Hacking comes in many forms, recently the trend in cyber crime has hackers going directly for the supply chain within an organization. The supply chain is a system of activities involved in handling, distributing, manufacturing and processing goods in order to move resources from a vendor into the hands of a final consumer. In reference to cyber-security, a supply chain attack involves tampering with the companies network in order to install malware that brings harm further down the supply chain.

One of the most popular supply chain attacks was data breach that occurred to the retail giant Target in 2013, Over 40 million customers credit card and debit cards were compromised after malware infiltrated one of Target’s third party suppliers and gained access to Targets main data network.

Recently, a computer cleaning software was compromised and left any user who downloaded the software between August 15th and September 12th with malware on their computer. CCleaner is an application that scans your PC for malware and junk files and cleans it up to work at maximum performance. It is an extremely popular software that has over 2 billion downloads, and ironically has caused the problem it tries to prevent. CCleaner was compromised when some unknown hackers infiltrated the download servers to the application and replaced the original version of the software with the malicious one and distributed it to millions of users for a month. The company that own the software is now recommending users to update their software to the latest version to protect their computer from being compromised.

These event have happened all to often, and can affect such a large group of users. These events are particularly a cause for concern to business owners. If your business computers are not being monitored and one of your employees accidentally downloads malicious software unknowingly, all of your important business data is now compromised. Not only is your data at risk, now your business if loosing precious hours trying to fix the problem and recovering from the cyber attack instead of focusing on your core business activities. These event could plummet employee productivity and could end up costing the business money that it simply cannot afford to lose. Be sure to always monitor end user activity and maintain backups of your important data.