Organizational opacity, bad defaults, compliance-driven security, and institutional inertia render your security initiatives less effective than one might hope, and attackers are keenly aware of this. Attackers ship hourly. Defenders hold quarterly reviews. That delta is your breach window.
While you perceive your organization as a collection of security controls, threat actors take a more holistic view and regard the gaps between — as opposed to merely within — the controls as a veritable catalog of opportunities.
Your security information and event management (SIEM) platform dutifully logs every failed login attempt, yet attackers employ valid credentials with the audacity of a most unwanted guest at an exclusive soirée. Your endpoint protection blocks malware with commendable efficiency, but they live off the land with PowerShell. Your network segmentation stops lateral movement, but they pivot through trusted service accounts with remarkable dexterity.
This fundamental mismatch isn’t merely technical in nature and can stem from sluggish or high-friction operational tempos. By the time you’ve identified a gap, documented the risk, and convened five change review sessions with three different teams to deliberate upon what the fix should be (because everyone sees a different slice of your ecosystem due to your siloed operations), attackers have already moved through numerous vulnerabilities unseen. One might say they’ve been quite busy.
Effective security must mirror attacker agility, and this author has it on good authority that such approaches yield the most favorable results. Red-teaming and penetration tests are important but hardly a panacea: Real security continuously challenges assumptions and constantly validates. One must embed attacker-style experimentation directly into daily processes.
Want to hear more? At Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit EMEA 2025, we will have a dedicated security and risk track. In my session, we’ll explore proactive security from the lens of threat actors and how to obtain and utilize a holistic view of the threats and opportunities within your ecosystem — a pressing matter for the discerning security professional.
Attendees can expect to learn how to:
Shift from reactive controls to proactive defense.
Think like an attacker to stop threats before they escalate.
Turn every breach simulation into a faster, stronger response blueprint.
Ensure that your current security program will survive contact with tomorrow’s threats. Join us in London on October 8–10 to build defenses that work when it matters most.
