integrity of their digital supply chains.
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