In today’s Tech Pulse, gain insight into how:

• Honeypots are giving way to AI-powered deception environments that keep attackers engaged long enough to capture real, firsthand threat intelligence.

• Supply chain risk now runs through third-party identities and access, making continuous identity threat monitoring more useful than annual vendor assessments.

• The most trusted, deeply integrated vendors can be the biggest liability, so leaders should apply zero-trust scrutiny and frequent access verification where trust runs deepest.

Each of these articles is penned by members of Forbes Technology Council, key luminaries shaping the future of technology leadership.

Grab your coffee, and let's dive in!

Honeypots Had Their Moment, Deception Environments Want the Whole Story

Honeypots can still catch a probe, but modern attackers spot isolated decoys fast and move on. Deception environments raise the bar by recreating believable “lived-in” terrain so defenders can watch real adversary behavior unfold longer and learn more.

Here’s what’s changing (and what leaders should know):

🪤 Why Honeypots Fail Today: Single decoy assets lack context, noise, and business purpose, making them easy to fingerprint.

🧭 Attackers Don’t Target Assets; They Navigate Environments: Lateral movement spans identities, cloud workloads, shared drives, apps, and integrations.

🎭 Deception Becomes a Stage, Not a Prop: Realistic infrastructure, credible identities, user activity, and business logic sustain engagement.

🧱 Layered Design Keeps Adversaries Interacting: Strategic decoys, planted “bait” (credentials/docs), and escalating “trophy” tiers draw attackers deeper.

🤖 Frontier AI Changes the Economics: AI can generate industry-accurate synthetic data and keep environments fresh at scale, without exposing real data.

⚖️ Program, Not “Set-&-Forget”: Ongoing curation, legal/HR considerations, and skilled analysts are still required to turn signals into action.

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Your Strongest Controls Won’t Matter if a Vendor Gets In First

The supply chain now runs on authenticated access, not handshakes. As APIs and SaaS integrations multiply, attackers are sidestepping hardened internal defenses by compromising trusted third-party identities and using that access to move fast across connected apps.

Here’s the shift security teams need to make:

🔗 Supply Chain Is an Identity Web: Third parties, apps, and integrations expand the perimeter well beyond what you directly control.

🕵️ Attackers Bypass Your Controls: Instead of breaking MFA or zero trust head-on, they target vendor accounts, sessions, and endpoints to get “legitimate” access.

🗓️ Annual TPRM Is Outdated: Questionnaires and point-in-time risk scores miss how intrusions happen now.

🪪 Identity Is the New Third-Party Attack Surface: Stolen credentials, hijacked sessions, phishing, and malware-driven exfiltration create exploitable access paths.

📡 Move to Continuous Identity Threat Monitoring: Track identity-linked signals like breach logs, phishing kits, malware exposure, and combolists tied to vendor domains.

🧩 Make Insights Operational: Attribute exposure to specific vendors, trend it over time, and respond by restricting access, adjusting privileges, reassessing integrations or re-tiering vendors.

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Your “Safest” Vendor May Be Your Biggest Exposure

Supply chain breaches increasingly ride in through partners you trust most, not the ones that look risky on a questionnaire. A deeply embedded vendor can provide a clean path into sensitive systems and IP, precisely because their access is familiar and rarely challenged.

Explore these key takeaways for security leaders:

🏭 Trusted-partner Breach, Outsized Impact: A ransomware leak at Tata Electronics allegedly exposed Apple and Tesla materials without directly breaching those companies’ systems.

📈 Third Parties Are Now a Primary Breach Path: Verizon’s 2026 DBIR notes third-party involvement is up 60% year over year and accounts for 48% of breaches.

🔐 Inherited Trust Is the Attacker’s Shortcut: Vendor relationships create “trusted channels” that are hard to distinguish from legitimate business traffic.

🧠 Familiarity Erodes Scrutiny: Long-running vendors often gain deeper access while facing fewer rigorous reviews over time.

🧱 Extend Zero Trust to Vendor Governance: Treat partner access like any other high-risk pathway: verify continuously, don’t assume safety based on reputation.

⏱️ Supply Chain Breaches Linger: IBM research cited puts average cost at $4.91M and average lifecycle at 267 days, reflecting how hard trusted-channel intrusion is to detect.

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Wrapping Up

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