Don’t fight the cyber-battle blindfolded

CISOs and security leaders work in a world where the threat landscape is continuously evolving. At the same time, organisations are changing the way they procure, deploy and manage infrastructure. Hybrid is the new normal, budgets are being crunched, and evolving technologies like AI are transforming the way people work.

Ian Farquhar, the Security Chief Technology Officer at Gigamon, says that companies must come up with new ways of thinking about how to best secure our critical systems and data.

“In our Gigamon 2025 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey, 97% of CISOs admit to making compromises to secure their infrastructure. And the same survey found that 55% of organisations were breached this year – an increase from 47% the year before. Clearly, the way we have been doing security needs to change.”

Historically, a significant part of security investment has been focussed on the endpoint and on firewalls. But true defence in depth goes beyond this. There has been a strong focus on logging and using SIEM and other solutions to capture system logs to get a picture of what’s been happening. But that retrospective visibility is not enough says Farquhar.

“We are facing adversaries, and we don't know who they are”, he says. “The network is our bestsource of real time threat intelligence. Deep observability, the ability to see network transactions and understand them, enables us to detect attackers in real-time and expel them before they do damage.”

Attackers are now leveraging AI to execute attacks. Gigamon’s research reveals that 55% of organisations have faced attackers that have used AI. And, in some cases, those attackers are trying to compromise the large language models being used by their targets.

This means we must start by rigorously assessing the visibility of what is happening on the network. With the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency finding that organisations routinely overstate their visibility, it is imperative that CISOs prioritise rigorously assessing visibility of what is happening on the network.

Farquhar’s advice is simple: “Ensure you know what is happening on your network. Because, unless you do, you are entering the cyber battle blindfolded.”