OT & IT Convergence: Defending the Industrial Attack Surface in 2025

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Brent Huston

In 2025, the boundary between IT and operational technology (OT) is more porous than ever. What once were siloed environments are now deeply intertwined—creating new opportunities for efficiency, but also a vastly expanded attack surface. For industrial, manufacturing, energy, and critical infrastructure operators, the stakes are high: disruption in OT is real-world damage, not just data loss.

PLC

This article lays out the problem space, dissecting how adversaries move, where visibility fails, and what defense strategies are maturing in this fraught environment.

The Convergence Imperative — and Its Risks

What Is IT/OT Convergence?

IT/OT convergence is the process of integrating information systems (e.g. ERP, MES, analytics, control dashboards) with OT systems (e.g. SCADA, DCS, PLCs, RTUs). The goal: unify data flows, enable predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, control logic feedback loops, operational analytics, and better asset management.

Yet, as IT and OT merge, their worlds’ assumptions—availability, safety, patch cycles, threat models—collide. OT demands always-on control; IT is optimized for data confidentiality and dynamic architecture. Bridging the two without opening the gates to compromise is the core challenge.

Why 2025 Is Different (and Dangerous)

Attacks are physical now. The 2025 Waterfall Threat Report shows a dramatic rise in attacks with physical consequences—shut-downs, equipment damage, lost output. Waterfall Security Solutions
Ransomware and state actors converge on OT. OT environments are now a primary target for adversaries aiming for disruption, not just data theft. zeronetworks.com+2Industrial Cyber+2
Device proliferation, blind spots. The explosion of IIoT/OT-connected sensors and actuators means incremental exposures mount. Nexus+2IAEE+2
Legacy systems with little guardrails. Many OT systems were never built with security in mind; patching is difficult or impossible. SSH+2Industrial Cyber+2
Stronger regulation and visibility demands. Critical infrastructure sectors face growing pressure—and liability—for cyber resilience. Honeywell+2Fortinet+2
Maturing defenders. Some organizations are already reducing attack frequency through segmentation, threat intelligence, and leadership-driven strategies. Fortinet

Attack Flow: From IT to OT — How the Adversary Moves

Understanding attacker paths is key to defending the convergence.

Initial foothold in IT. Phishing, vulnerabilities, supply chain, remote access are typical vectors.
Lateral movement toward bridging zones. Jump servers, VPNs, misconfigured proxies, flat networks let attackers pivot. Industrial Cyber+2zeronetworks.com+2
Transit through DMZ / industrial demilitarized zones. Poorly controlled conduits allow protocol bridging, data transfer, or command injection. iotsecurityinstitute.com+2Palo Alto Networks+2
Exploit OT protocols and logic. Once in the OT zone, attackers abuse weak or proprietary protocols (Modbus, EtherNet/IP, S7, etc.), manipulate command logic, disable safety interlocks. arXiv+2iotsecurityinstitute.com+2
Physical disruption or sabotage. Alter sensor thresholds, open valves, shut down systems, or destroy equipment.

Because OT environments often have weaker monitoring and fewer detection controls, malicious actions may go unnoticed until damage occurs.

The Visibility & Inventory Gap

You can’t protect what you can’t see.

Publicly exposed OT devices number in the tens of thousands globally—many running legacy firmware with known critical vulnerabilities. arXiv
Some organizations report only minimal visibility into OT activity within central security operations. Nasstar
Legacy or proprietary protocols (e.g. serial, Modbus, nonstandard encodings) resist detection by standard IT tools.
Asset inventories are often stale, manual, or incomplete.
Patch lifecycle data, firmware versions, configuration drift are poorly tracked in OT systems.

Bridging that visibility gap is a precondition for any robust defense in the converged world.

Architectural Controls: Segmentation, Microperimeters & Zero Trust for OT

You must treat OT not as a static, trusted zone but as a layered, zero-trust-aware domain.

1. Zone & Conduit Model

Apply segmentation by functional zones (process control, supervisory, DMZ, enterprise) and use controlled conduits for traffic. This limits blast radius. iotsecurityinstitute.com+2Palo Alto Networks+2

2. Microperimeters & Microsegmentation

Within a zone, restrict east-west traffic. Only permit communications justified by policy and process. Use software-defined controls or enforcement at gateway devices.

