Harikrishnan Muthukrishnan

expert panel

An attacker who gains access through a stolen credential may quickly move across devices, cloud resources and network systems in search of valuable data or greater control. Each step can generate clues, but when those signals land in separate tools and queues, security teams may struggle to recognize the full attack before the damage spreads.This challenge is becoming harder to tackle as traditional boundaries between users, devices, applications and infrastructure continue to dissolve. NIST’s zero-trust guidance reflects that shift, moving security away from static, network-based perimeters and toward continuous decisions based on users, assets and resources. This same erosion of boundaries is what makes it harder to catch attackers who don’t need to break anything to move around. CISA’s guidance on identifying and mitigating “living off the land” techniques warns that attackers can abuse legitimate, trusted tools and processes to blend in with normal system activity, making isolated alerts harder to interpret without broader context.Yet many organizations still measure security effectiveness largely by how well they detect suspicious activity. Detection remains essential, but alerts alone don’t determine which risks matter most, coordinate action across environments, or help the business continue operating when defenses fail. That requires an approach that connects visibility with timely decisions, enforceable controls and plans for maintaining and restoring critical operations.Moving beyond a detection-centric model means reconsidering how security data, decisions and defenses work together across the enterprise. Below, members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank—with expertise in enterprise cybersecurity strategies, data breach prevention, risk management, threat detection and cybersecurity leadership—explain what a more unified, real-time approach to visibility, control and resilience should look like.

expert panel

A vendor’s data breach doesn’t stay neatly contained within its own systems. Business clients may face exposed information, operational disruptions, regulatory scrutiny and difficult questions from their own stakeholders, even when their networks weren’t directly compromised. Third-party risk management is a growing issue for companies whose customers’ data resides in a growing web of applications and workflows.Once the initial crisis passes, vendors typically issue reassuring statements about investigations, remediation and stronger security. But communications crafted for customers and the media can’t establish whether the conditions that allowed the attack have truly been addressed. Telecommunications and media giant Comcast learned this the hard way in 2024 when a vendor initially said a breach hadn’t impacted Comcast’s customers—only to reverse course more than four months later.For organizations deciding whether to continue trusting a breached provider, the real question isn’t whether the vendor responded quickly or communicated effectively. It’s whether the vendor can demonstrate that it learned from the incident and has taken real, effective steps to reduce the risk of another one. Below, members of the Senior Executive Cybersecurity Think Tank—with expertise in enterprise cybersecurity strategy, data breach prevention and risk management—share what would convince them that a breached vendor will be a safer partner going forward.