Many people think of cybersecurity as threats coming from the outside, but with the government relying on private companies to provide hardware and software, the very tools that agencies use could be a threat within themselves.
Supply chain issues are wracking the nation, but the government is also thinking about its supply chain in terms of what companies are providing goods and services.
The U.S. Patent Office is one organization that pay particularly close attention to supply chain issues in order to keep clients proprietary information safe. Just recently, the Patent Office found a zero day vulnerability in one of its logging libraries, according to Stephan Mitchev, director of the Office of Application Engineering and Development and acting chief technology officer at the Patent Office.
That infiltration caused the office to look harder at its supply chain to see what could have been infected.