3. Zero Trust Principles for OT

Least privilege access: Human, service, and device accounts should only have the rights they need to perform tasks. iotsecurityinstitute.com+1
Continuous verification: Authenticate and revalidate sessions, devices, and commands.
Context-based access: Enforce access based on time, behavior, process state, operational context.
Secure access overlays: Replace jump boxes and VPNs with secure, isolated access conduits that broker access rather than exposing direct paths. Industrial Cyber+1

4. Isolation & Filtering of Protocols

Deep understanding of OT protocols is required to permit or deny specific commands or fields. Use protocol-aware firewalls or DPI (deep packet inspection) for industrial protocols.

5. Redundancy & Fail-Safe Paths

Architect fallback paths and redundancy such that the failure of a security component doesn’t cascade into OT downtime.

Detection & Response in OT Environments

Because OT environments are often low-change, anomaly-based detection is especially valuable.

Anomaly & Behavioral Monitoring

Use models of normal process behavior, network traffic baselines, and device state transitions to detect deviations. This approach catches zero-days and novel attacks that signature tools miss. Nozomi Networks+2zeronetworks.com+2

Protocol-Aware Monitoring

Deep inspection of industrial protocols (Modbus, DNP3, EtherNet/IP, S7) lets you detect invalid or dangerous commands (e.g. disabling PLC logic, spoofing commands).

Hybrid IT/OT SOCs & Playbooks

Forging a unified operations center that spans IT and OT (or tightly coordinates) is vital. Incident playbooks should understand process impact, safe rollback paths, and physical fallback strategies.

Response & Containment

Quarantine zones or devices quickly.
Use “safe shutdown” logic rather than blunt kill switches.
Leverage automated rollback or fail-safe states.
Ensure forensic capture of device commands and logs for post-mortem.

Patch, Maintenance & Change in OT Environments

Patching is thorny in OT—disrupting uptime or control logic can have dire consequences. But ignoring vulnerabilities is not viable either.

Risk-Based Patch Prioritization

Prioritize based on:

Criticality of the device (safety, control, reliability).
Exposure (whether reachable from IT or remote networks).
Known exploitability and threat context.

Scheduled Windows & Safe Rollouts

Use maintenance windows, laboratory testing, staged rollouts, and fallback plans to apply patches in controlled fashion.

Virtual Patching / Compensating Controls

Where direct patching is impractical, employ compensating controls—firewall rules, filtering, command-level controls, or wrappers that mediate traffic.

Vendor Coordination & Secure Updates

Work with vendors for safe update mechanisms, integrity verification, rollback capability, and cryptographic signing of firmware.

Configuration Lockdown & Hardening

Disable unused services, remove default accounts, enforce least privilege controls, and lock down configuration interfaces. Industrial Cyber

Operating in Hybrid Environments: Best Practices & Pitfalls

Journeys, not Big Bangs. Start with a pilot cell or site; mature gradually.
Cross-domain teams. Build integrated IT/OT guardrails teams; train OT engineers with security awareness and IT folk with process sensitivity. iotsecurityinstitute.com+2Secomea+2
Change management & governance. Formal processes must span both domains, with risk acceptance, escalation, and rollback capabilities.
Security debt awareness. Legacy systems will always exist; plan compensating controls, migration paths, or compensating wrappers.
Simulation & digital twins. Use testbeds or digital twins to validate security changes before deployment.
Supply chain & third-party access. Strong control over third-party remote access is essential—no direct device access unless brokered and constrained. Industrial Cyber+2zeronetworks.com+2

Governance, Compliance & Regulatory Alignment

Map your security controls to frameworks such as ISA/IEC 62443, NIST SP 800‑82, and relevant national ICS/OT guidelines. iotsecurityinstitute.com+2Tenable®+2
Develop risk governance that includes process safety, availability, and cybersecurity in tandem.
Align with critical infrastructure regulation (e.g. NIS2 in Europe, SEC cyber rules, local ICS/OT mandates). Honeywell+1
Build executive visibility and metrics (mean time to containment, blast radius, safety impact) to support prioritization.

