Enhancing Financial Sector Cybersecurity: A Multi-Component Framework for Supply Chain Risk Mitigation

Supply chains are being used at scale within new industries, mainly in the financial sector and the cyber security risks emerging in this area have been on the rise. Given recent attack scenarios the mitigation strategies taken within these areas are limited. This research paper focuses on the main areas where the risk can be reduced to provide an overall effective solution to reduce the risks. However, there are certain challenges in minimizing the risks associated, such as third-party vendor identification, classifying and securing data, and gathering relevant external threat information. This research utilizes a centralized risk assessment gateway to assess the security level of each third-party vendor. Further, there will be a secure transfer of text and image data once the vendors have been assessed and these will be done in correlation with a zero-trust policy engine where data classification occurs based on unique trust levels. In addition, it will also use machine learning to tailor the external cyber threat feeds to provide valuable insights regarding threat attacks, vulnerabilities, and patches within the sector to gain more granular intelligence and reduce analysis time. The overall solution will serve as a zero-trust approach to mitigate the attacks within the financial fields of the supply chain sector.