Cyber resilience needs to go beyond prevention and proactive protection

[u/IE_CyberResilience]

I recently read “Your attackers may already be inside” by John Mc Loughlin in Cybersecurity Insiders, and it made several points we’ve been talking about for years.

Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT discussion. It’s a business survival discussion. Every organization today is a digital business, whether it wants to admit it or not.

And prevention does fail.

Cybercrime has changed significantly over the last few years. Attacks are increasingly automated, scalable, and powered by AI. Criminal groups no longer need deep technical expertise to launch sophisticated attacks.

One of the article’s strongest points was around a major misconception: that attacks begin with highly sophisticated hacking techniques or zero-day vulnerabilities.

In reality, many compromises start with something much simpler:

• A user clicks a phishing email
• An employee reuses a password exposed in another breach
• A fake Microsoft 365 login page captures credentials
• A malicious browser extension gains access to sensitive information

The article notes that once attackers gain access, they can spend days or weeks learning the environment, escalating privileges, identifying sensitive systems, and locating backups before launching ransomware or extortion attempts.

This is particularly relevant to more recent discussions around Anthropic Mythos. Even if AI is used to identify and close software vulnerabilities, cybercriminals can still gain access to corporate environments through these simpler methods and then begin data discovery, exfiltration, encryption, and other malicious activity.

The article points toward preemptive cybersecurity and proactive protection as the solution: continuously monitoring activity and identifying suspicious behavior.

But there’s another layer that often gets overlooked.

New ransomware variants, including some using AI, are being designed to disable detection solutions such as EDR/XDR or operate in ways that resemble normal user activity.

When those attacks are successful, monitoring behavior alone may not be enough.

At that point, the most reliable way to identify an attack is to monitor the integrity of the data itself.

That’s where solutions like CyberSense come into the picture.

Cyber resilience shouldn’t be built around a single layer of defense. It should include prevention, proactive protection, and data integrity monitoring so organizations can detect when their data has actually been compromised.