Roadmap: From Zero → Maturity

Here’s a rough maturation path you might use:

Phase	Focus	Key Activities
Pilot / Awareness	Reduce risk in one zone	Map asset inventory, segment pilot cell, deploy detection sensors
Hardening & Control	Extend structural defenses	Enforce microperimeters, apply least privilege, protocol filtering
Detection & Response	Build visibility & control	Anomaly detection, OT-aware monitoring, SOC integration
Patching & Maintenance	Improve security hygiene	Risk-based patching, vendor collaboration, configuration lockdown
Scale & Governance	Expand and formalize	Extend to all zones, incident playbooks, governance models, metrics, compliance
Continuous Optimization	Adapt & refine	Threat intelligence feedback, lessons learned, iterative improvements

Start small, show value, then scale incrementally—don’t try to boil the ocean in one leap.

Use Case Scenarios

Remote Maintenance Abuse
A vendor’s remote access via a jump host is compromised. The attacker uses that jump host to send commands to PLCs via an unfiltered conduit, shutting down a production line.
Logic Tampering via Protocol Abuse
An attacker intercepts commands over EtherNet/IP and alters setpoints on a pressure sensor—causing shock pressure and damaging equipment before operators notice.
Firmware Exploit on Legacy Device
A field RTU is running firmware with a known remote vulnerability. The attacker exploits that, gains control, and uses it as a pivot point deeper into OT.
Lateral Movement from IT
A phishing campaign generates a foothold on IT. The attacker escalates privileges, accesses the central historian, and from there reaches into OT DMZ and onward.

Each scenario highlights the need for segmentation, detection, and disciplined control at each boundary.

Checklist & Practical Guidance

⚙️ Inventory & visibility: Map all OT/IIoT devices, asset data, communications, and protocols.
🔒 Zone & micro‑segment: Enforce strict controls around process, supervisory, and enterprise connectivity.
✅ Least privilege and zero trust: Limit access to the minimal set of rights, revalidate often.
📡 Protocol filtering: Use deep packet inspection to validate or block unsafe commands.
💡 Anomaly detection: Use behavioral models, baselining, and alerts on deviations.
🛠 Patching strategy: Risk-based prioritization, scheduled windows, fallback planning.
🧷 Hardening & configuration control: Remove unused services, lock down interfaces, enforce secure defaults.
🔀 Incident playbooks: Include safe rollback, forensic capture, containment paths.
👥 Cross-functional teams: Co-locate or synchronize OT, IT, security, operations staff.
📈 Metrics & executive reporting: Use security KPIs contextualized to safety, availability, and damage containment.
🔄 Continuous review & iteration: Ingest lessons learned, threat intelligence, and adapt.
📜 Framework alignment: Use ISA/IEC 62443, NIST 800‑82, or sector-specific guidelines.

Final Thoughts

As of 2025, you can’t treat OT as a passive, hidden domain. The convergence is inevitable—and attackers know it. The good news is that mature defense strategies are emerging: segmentation, zero trust, anomaly-based detection, and governance-focused integration.

The path forward is not about plugging every hole at once. It’s about building layered defenses, prioritizing by criticality, and evolving your posture incrementally. In a world where a successful exploit can physically damage infrastructure or disrupt a grid, the resilience you build today may be your strongest asset tomorrow.

More Info and Assistance

For discussion, more information, or assistance, please contact us. (614) 351-1237 will get us on the phone, and info@microsolved.com will get us via email. Reach out to schedule a no-hassle and no-pressure discussion. Put out 30+ years of OT experience to work for you!

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Cut SOC Noise with an Alert-Quality SLO: A Practical Playbook for Security Teams

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Brent Huston

Security teams don’t burn out because of “too many threats.” They burn out because of too much junk between them and the real threats: noisy detections, vague alerts, fragile rules, and AI that promises magic but ships mayhem.

