When a $48 Billion Giant Falls to Basic Password Bollocks: The Ingram Micro Disaster That Should Terrify Every UK Business

Industry Analysis
Written By Noel Bradford

Right, let's talk about the supply chain catastrophe that just exposed the terrifying fragility of the entire global IT industry. Ingram Micro, the $48 billion behemoth that processes nearly every piece of technology you've ever touched, just got completely destroyed by SafePay ransomware through the most basic, preventable security failure imaginable.

We're not talking about some sophisticated nation-state attack here. We're talking about criminals who got in through a bloody VPN because some muppet misconfigured a firewall to bypass multi-factor authentication. A firewall setting. A checkbox that wasn't ticked properly.

And now the backbone of global technology distribution is offline, bleeding £136 million daily, with thousands of MSPs worldwide unable to fulfil orders or serve customers.

The Stupid, Preventable Failure That Broke Everything

Here's what actually happened, and brace yourself because this is going to make you furious. NCC Group's forensics team found that "the Threat Actor was able to gain access to a local account through a simple misconfiguration on the Fortigate firewall, allowing local accounts to be authenticated and bypass the MFA requirement on the VPN."

Read that again. A simple misconfiguration. On the firewall. That bypassed MFA.

This is like leaving your house keys in the front door, then wondering why burglars waltzed in and ransacked the place.

SafePay criminals didn't need zero-day exploits or nation-state resources. They needed basic password credentials and the knowledge that Ingram's security team had cocked up their firewall configuration so badly that multi-factor authentication could be completely bypassed.

A $48 billion company, handling the critical infrastructure that keeps every MSP and VAR in business, was brought to its knees by a configuration error that any competent technician should have caught during routine security auditing.

The timeline makes it even more infuriating. Attack started July 3rd at 8 AM. By evening, employees were finding ransom notes on their devices. Twenty-four hours from initial access to complete ransomware deployment across a global enterprise network.

That's not sophisticated hacking. That's shooting fish in a barrel when the fish have helpfully removed all the water themselves.

The Global Supply Chain Meltdown Nobody Saw Coming

While Ingram's executives count their daily losses in the hundreds of millions, the real carnage is happening downstream to the thousands of MSPs and technology resellers who suddenly discovered their entire business model depends on a single vendor's cybersecurity competence.

Let me paint you a picture of the chaos. Stanley Louissaint from Fluid Designs said it perfectly: "I had a few open orders I was dealing with, and then the site just went down. No word on fulfillment, no system access... nothing."

Multiply that frustration across thousands of MSPs worldwide. Projects halted. Customer commitments impossible to meet. Revenue bleeding out while Ingram's AI-powered Xvantage platform and Impulse licensing system sit offline, displaying maintenance messages that don't mention the word "ransomware."

Every MSP reading this should be having a panic attack right now, because you've just discovered how your entire livelihood depends on vendors who can't configure firewalls properly.

The scope is staggering. Ingram processes technology for MSPs across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. They handle distribution agreements with Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Nvidia, Red Hat, SonicWall, and dozens of other vendors that form the backbone of modern IT infrastructure.

When Ingram goes down, it's not just one company having a bad day. It's the entire technology supply chain grinding to a halt because criminals exploited firewall settings that should have been caught in any basic security audit.

The SafePay Criminal Enterprise: Laughing at Our Incompetence

SafePay emerged in November 2024 and became the world's most active ransomware operation by May 2025, with 70 attacks in a single month. They're not some sophisticated nation-state group. They're criminals with a business model: target infrastructure providers for maximum damage per attack.

Their ransom note to Ingram literally mocks the company's security failures: "We exploited a number of mistakes Ingram made in setting up the security of your corporate network, so we were able to spend quite a long time in it and compromise you."

The criminals are taking the piss out of Ingram's security posture in their own ransom note. That's the level of contempt they have for enterprise cybersecurity.

SafePay's technical approach isn't revolutionary. They use stolen VPN credentials, password spray attacks, and exploit basic configuration errors. No phishing campaigns, no social engineering, no zero-day exploits. Just systematic testing of authentication systems until they find one configured by idiots.

They've claimed over 220 victims since November because the same basic security failures that work on SMBs also work on billion-pound global enterprises.

Graham Cluley from Fortra nailed it: "SafePay is known for breaking into organisations by using stolen VPN or RDP credentials." This isn't sophisticated hacking. This is criminals walking through doors that organisations leave wide open through basic incompetence.

