Poisoned Pipeline / Mitigations / M1934
M1934
Plan and test a fallback route for each critical supplier service
Availability of a supplier is a supply-chain risk that no amount of secure
development removes. For each service where loss of the supplier would stop a
core process, decide in advance how the business continues without it:
1. Name the processes that stop if the supplier is unavailable, and the
recovery-time objective for the core platform and for each connected
integration. Restoring a platform does not restore the ordering, payment
and reporting systems wired to it, which usually recover later.
2. Confirm the process can run manually, for how long, and who does it —
including how queued transactions are reconciled afterwards without
duplication.
3. Identify whether a second provider or alternate route exists, whether it is
contracted, and how quickly it can be switched on.
4. Hold spares for components that cannot be sourced quickly, and check them.
Rehearse the fallback, not just the invocation: an untested manual route is a
plan on paper. This is the control that distinguishes organisations that
continued operating during a platform outage from those that did not.
Source: NCSC ICS Community of Interest Supply Chain Expert Group, "Developing
Incident Response and Management with your Supply Chain" (Colin Topping,
July 2023), supply chain resilience section.
Applies to
- No technique references this mitigation yet.