SOC

Here’s a simple fix that works in the real world: treat alert quality like a reliability objective. Put noise on a hard budget and enforce a ship/rollback gate—exactly like SRE error budgets. We call it an Alert-Quality SLO (AQ-SLO) and it can reclaim 20–40% of analyst time for higher-value work like hunts, tuning, and purple-team exercises.

The Core Idea: Put a Budget on Junk

Alert-Quality SLO (AQ-SLO): set an explicit ceiling for non-actionable alerts per analyst-hour (NAAH). If a new rule/model/AI feed pushes you over budget, it doesn’t ship—or it auto-rolls back.

Think “error budgets,” but applied to SOC signal quality.

Working definitions (plain language)

Non-actionable alert: After triage, it requires no ticket, containment, or tuning request—just closes.
Analyst-hour: One hour of human triage time (any level).
AQ-SLO: Maximum tolerated non-actionables per analyst-hour over a rolling window.

Baselines and Targets (Start Here)

Before you tune, measure. Collect 2–4 weeks of baselines:

Non-actionable rate (NAR) = (Non-actionables / Total alerts) × 100
Non-actionables per analyst-hour (NAAH) = Non-actionables / Analyst-hours
Mean time to triage (MTTT) = Average minutes to disposition (track P90, too)

Initial SLO targets (adjust to your environment):

NAAH ≤ 5.0 (Gold ≤ 3.0, Silver ≤ 5.0, Bronze ≤ 7.0)
NAR ≤ 35% (Gold ≤ 20%, Silver ≤ 35%, Bronze ≤ 45%)
MTTT ≤ 6 min (with P90 ≤ 12 min)

These numbers are intentionally pragmatic: tight enough to curb fatigue, loose enough to avoid false heroics.

Ship/Rollback Gate for Rules & AI

Every new detector—rule, correlation, enrichment, or AI model—must prove itself in shadow mode before it’s allowed to page humans.

Shadow-mode acceptance (7 days recommended):

NAAH ≤ 3.0, or
≥ 30% precision uplift vs. control, and
No regression in P90 MTTT or paging load

Enforcement: If the detector breaches the budget 3 days in 7, auto-disable or revert and capture a short post-mortem. You’re not punishing innovation—you’re defending analyst attention.

Minimum Viable Telemetry (Keep It Simple)

For every alert, capture:

detector_id
created_at
triage_outcome → {actionable | non_actionable}
triage_minutes
root_cause_tag → {tuning_needed, duplicate, asset_misclass, enrichment_gap, model_hallucination, rule_overlap}

Hourly roll-ups to your dashboard:

NAAH, NAR, MTTT (avg & P90)
Top 10 noisiest detectors by non-actionable volume and triage cost

This is enough to run the whole AQ-SLO loop without building a data lake first.

Operating Rhythm (SOC-wide, 45 Minutes/Week)

Noise Review (20 min): Examine the Top 10 noisiest detectors → keep, fix, or kill.
Tuning Queue (15 min): Assign PRs/changes for the 3 biggest contributors; set owners and due dates.
Retro (10 min): Are we inside the budget? If not, apply the rollback rule. No exceptions.

Make it boring, repeatable, and visible. Tie it to team KPIs and vendor SLAs.

What to Measure per Detector/Model

Precision @ triage = actionable / total
NAAH contribution = non-actionables from this detector / analyst-hours
Triage cost = Σ triage_minutes
Kill-switch score = weighted blend of (precision↓, NAAH↑, triage cost↑)

Rank detectors by kill-switch score to drive your weekly agenda.

Formulas You Can Drop into a Sheet

NAAH = NON_ACTIONABLE_COUNT / ANALYST_HOURS

NAR% = (NON_ACTIONABLE_COUNT / TOTAL_ALERTS) * 100

MTTT = AVERAGE(TRIAGE_MINUTES)

MTTT_P90 = PERCENTILE(TRIAGE_MINUTES, 0.9)

ERROR_BUDGET_USED = max(0, (NAAH – SLO_NAAH) / SLO_NAAH)

These translate cleanly into Grafana, Kibana/ELK, BigQuery, or a simple spreadsheet.

Fast Implementation Plan (14 Days)

Day 1–3: Instrument triage outcomes and minutes in your case system. Add the root-cause tags above.

