Supply Chain Security: Trust Is the New Attack Surface

In February 2026, while participating in a panel at IT Expo, one statement kept resonating throughout the discussion: most breaches today don’t start at the perimeter, they do start with abused trust.  

For years, we invested heavily in defending the edge using mechanisms like firewalls, segmentation, endpoint protection, etc.  But attackers constantly adapt their skill, instead of trying to break through hardened perimeters, they compromise what is already trusted: vendors, CI/CD pipelines, build systems, dependencies, and update mechanisms. 

From a real-world security testing perspective, this makes perfect sense.  If I’m an attacker, I won’t target your domain controllers and server, you have your SOC and it’ll have too much protection, I’ll target your vendors, your developers, or your build pipeline.  Why fight controls designed to stop me when I can abuse a trusted integration that already has privileged access?  The supply chain is the fastest path to scale an attack. 

Compromised build agents, hijacked dependencies, abused code-signing certificates, poisoned artifact repositories, these aren’t theoretical scenarios.  They’re efficient.  They leverage automation and implicit trust.  And once trust is embedded into a process, malicious activity can propagate quickly and quietly. 

One of the strongest points during the discussion was how outdated many third-party risk practices still are.  Vendor questionnaires and annual assessments are often treated as primary controls.  But questionnaires measure intent, not exposure.  They are point-in-time, self-attested, and disconnected from how software actually integrates into your environment. 

A vendor can look mature and compliant on paper and still introduce significant risk through overprivileged service accounts, insecure update mechanisms, or poorly segmented integrations. Questionnaires don’t stop breaches, but validation does. 

I’m not saying that frameworks are irrelevant.  On the contrary, they are powerful, but only if they’re operationalized.  Frameworks should guide how we identify dependencies, protect build systems, detect anomalous behavior in pipelines, respond to compromised components, and recover quickly with trusted artifacts.  Used correctly, they shape architecture and process.  Used poorly, they become compliance “theater”. 

Another important takeaway is that supply chain security isn’t just about external vendors.  It’s also about how we build and ship software internally.  Many organizations scrutinize third parties while overlooking their own pipelines.  Internal service accounts often have excessive privileges. Artifact repositories may lack strong integrity verification.  Build environments may not be isolated or continuously monitored. 

Trust is everywhere in modern development; an attacker just needs one token to become part of the “trustable” supply chain.  Unfortunately, trust is rarely treated as a dynamic risk. 

Supply chain attacks scale faster than direct attacks because they exploit existing relationships. When a trusted component is compromised, it can distribute impact across environments automatically.  That’s why I say that trust is the new attack surface. 

The solution isn’t eliminating trust.  First, it would be impossible in an interconnected ecosystem. The solution is designing systems where trust is continuously validated.  Can you monitor unusual pipeline behavior?  Can you detect unexpected dependency changes?  Can you revoke keys, invalidate tokens, or shut down integrations quickly?  If you can’t revoke trust rapidly, you don’t truly control it. 

Modern supply chain security is about aligning third-party risk, secure development practices, and continuous monitoring into one cohesive strategy.  It’s about assuming compromise is possible and building resilience accordingly. 

If we design our systems under the assumption that trusted components will never fail us, we’re relying on optimism.  If we design them assuming trust can be abused, we build in verification, detection, and recovery from the start. 

Trust should never be static.  It must be earned, monitored, and revalidated continuously. 

Because in today’s threat landscape, breaches don’t begin where we used to look.  They begin where we stopped questioning trust.