Start with a list of the software your operations cannot run without, rank the vendors behind it by what a failure would stop, ask the top tier for SBOMs and incident terms, and write down who decides what when a vulnerability lands. In logistics that is a few weeks of work, not a transformation.
Why is logistics a hard place to start?
Logistics runs on a web of software that you did not write and often cannot change: warehouse management, transport management, carrier integrations, customs and tracking portals, handheld scanners, dock scheduling, telematics, plus whatever your customers and partners push into your systems by file or API. Many are hosted by others. Many are old.
NIST's guidance on cybersecurity supply chain risk management puts the problem in one sentence: organizations are concerned about products and services that may contain malicious functionality, be counterfeit, or be vulnerable due to poor development practices, and these risks stem from decreased visibility into how the technology they acquire is developed, integrated and deployed. The publication, SP 800-161 Rev. 1, gives guidance on identifying, assessing and mitigating those risks at every level of an organization. Its CSRC page currently shows the 2022 publication as withdrawn and superseded, so check which edition applies to you before citing it.
Visibility is the first thing you build.
What does the first 90 days look like?
A constructed example: a regional freight forwarder with six warehouses, two hundred staff, and a small IT team. Here is a plan that team could actually finish.
Weeks 1 to 3: know what you run. List every system that touches shipments, inventory, billing and customer data. For each, record the owner, who hosts it, who supports it, what it connects to, and what stops if it is down for a day. A spreadsheet is fine. Mark the ten systems where an outage means trucks do not move or invoices do not go out. Those ten are your program for now.
Weeks 3 to 6: tier the vendors. For the vendors behind those systems, ask five questions: can you send a software bill of materials, how do you tell customers about a vulnerability in your product, what is your patch support period, who at your company can access our environment, and how fast will you notify us of an incident? CISA describes an SBOM as a nested inventory, a list of ingredients that make up software components. Pair it with a VEX statement, which CISA describes as an attestation that indicates whether products are affected by a known vulnerability. Together they tell you whether to worry about a new advisory.
Weeks 6 to 9: cover what you build. Even a logistics company writes software: integration scripts, customer portals, EDI converters, reporting tools. Put those repositories under dependency scanning, require lock files, and keep secrets out of code. This is the part where you control the fix.
Weeks 9 to 12: write the response rules. Decide who is told within one business day of a critical advisory, who can approve an emergency patch outside the change window, and which systems cannot be patched without the vendor. Write it on one page. Run one tabletop exercise using a real past advisory.
What about the vendors who say no?
Some will not provide SBOMs yet. Record it as a risk, not a failure. Compensate with what you can control: network segmentation around that system, restricted remote access, monitoring of its outbound connections, and a contract clause at renewal. Over a year the answers improve if every customer asks.
What should you measure?
Keep it small. How many critical systems have an owner and a vendor contact on file. How many have a current component list. How many days from an advisory to a documented decision. Those three numbers tell you whether the program is working.
What to do
- Build the inventory of systems that move goods and money, with owners.
- Mark the ten most critical and tier their vendors.
- Send the five questions and record the answers.
- Scan and lock the dependencies of software you write.
- Write the one page response rules and run a tabletop.
- Add SBOM and incident notification terms to contracts at renewal.
- Review the program every quarter and refresh the inventory.
Safeguard can generate SBOMs, scan dependencies, and help with asset discovery, and the free scan at gold.safeguard.sh/scan checks up to 100 dependencies in the browser. A program still depends on people owning the decisions.
Quick check
Do we need to cover every system first?
No. Start with the systems whose failure stops operations, and widen from there.
What if a vendor cannot supply an SBOM?
Log it as a risk, add compensating controls such as segmentation and access limits, and ask again at renewal.
Sources
- NIST SP 800-161 Rev. 1, Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Practices for Systems and Organizations
- CISA: Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
Last reviewed: 18 October 2026.
