Nottingham, United Kingdom: Nexor today announced a new partnership with Craft, a supply chain-focused enterprise data platform, and Lab 1, the leader in Corporate Data Exposure Intelligence, to launch a new Supply Chain Security service to the Defence, Government and Law Enforcement markets.  

In an escalating cyber threat environment - in both the volume of attacks and sophistication - there is a significant need for Defence and Government to improve cyber security across the supply chain. 

The Government Security Group (supported by NCSC) has mandated a focus on Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) Resilience, while the MOD Cyber Resilience Strategy highlights the need to improve supply chain cyber security and resilience outcomes, making reference to the important role of collaboration with industry to “maximise our collective capabilities”.

This new partnership between Nexor, Craft, and Lab 1 will deliver a blended service that identifies and addresses risks throughout the supply chain, including capabilities to:

• Conduct a deep investigation to map the entire supply chain and understand the criticality of the programme or procurement to Defence;

• Understand the vulnerability to each programme if one supplier in the supply chain fails;

• Assess each company/tier within the supply chain for past data breaches, data-related vulnerabilities, company ownership, manufacturing locations, senior and critical employees, and more;

• Review the findings with the customers to determine which risks need to be prioritised, create a mitigation plan, and then support the customer in the implementation of that plan;

• Continuous monitoring of the entire supply chain to highlight new changes or events that require action.

Each partner brings specialist skills to the above service, making a compelling combination to help customers assess and monitor their supply chain cyber risks

• Nexor’s subject matter expertise is identifying, monitoring and managing security risk within the supply chain networks of Defence and wider Government, blended with many years of experience in information assurance and secure information exchange.

• Craft is a supply chain resilience platform helping organisations discover and evaluate supplier networks through a holistic and reliable lens of millions of data points and thousands of risk factors. Predict and prevent disruption and violation with complete confidence through Craft’s Risk Hub. And, enable organisations to align and control outcomes and identify new opportunities with collaborative operational capabilities. Ultimately, create an unbreakable supplier network.

• Lab 1's Unique Corporate Data Exposure Intelligence platform provides companies with near-real-time insights into data risks across their supply chains, by collecting and analysing the full corpus of exposed data from the deep and dark web, messaging platforms and hidden communities. This enables them to uncover where and how organisations have been exposed through third-party data breaches.

“With Supply Chain Security identified as strategically important within the recent Cyber Resilience Strategy for Defence, the timing of our partnership with Craft and Lab 1 couldn’t be better. We believe we are well placed to support wider government in identifying and mitigating supply chain risks on an ongoing basis,” said Tim Thompson, Managing Director, Nexor Limited

“With a booming ransomware-as-a-service industry and rapidly advancing technologies, cyber threats have seen a marked increase over the last few years. Coupled with the fact that most organisations have limited visibility into their multi-tier supplier network, there is an acute demand for this kind of partnership. We look forward to partnering with Lab-1 and Nexor on this important initiative" said Ilya Levtov, CEO and founder of Craft.” 

“We are delighted to be partnering with Nexor and Craft through which we can create the opportunity for the defence sector to be at the forefront of data-driven supply chain risk management,” said Robin Brattel, Lab-1 CEO.

The benefits of this new partnership include. 

• Offers customers a deeper understanding of the relationships and interdependencies of their supply chain, and the potential impact if different elements were compromised;

• Monitors over 450 data points in risk domains such as financial, operational, ESG, labour, security etc;

• Surfaces data breaches for specific companies, as well as identifying where data about that company appears as part of third-party breaches;

• Provides insights and mitigation plans for teams who either don’t have the capacity, specialist skillset or toolset to investigate and monitor their entire supply chain;

• Validates the security of your supply chain as part of any procurement processes.

About Nexor: Nexor is a specialist Secure Information Exchange SME that delivers accreditable Cross Domain Services and Solutions into complex and restricted networks globally. Our Consultancy Services are focused on two areas, our Advisory services, fixing customer problems of today and Research & Innovation solving customer problems of tomorrow.

Our customers benefit from a combination of a highly customisable and flexible secure information exchange product portfolio, with subject matter experts who are leading MOD research projects into the future of cross-domain technology and information security. Nexor’s agile development capability complements our services to ensure that the solutions we provide are tailored to enable our customers’ business and security objectives, adeptly balancing risk with budget and functionality.

About Craft Craft is a supply chain resilience company empowering global supply chain ecosystems to optimise value creation in a sustainable, profitable, secure and ethical way. With the risks of climate change and the rapidly shifting geo-political landscape, the resilience of global supply chains has become a board priority and critical for competitive advantage. Craft provides a holistic and reliable lens into global supplier networks with the most comprehensive data intelligence foundation.

In addition, with Craft’s automated risk hub and workflow capabilities, procurement and supply chain professionals can confidently prevent and protect from regulatory violations, unethical acts, and unforeseen disruption while controlling and tracking business outcomes. Craft is based in San Francisco, CA and services Global 2000 companies and government organisations globally.

About Lab 1 Lab 1 has built a data exposure intelligence platform for corporations delivering near-real-time data risk insights across supply chains. We collect exposed data from the dark web, messaging platforms and hidden communities to provide you with the best overview of risk across your supply chain. 

CiGraph™ is our proprietary graphing and machine learning technology. As we collect data, CiGraph adds it to the mesh spotting links and inferring patterns, providing our customers with unique insights. We have tens of billions of data entities under management with hundreds of entities being added every second. 

Robin Brattel, CEO at Lab 1, comments: “The current geo-political climate has increased the intensity of attacks on Governments and Defence companies. And unfortunately, cybercriminals are well aware that the easiest route into these organisations’ systems is not targeting them directly, but through their third party suppliers that may not have the same level of defence. Indirect, as well as direct, incidents can create risks for any company and where this happens, it is critical that these organisations have near immediate knowledge of their exposure to risk or a breach and can react fast to protect their systems and their data. That is why we are pleased to be partnering with Nexor and Craft to offer greater insights into supply chain risk.”