Day 4–10: Run all changes in shadow mode. Publish hourly NAAH/NAR/MTTT to a single dashboard.

Day 11: Freeze SLOs (start with ≤ 5 NAAH, ≤ 35% NAR).

Day 12–14: Turn on auto-rollback for any detector breaching budget.

If your platform supports feature flags, wrap detectors with a kill-switch. If not, document a manual rollback path and make it muscle memory.

SOC-Wide Incentives (Make It Stick)

Team KPI: % of days inside AQ-SLO (target ≥ 90%).
Engineering KPI: Time-to-fix for top noisy detectors (target ≤ 5 business days).
Vendor/Model SLA: Noise clauses—breach of AQ-SLO triggers fee credits or disablement.

This aligns incentives across analysts, engineers, and vendors—and keeps the pager honest.

Why AQ-SLOs Work (In Practice)

Cuts alert fatigue and stabilizes on-call burdens.
Reclaims 20–40% analyst time for hunts, purple-team work, and real incident response.
Turns AI from hype to reliability: shadow-mode proof + rollback by budget makes “AI in the SOC” shippable.
Improves organizational trust: leadership gets clear, comparable metrics for signal quality and human cost.

Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

Chasing zero noise. You’ll starve detection coverage. Use realistic SLOs and iterate.
No root-cause tags. You can’t fix what you can’t name. Keep the tag set small and enforced.
Permissive shadow-mode. If it never ends, it’s not a gate. Time-box it and require uplift.
Skipping rollbacks. If you won’t revert noisy changes, your SLO is a wish, not a control.
Dashboard sprawl. One panel with NAAH, NAR, MTTT, and the Top 10 noisiest detectors is enough.

Policy Addendum (Drop-In Language You Can Adopt Today)

Alert-Quality SLO: The SOC shall maintain non-actionable alerts ≤ 5 per analyst-hour on a 14-day rolling window. New detectors (rules, models, enrichments) must pass a 7-day shadow-mode trial demonstrating NAAH ≤ 3 or ≥ 30% precision uplift with no P90 MTTT regressions. Detectors that breach the SLO on 3 of 7 days shall be disabled or rolled back pending tuning. Weekly noise-review and tuning queues are mandatory, with owners and due dates tracked in the case system.

Tune the numbers to fit your scale and risk tolerance, but keep the mechanics intact.

What This Looks Like in the SOC

An engineer proposes a new AI phishing detector.
It runs in shadow mode for 7 days, with precision measured at triage and NAAH tracked hourly.
It shows a 36% precision uplift vs. the current phishing rule set and no MTTT regression.
It ships behind a feature flag tied to the AQ-SLO budget.
Three days later, a vendor feed change spikes duplicate alerts. The budget breaches.
The feature flag kills the noisy path automatically, a ticket captures the post-mortem, and the tuning PR lands in 48 hours.
Analyst pager load stays stable; hunts continue on schedule.

That’s what operationalized AI looks like when noise is a first-class reliability concern.

Want Help Standing This Up?

MicroSolved has implemented AQ-SLOs and ship/rollback gates in SOCs of all sizes—from credit unions to automotive suppliers—across SIEMs, EDR/XDR, and AI-assisted detection stacks. We can help you:

Baseline your current noise profile (NAAH/NAR/MTTT)
Design your shadow-mode trials and acceptance gates
Build the dashboard and auto-rollback workflow
Align SLAs, KPIs, and vendor contracts to AQ-SLOs
Train your team to run the weekly operating rhythm

Get in touch: Visit microsolved.com/contact or email info@microsolved.com to talk with our team about piloting AQ-SLOs in your environment.

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Quantum Readiness in Cybersecurity: When & How to Prepare

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Brent Huston

“We don’t get a say about when quantum is coming — only how ready we will be when it arrives.”

Why This Matters

While quantum computers powerful enough to break today’s public‑key cryptography do not yet exist (or at least are not known to exist), the cryptographic threat is no longer theoretical. Nations, large enterprises, and research institutions are investing heavily in quantum, and the possibility of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks means that sensitive data captured today could be exposed years down the road.

