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The Practical Checklist for Defending Against Supply Chain Attacks
A practical checklist for engineering teams facing the current generation of supply chain attacks. The recommendations follow the path a compromised package takes into production, from the registry through your pipeline to the machines your team works on. Covers the specific habits that prevent a compromised package from becoming an incident.
Nicholas Thomson is a Content Marketing Writer at Aikido Security. Prior to this, he worked as a technical writer at Datadog and Edge Delta. Before entering tech, he worked as an editor at Penguin Random House.
Key Findings
Dependency management from install-time to production, covering package age policies, lockfiles, SBOMs, and continuous scanning
Access and identity controls that hold up against modern attacks, including phishing-resistant MFA, token scoping, and staged publishing
CI/CD hardening for the pipelines attackers now target, covering pinning, workflow hardening, and prompt injection defense
Agentic toolchain controls for MCP servers and AI agents, including server verification, permission scoping, and sandboxing
Summary
Attackers have moved from targeting production applications to targeting the systems that build them, but defenders still control what enters those systems. You control your lockfile, your pipeline configuration, your token scopes, and the tooling on your developer machines. The engineering teams that come out ahead are the ones using that control before someone finds the vulnerable entry points first. This checklist contains actionable defenses across dependencies, pipelines, containers, developer environments, and the agentic tools your team is starting to rely on.
What you’ll learn
How to secure your stack against the current generation of supply chain attacks
A practical checklist for engineering teams facing the current generation of supply chain attacks. The recommendations follow the path a compromised package takes into production, from the registry through your pipeline to the machines your team works on. Covers the specific habits that prevent a compromised package from becoming an incident.
Nicholas Thomson is a Content Marketing Writer at Aikido Security. Prior to this, he worked as a technical writer at Datadog and Edge Delta. Before entering tech, he worked as an editor at Penguin Random House.