The Vendor Dependency Death Trap

This attack exposes the most dangerous delusion in modern business: the assumption that your critical vendors have their security shit sorted. Mohamed Amine Belarbi from Cypherleak put it perfectly: "This attack underscores a growing and deeply concerning trend: cyber criminals targeting critical nodes in the global IT supply chain."

UK SMBs have built their entire operation around vendor dependencies they never questioned, never audited, and certainly never planned to replace.

Think about your own business right now:

  • Can you operate if your primary software vendor goes offline for a week?

  • Do you have alternative suppliers for critical hardware and licensing?

  • What happens to your customer commitments when your distributor gets ransomwared?

  • Have you ever audited your vendors' cybersecurity practices, or just trusted their marketing materials?

The brutal answer for most businesses is that they're completely fucked if their primary vendors get compromised. And vendors are getting compromised daily through basic security failures.

SecurityScorecard's 2025 survey reveals the scale of the problem: 88% of cybersecurity leaders worry about supply chain risks, but only 26% include incident response in their supply chain frameworks. Meanwhile, third-party involvement in breaches has doubled from 15% to 30%.

We're worried about the problem but doing bugger all to actually solve it.

Why This Was Entirely Preventable

The most infuriating aspect of this disaster is how easily it could have been prevented. Every single control that would have stopped SafePay cold is basic cybersecurity hygiene that any competent security team should have implemented:

Proper VPN Configuration: Don't configure firewalls to bypass MFA. This is cybersecurity basics, not rocket science. If you're allowing local account authentication without multi-factor verification, you're not protecting anything.

Regular Security Auditing: Any halfway competent penetration test would have identified the firewall misconfiguration that enabled this attack. Ingram spent billions on AI-powered distribution platforms but apparently couldn't invest in basic security reviews.

Network Segmentation: Critical systems should be isolated from VPN access points. Even if criminals compromise remote access, they shouldn't be able to deploy ransomware across your entire global infrastructure within 24 hours.

Credential Monitoring: Threat intelligence services monitor underground markets for stolen credentials. If your VPN passwords are for sale on criminal forums, you should know immediately, not discover it when the ransom note appears.

Incident Response Planning: The delayed communication and lack of recovery timeline suggests Ingram wasn't prepared for this scenario, despite ransomware being the most predictable threat facing large enterprises.

Every single one of these controls is covered in basic cybersecurity frameworks. Every single one was apparently ignored or implemented incompetently.

What This Means for UK SMBs and MSPs

If you're running a UK SMB or MSP, this attack just taught you some brutal lessons about the reality of vendor risk:

Single Vendor Dependency Is Business Suicide: Any critical function that relies on a single vendor represents an existential threat to your operation. Ingram's customers are learning this lesson in real-time while bleeding revenue and losing customers.

Vendor Security Due Diligence Isn't Optional: The days of trusting vendor security based on their marketing materials just ended. You need contractual security requirements, regular audits, and documented alternatives for when (not if) your vendors get compromised.

Supply Chain Attacks Are Accelerating: Criminals have discovered that targeting infrastructure providers creates exponentially more damage than attacking individual businesses. ConnectWise ScreenConnect, DragonForce RMM attacks, now Ingram Micro - the pattern is clear.

Your MSP's Vendor Dependencies Are Your Problem: If your MSP can't deliver services because their suppliers got breached, your business still suffers. Vendor risk management needs to extend through your entire supply chain.

Contractual Protections Are Worthless: No contract with Ingram will compensate MSPs for lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and market share erosion. Legal protections don't replace operational resilience.

The Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Asking Today

For MSPs: How many of your critical suppliers could shut down your operation overnight? Do you have documented backup suppliers for essential services? Can you operate without your primary distributor for weeks while they recover from ransomware?

For SMBs: Does your MSP have resilient supply chains, or are you dependent on their single-vendor relationships? What happens to your IT projects when their suppliers get breached? Are you paying premium rates for services that depend entirely on vendors with basic security failures?

For Everyone: Should vendor cybersecurity competence be your primary selection criterion? Are you willing to pay higher costs for vendors who actually invest in proper security? What's your plan when your cheapest vendor becomes your most expensive mistake?

The Solution Nobody Wants to Implement

Fixing vendor dependency requires fundamental changes that cost money and create operational complexity. But the alternative is what Ingram's customers are experiencing right now: complete helplessness when your vendors get destroyed by preventable attacks.

Vendor Cybersecurity Auditing: Every critical vendor relationship should include security assessments, regular audits, and contractual cybersecurity requirements. If they won't accept liability for security failures that impact your operations, find vendors who will.

