Team Cymru senior threat intelligence adviser Stephen Campbell said smaller companies inside the US Defense Industrial Base face a structural disadvantage because many hold sensitive contract, technical and personnel data but lack the network-level visibility available to major prime contractors. His assessment points to routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators and other edge devices as a key weak point, particularly where defenders rely heavily on endpoint tools that cannot see what is happening across perimeter infrastructure.
The warning lands at a time when defence supply chains are under growing pressure from state-linked operators seeking not only intellectual property but durable access that could be used during a geopolitical crisis. Weapons systems, propulsion data, communications designs, production schedules and clearance-linked personnel information remain high-value targets. Yet the more strategic prize may be the ability to disrupt manufacturing, logistics or communications by compromising a supplier that sits below the top tier of the procurement chain.
Small and medium-sized contractors make up the overwhelming majority of the US Defense Industrial Base. Many serve as specialist suppliers to larger primes, creating a network of dependencies that can give attackers an indirect route into sensitive programmes. Campbell’s analysis argues that adversaries look for the seam rather than the strongest point, targeting organisations where access is valuable but monitoring, patching and incident response are thinner.
The central concern is pre-positioning. Rather than launching an immediate disruptive attack, state-backed operators map infrastructure, identify credentials, test access routes and place themselves where they can act later. That pattern has been seen in campaigns linked to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, though the tactics differ. China-linked groups have emphasised persistence and concealment, including the use of normal administrative tools to avoid malware alerts. Russian military-linked operators have focused on vulnerable routers and other infrastructure that can be turned into relay points. Iran-linked groups have relied more heavily on tailored social engineering against aerospace and defence personnel. North Korea-linked operations have combined cyber intrusion with fake employment activity and alleged remote-worker infiltration.
Edge devices are especially attractive because they often sit outside normal endpoint detection coverage. Routers, switches, firewalls and VPN appliances may have limited logging, are not always patched consistently and can continue operating even while compromised. Once inside these systems, attackers can observe traffic, disguise command-and-control channels and use trusted infrastructure to blend into normal business activity.
The wider zero-day landscape reinforces that risk. Ninety zero-day vulnerabilities were tracked as exploited in the wild during 2025, with enterprise technologies accounting for 43 of them. Security and networking products represented a large share of enterprise-targeted flaws, while 14 zero-days were identified as affecting edge devices, a figure likely to understate the true scale because detection on such platforms remains limited. For small defence contractors, the implication is clear: the devices most likely to provide stealthy access are also among the hardest to monitor.
Campbell’s warning also reflects a shift away from conventional malware detection. Attackers increasingly use legitimate cloud platforms, commercial hosting providers, code repositories and built-in system tools. Their activity may not produce obvious malicious files or endpoint alerts. Instead, the useful signals appear in traffic flows, passive DNS records, TLS fingerprints, timing patterns and unusual connections to short-lived infrastructure. Without NetFlow analysis, infrastructure mapping and historical network telemetry, defenders may only learn of an intrusion after credentials have been taken or access has been expanded.
Compliance pressure is also rising. The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification programme began its three-year rollout on 10 November 2025, making cyber verification a growing condition for Department of Defense contracts. The framework is intended to improve protection of federal contract information and controlled unclassified information, but smaller companies still face cost, staffing and technical barriers. Certification can raise baseline standards, yet it does not automatically give a contractor the telemetry needed to detect a patient nation-state actor already operating through edge infrastructure.
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