Standards bodies are already defining post‑quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms. Organizations that fail to build agility and transition roadmaps now risk being left behind — or worse, suffering catastrophic breaches when the quantum era arrives.

To date, many security teams lack a concrete plan or roadmap for quantum readiness. This article outlines a practical, phased approach: what quantum means for cryptography, how standards are evolving, strategies for transition, and pitfalls to avoid.

What Quantum Computing Means for Cryptography

To distill the challenge:

Shor’s algorithm (and related advances) threatens to break widely used asymmetric algorithms — RSA, ECC, discrete logarithm–based schemes — rendering many of our public key systems vulnerable.
Symmetric algorithms (AES, SHA) are more resistant; quantum can only offer a “square‑root” speedup (Grover’s algorithm), so doubling key sizes can mitigate that threat.
The real cryptographic crisis lies in key exchange, digital signatures, certificates, and identity systems that rely on public-key primitives.
Because many business systems, devices, and data have long lifetimes, we must assume some of today’s data, if intercepted, may become decryptable in the future (i.e. the “store now, crack later” model).

In short: quantum changes the assumptions undergirding modern cryptographic infrastructure.

Roadmap: PQC in Standards & Transition Phases

Over recent years, standards organizations have moved from theory to actionable transition planning:

NIST PQC standardization
In August 2024, NIST published the first set of FIPS‑approved PQC algorithms: lattice‑based (e.g. CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium), hash-based signatures, etc. These are intended as drop-in replacements for many public-key roles. Encryption Consulting+3World Economic Forum+3NIST Pages+3
NIST SP 1800‑38 (Migration guidance)
The NCCoE’s “Migration to Post‑Quantum Cryptography” guide (draft) outlines a structured, multi-step migration: inventory, vendor engagement, pilot, validation, transition, deprecation. NCCoE
Crypto‑agility discussion
NIST has released a draft whitepaper “Considerations for Achieving Crypto‑Agility” to encourage flexible architecture designs that allow seamless swapping of cryptographic primitives. AppViewX
Regulatory & sector guidance
In the financial world, the BIS is urging quantum-readiness and structured roadmaps for banks. PostQuantum.com
Meanwhile in health care and IoT, device lifecycles necessitate quantum-ready cryptographic design now. medcrypt.com

Typical projected milestones that many organizations use as heuristics include:

Milestone	Target Year
Inventory & vendor engagement	2025–2027
Pilot / hybrid deployment	2027–2029
Broader production adoption	2030–2032
Deprecation of legacy / full PQC	By 2035 (or earlier in some sectors)

These are not firm deadlines, but they reflect common planning horizons in current guidance documents.

Transition Strategies & Building Crypto Agility

Because migrating cryptography is neither trivial nor instantaneous, your strategy should emphasize flexibility, modularity, and iterative deployment.

Core principles of a good transition:

Decouple cryptographic logic
Design your code, libraries, and systems so that the cryptographic algorithm (or provider) can be replaced without large structural rewrites.
Layered abstraction / adapters
Use cryptographic abstraction layers or interfaces, so that switching from RSA → PQC → hybrid to full PQC is easier.
Support multi‑suite / multi‑algorithm negotiation
Protocols should permit negotiation of algorithm suites (classical, hybrid, PQC) as capabilities evolve.
Vendor and library alignment
Engage vendors early: ensure they support your agility goals, supply chain updates, and PQC readiness (or roadmaps).
Monitor performance & interoperability tradeoffs
PQC algorithms generally have larger key sizes, signature sizes, or overheads. Be ready to benchmark and tune.
Fallback and downgrade-safe methods
In early phases, include fallback to known-good classical algorithms, with strict controls and fallbacks flagged.

In other words: don’t wait to refactor your architecture so that cryptography is a replaceable module.

Hybrid Deployments: The Interim Bridge

During the transition period, hybrid schemes (classical + PQC) will be critical for layered security and incremental adoption.

