Managing your third-party supply chain

Supply chain management in traditional brick-and-mortar aims to be efficient, effective, resilient, agile. These targets are more often difficult to achieve due to the following:

The system is complex and includes several main areas: planning, sourcing, manufacturing, delivery.
The areas cannot function without establishing contracts, transactions, accounting, geo-political events, performing due diligence.
The systems need quality control, assessments, attestations, capabilities, performance, audits, training, disclosures for products, services and organizations in their entirety.
Other contextual information generally pertaining to supply chain refers to Service Level Agreements, negative news, inspections, sanctions.

Moving the supply chain transaction online induces more complexity in the areas of implementation, hiring employees with specific skills while providing data security and protection from malicious actors. Therefore, the necessity to implement supply chain management engaging AI-tools looms. Used in the right way, a structured governance leveraged AI will help assure secure information and data management, thus decreasing the organizations’ legal liability.

Little information and its potential damaging consequences
KIA vehicles could have been accessed and controlled remotely knowing only the info publicly displayed on the vehicle plate.
Good news is that all vulnerabilities below have already been addressed during the summer of 2024. All the described scenarios did not occur thanks to the cyber researchers who pinpointed them to be immediately corrected.
Once knowing the info on the vehicle plate, the cyber attacker could have used KIA dealership infrastructure to:

register a fake account which releases tokens to retrieve dealer account or a token “header”
search and find vehicle owner’s name, email, phone number, street address.
modify vehicle owner’s contact info to fit the attacker’s profile
allow arbitrary remote commands to induce malicious code
track the vehicle passively, and send various commands such as unlock, honk, or start the vehicle.
allow execution of malicious scenarios without the owner ever knowing of the bad actors’ existence and actions.

Fortunately this will not happen, and it’s reassuring that cyber researchers work around the clock to signal security vulnerabilities in products and services produced throughout the world.

Humans could envision that both AI and cyber security present hazards, but also opportunities when knowing how to handle the risks.