Your Vendors Have Keys to Your Business Too

MIDAS doesn't run this business alone, and no reverse logistics company does. Every phone that comes back to us passes through a courier's tracking system, sits in our own warehouse software for a while, sometimes goes out to a refurbishment partner, and eventually gets listed through a resale marketplace. Each one of those is a login or a connected account — and each one is a potential path for an attack that has nothing to do with our own systems at all.

The menace is an attack that does not even begin with us.

According to Verizon's most recent Data Breach Investigations Report, approximately half of all data breaches this year involved third parties, which is almost twice as many as it was a year ago (as cited in Passwork, 2026). The attack itself usually looks simple: a stolen or reused password, a phishing email that tricks a vendor employee, or an account with no multi-factor authentication turned on. Once an attacker is inside a courier's system, a partner's network, or a marketplace account tied to ours, they don't need to touch MIDAS directly to reach our data.

What could actually happen if a partner gets breached

Small businesses are targeted more frequently than large enterprises, with ransomware appearing in most of such situations (as mentioned in DuoCircle, 2026). If a courier's system were compromised, that's customer names, addresses, and order details for every parcel in transit. If a refurbishment partner got breached, a device we thought was safely wiped could end up exposed before we even know something's wrong. According to IBM's research, the average supply-chain breach costs about five million dollars, and containment takes months (as mentioned in Secureframe, 2025). Additionally, when a breach is traced back to a vendor rather than the organization itself, it tends to cost more and take longer to notice. For a business our size, that kind of cost and client fallout isn't something we could just absorb.

How we prevent it

One of the main points of CISA's guidelines for small and mid-sized organizations on this particular issue is straightforward: even when your own end is tightly secured, an attack on a vendor can still harm your company (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 2023). Good security on our side isn't the whole picture — prevention has to extend outward too.

In Practice: treat every outside login as our own. Be it courier portals, marketplace dashboards, refurbishment tools treat them as our own MIDAS account. Unique password, MFA on, no shared logins before connecting any new vendor tool to our system, run it pass through higher authority; as new integrations need a yes from management team, not just a switch flipped because it's convenient. If a courier or partner ever asks you to skip a step "just this once" — reset a password over email, hand over data outside the usual process — stop and call a known contact number instead of trusting the message. And if something about a partner system feels off, say something early. A five-minute heads-up beats cleaning up a breach later.

We picked our courier, refurbishment, and marketplace partners because they make this business work. That trust still needs caution behind it — because in reverse logistics, the chain only holds up if every link in it does.