Hybrid key exchange / signatures
Many protocols propose combining classical and PQC algorithms (e.g. ECDH + Kyber) so that breaking one does not compromise the entire key. arXiv
Dual‑stack deployment
Some servers may advertise both classical and PQC capabilities, negotiating which path to use.
Parallel validation / testing mode
Run PQC in “passive mode” — generate PQC signatures or keys, but don’t yet rely on them — to collect metrics, test for interoperability, and validate correctness.

Hybrid deployments allow early testing and gradual adoption without fully abandoning classical cryptography until PQC maturity and confidence are achieved.

Asset Discovery & Cryptographic Inventory

One of the first and most critical steps is to build a full inventory of cryptographic use in your environment:

Catalog which assets (applications, services, APIs, devices, endpoints) use public-key cryptography (for key exchange, digital signatures, identity, etc.).
Use automated tools or static analysis to detect cryptographic algorithm usage in code, binaries, libraries, embedded firmware, TLS stacks, PKI, hardware security modules.
Identify dependencies and software libraries (open source, vendor libraries) that may embed vulnerable algorithms.
Map data flows, encryption boundaries, and cryptographic trust zones (e.g. cross‑domain, cross‑site, legacy systems).
Assess lifespan: which systems or data are going to persist into the 2030s? Those deserve priority.

The NIST migration guide emphasizes that a cryptographic inventory is foundational and must be revisited as you migrate. NCCoE

Without comprehensive visibility, you risk blind spots or legacy systems that never get upgraded.

Testing & Validation Framework

Transitioning cryptographic schemes is a high-stakes activity. You’ll need a robust framework to test correctness, performance, security, and compatibility.

Key components:

Functional correctness tests
Ensure new PQC signatures, key exchanges, and validations interoperate correctly with clients, servers, APIs, and cross-vendor systems.
Interoperability tests
Test across different library implementations, versions, OS, devices, cryptographic modules (HSMs, TPMs), firmware, etc.
Performance benchmarking
Monitor latency, CPU, memory, and network overhead. Some PQC schemes have larger signatures or keys, so assess impact under load.
Security analysis & fuzzing
Integrate fuzz testing around PQC inputs, edge conditions, degenerate cases, and fallback logic to catch vulnerabilities.
Backwards compatibility / rollback plans
Include “off-ramps” in case PQC adoption causes unanticipated failures, with graceful rollback to classical crypto where safe.
Continuous regression & monitoring
As PQC libraries evolve, maintain regression suites ensuring no backward-compatibility breakage or cryptographic regressions.

You should aim to embed PQC in your CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines early, so that changes are automatically tested and verified.

Barriers, Pitfalls, & Risk Mitigation

No transition is without challenges. Below are common obstacles and how to mitigate them:

Challenge	Pitfall	Mitigation
Performance / overhead	Some PQC algorithms bring large keys, heavy memory or CPU usage	Benchmark early, select PQC suites suited to your use case (e.g. low-latency, embedded), optimize or tune cryptographic libraries
Vendor or ecosystem lag	Lack of PQC support in software, libraries, devices, or firmware	Engage vendors early, request PQC roadmaps, prefer components with modular crypto, sponsor PQC support projects
Interoperability issues	PQC standards are still maturing; multiple implementations may vary	Use hybrid negotiation, test across vendors, maintain fallbacks, participate in interoperability test beds
Supply chain surprises	Upstream components (third-party libraries, devices) embed hard‑coded crypto	Demand transparency, require crypto-agility clauses, vet supplier crypto plans, enforce security requirements
Legacy / embedded systems	Systems cannot be upgraded (e.g. firmware, IoT, industrial devices)	Prioritize replacement or isolation, use compensating controls, segment legacy systems away from critical domains
Budget, skills, and complexity	The costs and human capital required may be significant	Start small, build a phased plan, reuse existing resources, invest in training, enlist external expertise
Incorrect or incomplete inventory	Missing cryptographic dependencies lead to breakout vulnerabilities	Use automated discovery tools, validate by code review and runtime analysis, maintain continuous updates
Overconfidence or “wait and see” mindset	Delay transition until quantum threat is immediate, losing lead time	Educate leadership, model risk of “harvest now, decrypt later,” push incremental wins early

Mitigation strategy is about managing risk over time — you may not jump to full PQC overnight, but you can reduce exposure in controlled steps.

