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Written by Swati Thapar

A firefighter’s job description of extinguishing fires, using sophisticated firefighting equipment, conducting safety inspections, maintaining equipment, and writing full incident reports will sound familiar to a security specialist.

World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 shines light on the growing complexity in the cyberspace and lists factors that contribute to it.

WEF reported supply chain challenges as the biggest (54%) barrier to achieving cyber resilience. Other top factors contributing to cyberspace complexity include geopolitical tensions, rapid adoption of AI, regulations across jurisdictions have created compliance challenges, and shortage of cyber talent.

To help you navigate these complexities, we have put together some practical advice and a handy checklist.

Lack of visibility into the security levels adopted by trading partners and suppliers, has emerged as the leading cybersecurity risk for organizations. Key concerns include software vulnerabilities introduced by third parties and the propagation of cyberattacks throughout supply chain ecosystem.

Depending on the size of your organization, you could be gatekeeping tens or even hundreds of interfaces. Monitoring thousands of security alerts per day is the leading cause of burnouts and security threats going undetected, slipping through the security nets that you have in place.

Private blockchain technology’s decentralized nature allows your entire supply chain ecosystem to operate on a single network. For you, that means:

• Monitoring just one interface – There is no burden of conducting due diligence of partners’ IT infrastructure and regular security audits either.
• Strategizing a resilience plan – On a blockchain network, you can swiftly respond to a security incident by disconnecting the attacked trading partner from the supply chain ecosystem. Logistics operations of the rest of your supply chain ecosystem can continue because all data is still available and protected on the network.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern threat detection enable security teams to identify hidden patterns in data, predict risks, and respond to cyber threats at a speed impossible for humans alone. Large organisations are now building AI agents for cyber security and defence: a malware investigation agent, a security agent, or privacy agent.

But AI runs on data.

Digitalization, which is the use of digital technologies to automate, simplify, and improve entire processes, is transforming operations. Digitalization without complete digitization, however, creates cyber vulnerabilities.

Paper based logistics documents like invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and customs declarations contain product details, shipment tracking information, and financial data which is goldmine for criminals. Day-to-day collaboration between trading partners using fax and telephone calls is a part of this risk.

Defaulting to manual execution any time there’s disruption or a larger crisis is also the missing part of this incomplete digital transformation.

Therefore, complete digitization of paperwork and processes is the first and the most crucial step towards securing your supply chain.

Navigate geopolitical tensions and natural disasters with the ability to collaborate with new trading partners and confidently inform the existing ones of the developments or changes. End-to-end digitization and a single network for supply chain operations will make this possible.

Authorized users like employees, contractors, or trading partners accidentally compromise an organization’s cyber and data security with incidents like lost laptops and falling for a phishing attack. No matter how secure an organization’s internal digital systems are, if data is being shared over email, spreadsheets, and traditional point-to-point interfaces (EDIs), it is vulnerable to a data breach or could be sold to competitors.

Make data sharing uniquely encrypted and immutable (tamper-evident) along with all trading partners of your supply chain ecosystem operating on a single network. This eliminates the threat of social engineering (the possibility of attackers impersonating themselves as trading partners to extract confidential information).

Cybersecurity continues to become more challenging and complex, year after year. Cybersecurity professionals can unchain from these incessantly ringing fire alarms with a more strategic approach when supported and funded by the C-suite executives of organizations.