Digital Security Magazine 17​

Beneath the Blocks: The Hidden Stress Points of the Digital Supply Chain

In a game of Jenga, collapse doesn’t begin with a crash. It begins with confidence, when the tower looks stable, even as hidden stresses accumulate deep within the structure. You remove one block, then another. The game rewards speed, boldness and efficiency. Until the wrong piece shifts, and suddenly, it’s over. The collapse might be sudden, but the conditions for failure were stacked long ago.

Our digital supply chains are no different.

What was once a linear sequence of vendors and code has become a sprawling, interdependent structure, stacked high with third-party libraries, cloud APIs, automation pipelines, embedded AI, and external contractors.

Each block is a shortcut to innovation.

Each gap is a potential point of failure.

We build higher, faster, rarely stopping to ask: What are we standing on? And our adversaries know this.

They study the structure quietly. They know which block to tap, not the obvious one, but the overlooked one. In the SolarWinds breach, attackers injected malware into a software update used by thousands of organizations, from Fortune 500s to government agencies. In the Kaseya incident, REvil ransomware spread through a remote management platform, crippling MSPs and their clients worldwide. Even seemingly harmless packages, like in the Event-Stream NPM exploit, have hidden malicious code deep inside open-source dependencies.

Threat actors don’t need to break in. They wait for us to install them.

This edition of Atos Digital Security Magazine is a deep dive into the new physics of digital supply chain security. We start with the anatomy of modern attacks, pulling apart the methods that allow breaches to have a ripple effect, from a single overlooked component. We get inside the minds of those reshaping supply chain threats: how they think, what they target, and why legacy defenses fall short.

We follow the full software lifecycle, from code to deployment, and examine how security must be embedded at every turn, not bolted on after the fact. We scrutinize third-party access, the perennial blind spot in even the most mature organizations. We look at regulatory pressures and frameworks, and ask whether the industry is driving change, or reacting too late.

Leadership, too, is under the spotlight. The rise of the Chief Product Security Officer reflects a growing truth: product is now the front line of cyber defense. And if no one owns that role in your organization, you may already be exposed.

And then there’s AI, the most complex block yet. Our partner Justin Buchanan from Tenable unpacks the invisible dependencies beneath today’s most powerful services. In Supply Chain’s New Shield, we explore how agentic AI and zero trust architectures are redefining identity, verification, and trust at scale.

No one wins Jenga by refusing to move. But the best players learn the structure. They feel the tension. They know what’s holding it all together. And what isn’t.

The same is true in cybersecurity. Our job is not to freeze progress, but to make every move with clarity, foresight, and a full awareness of the towers we’ve built, and how easily they can fall if we don’t take the right actions.