Supply Chain Diversification: Single points of failure in your supply chain are single points of failure in your business. Redundancy costs money but prevents total operational shutdown. The cost of maintaining backup suppliers is infinitely less than explaining to customers why their projects are delayed indefinitely.

Internal Resilience Planning: Develop procedures that function when key suppliers go offline. This isn't disaster recovery, it's basic business continuity. If your operation collapses when one vendor gets compromised, you don't have a business, you have a house of cards.

Why This Will Keep Happening

The fundamental economics haven't changed. Criminals get maximum damage by targeting infrastructure providers rather than individual businesses. SafePay's business model of attacking distribution chokepoints generates exponentially more profit than targeting individual SMBs.

Until the IT industry acknowledges that supply chain security is everyone's problem, not just the vendor's problem, these attacks will continue destroying businesses that thought vendor dependency was an acceptable risk.

Ingram Micro won't be the last major distributor to get destroyed by basic security failures. The criminals are systematically working through critical infrastructure providers because they know most organisations haven't planned for vendor compromise scenarios.

The Bottom Line: Wake Up or Get Destroyed

DNV's research found that 53% of critical infrastructure organisations lack full supply chain visibility, and 36% believe cyber-attackers may have already infiltrated their supply chain unreported.

This isn't theoretical risk. This is documented reality affecting the majority of businesses that haven't bothered to map their vendor dependencies or plan for inevitable security failures.

The Ingram Micro attack just demonstrated that no vendor is too big to fail, no security budget prevents basic configuration errors, and no amount of "trusted partner" relationships protect you when criminals target your suppliers through preventable vulnerabilities.

Your choice is simple: diversify your critical vendor dependencies now, or explain to your customers later why their projects are delayed indefinitely because you trusted a single supplier's firewall configuration competence.

The criminals are laughing at us because we keep building single points of failure, then acting shocked when they target those exact vulnerabilities through basic password attacks and configuration errors.

The question isn't whether your suppliers will get breached. The question is whether your business will survive when they do.

Stop pretending vendor security is someone else's problem. Start building resilience before the next SafePay target takes down the infrastructure your entire operation depends on.

Because if a $48 billion global enterprise can get destroyed by a firewall checkbox, what makes you think your vendors are any more competent?

Last week on the Podcast, we warned about exactly this scenario: supply chain attacks targeting critical infrastructure providers to create maximum downstream chaos. The Ingram Micro disaster proves every prediction we made about vendor dependency risks and the systematic targeting of distribution chokepoints. If you missed that episode, go back and listen now, because we laid out the playbook that SafePay just executed perfectly against a $48 billion global enterprise. The criminals didn't invent new tactics, they just found another victim who ignored the warnings we've been shouting about for months.

This week's Episode covers Shadow IT and the unauthorized vendors already undermining your security, because apparently learning from other people's disasters isn't painful enough for most businesses.

Noel Bradford

Noel Bradford – Head of Technology at Equate Group, Professional Bullshit Detector, and Full-Time IT Cynic

As Head of Technology at Equate Group, my job description is technically “keeping the lights on,” but in reality, it’s more like “stopping people from setting their own house on fire.” With over 40 years in tech, I’ve seen every IT horror story imaginable—most of them self-inflicted by people who think cybersecurity is just installing antivirus and praying to Saint Norton.

I specialise in cybersecurity for UK businesses, which usually means explaining the difference between ‘MFA’ and ‘WTF’ to directors who still write their passwords on Post-it notes. On Tuesdays, I also help further education colleges navigate Cyber Essentials certification, a process so unnecessarily painful it makes root canal surgery look fun.

My natural habitat? Server rooms held together with zip ties and misplaced optimism, where every cable run is a “temporary fix” from 2012. My mortal enemies? Unmanaged switches, backups that only exist in someone’s imagination, and users who think clicking “Enable Macros” is just fine because it makes the spreadsheet work.

I’m blunt, sarcastic, and genuinely allergic to bullshit. If you want gentle hand-holding and reassuring corporate waffle, you’re in the wrong place. If you want someone who’ll fix your IT, tell you exactly why it broke, and throw in some unsolicited life advice, I’m your man.

Technology isn’t hard. People make it hard. And they make me drink.

https://noelbradford.com
Previous

Shadow IT: The Digital Squatters in Your Business
Next

Catwatchful Exposed: When Surveillance Technology Becomes a Weapon