By Vijendra Katiyar, Co-Founder and CRO, CleanStart
By the end of 2025, one thing was no longer debatable: software supply chain attacks had moved from an emerging risk to a dominant attack vector.
Across the data analyzed in our year-end report, the number of reported supply chain–related incidents roughly doubled year over year. This was not the result of a single vulnerability or a brief surge in attacker activity. It reflected a deeper, more structural problem. Organisations continue to place implicit trust in software they cannot actually prove.
Unless that trust model changes, 2026 is likely to be more disruptive than the year before.
The Scale Problem Attackers Figured Out
Supply chain attacks are not attractive because they are novel. They are attractive because they scale.
Modern applications are assembled from layers of upstream software: base images, open-source libraries, build tools, CI jobs, and automated update mechanisms. A single compromised component can quietly propagate across thousands of downstream deployments.
Our report showed that over 70% of security issues later observed in production were already present at build time. In containerized environments, more than 60% of images entered production with at least one critical or high-severity vulnerability on day one, largely inherited rather than introduced by application code.
This creates an asymmetric advantage for attackers. They do not need to breach every organisation individually.
They only need to compromise trust once.
October provided a clear signal of how persistent this model has become. It recorded the highest concentration of reported software supply chain attacks in 2025, reinforcing that this was not a short-lived spike but a sustained pattern.
Why More Scanning Did Not Change the Outcome
Many organisations responded to rising supply chain risk by adding more scanners, more alerts, and more dashboards. The data show why that approach failed to bend the curve.
Detection happened too late.
By the time vulnerabilities were identified, software was already built, shipped, and running in production. Remediation then competed with release deadlines, uptime requirements, and limited engineering capacity.
Our analysis found that more than two-thirds of container vulnerabilities with available fixes remained unpatched in production. This was not apathy. It was a rational response to an unsustainable remediation model.
Detection-first security is optimized for managing known issues after trust has already been granted. Supply chain attacks exploit that delay.
The Real Issue Is Not Vulnerabilities. It Is Proof
At the center of the supply chain problem is a trust gap that most organisations still cannot close.
Can you prove how your software was built?
Can you prove which components were actually used at build time?
Can you prove that the artifact running in production is the same one that passed review?
In many environments, the answer is no.
Build processes remain opaque. Artifacts are promoted without cryptographic verification. SBOMs describe declared dependencies, not the full reality of build-time behavior. Compliance evidence is assembled after delivery rather than generated by the system itself.
This is not a tooling failure. It is a proof failure.
Attackers succeed because they operate in the space between what organisations assume and what they can actually verify.
Why 2026 Raises the Stakes Further
If the software ecosystem were stabilizing, this might be manageable. It is not.
AI-assisted development, automated dependency updates, and increasingly ephemeral build environments are accelerating change. At the same time, regulatory and board-level scrutiny around provenance, SBOM accuracy, and supply chain accountability is increasing.
Without proof-based security, these forces compound risk rather than reduce it.
Our report showed that organisations enforcing build-time verification and standardized software foundations reduced downstream critical vulnerability exposure by more than 80% compared to those relying primarily on runtime scanning. They also saw dramatic reductions in emergency patching, with mean time to remediate falling from days to minutes because fewer issues reached production at all.
Proof-based security does not eliminate risk. It constrains it upstream, where it is cheaper to fix and harder to exploit.
From Trusting Software to Verifying It
The lesson from 2025 is not that supply chain attacks are inevitable. It is that they are predictable when trust is implicit.
Without verifiable builds, deterministic pipelines, and cryptographic provenance, organisations will continue to deploy risk by default. Attackers will continue to exploit that gap. And year-over-year growth in supply chain attacks will remain the norm.
2026 does not need to be worse than 2025. But without a shift from assumed trust to provable trust, there is little reason to believe it will be better.
Proof-based security is not a new control layer. It is a different foundation. And, as the data from 2025 make clear, foundations are exactly where the supply chain problem begins.