When to Accelerate vs When to Wait

How do you decide whether to push harder or hold off?

Signals to accelerate:

You store or transmit highly sensitive data with long lifetimes (intellectual property, health, financial, national security).
Regulatory, compliance, or sector guidance (e.g. finance, energy) begins demanding or recommending PQC.
Your system has a long development lifecycle (embedded, medical, industrial) — you must bake in agility early.
You have established inventory and architecture foundations, so investment can scale linearly.
Vendor ecosystem is starting to support PQC, making adoption less risky.
You detect a credible quantum threat to your peer organizations or competitors.

Reasons to delay or pace carefully:

PQC implementations or libraries for your use cases are immature or lack hardening.
Performance or resource constraints render PQC impractical today.
Interoperability with external partners or clients (who are not quantum-ready) is a blocking dependency.
Budget or staffing constraints overwhelm other higher-priority security work.
Your data’s retention horizon is short (e.g. ephemeral, ephemeral sessions) and quantum risk is lower.

In most real-world organizations, the optimal path is measured acceleration: begin early but respect engineering and operational constraints.

Suggested Phased Approach (High-Level Roadmap)

Awareness & executive buy-in
Educate leadership on quantum risk, “harvest now, decrypt later,” and the cost of delay.
Inventory & discovery
Build cryptographic asset maps (applications, services, libraries, devices) and identify high-risk systems.
Agility refactoring
Modularize cryptographic logic, build adapter layers, adopt negotiation frameworks.
Vendor engagement & alignment
Query, influence, and iterate vendor support for PQC and crypto‑agility.
Pilot / hybrid deployment
Test PQC in non-critical systems or in hybrid mode, collect metrics, validate interoperability.
Incremental rollout
Expand to more use cases, deprecate classical algorithms gradually, monitor downstream dependencies.
Full transition & decommissioning
Remove legacy vulnerable algorithms, enforce PQC-only policies, archive or destroy old keys.
Sustain & evolve
Monitor PQC algorithm evolution or deprecation, incorporate new variants, update interoperability as standards evolve.

Conclusion & Call to Action

Quantum readiness is no longer a distant, speculative concept — it’s fast becoming an operational requirement for organizations serious about long-term data protection.

But readiness doesn’t mean rushing blindly into PQC. The successful path is incremental, agile, and risk-managed:

Start with visibility and inventory
Build architecture that supports change
Pilot carefully with hybrid strategies
Leverage community and standards
Monitor performance and evolve your approach

If you haven’t already, now is the time to begin — even a year of head start can mean the difference between being proactive versus scrambling under crisis.

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Machine Identity Management: The Overlooked Cyber Risk and What to Do About It

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Brent Huston

The term “identity” in cybersecurity usually summons images of human users: employees, contractors, customers signing in, multi‑factor authentication, password resets. But lurking behind the scenes is another, rapidly expanding domain of identities: non‑human, machine identities. These are the digital credentials, certificates, service accounts, keys, tokens, device identities, secrets, etc., that allow machines, services, devices, and software to authenticate, communicate, and operate securely.

CyberLaptop

Machine identities are often under‑covered, under‑audited—and yet they constitute a growing, sometimes catastrophic attack surface. This post defines what we mean by machine identity, explores why it is risky, surveys real incidents, lays out best practices, tools, and processes, and suggests metrics and a roadmap to help organizations secure their non‑human identities at scale.

What Are Machine Identities

Broadly, a machine identity is any credential, certificate, or secret that a non‑human entity uses to prove its identity and communicate securely. Key components include:

Digital certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
Cryptographic keys
Secrets, tokens, and API keys
Device and workload identities

These identities are used in many roles: securing service‑to‑service communications, granting access to back‑end databases, code signing, device authentication, machine users (e.g. automated scripts), etc.

Why Machine Identities Are Risky

Here are major risk vectors around machine identities:

Proliferation & Sprawl
Shadow Credentials / Poor Visibility
Lifecycle Mismanagement
Misuse or Overprivilege
Credential Theft / Compromise
Operational & Business Risks

Real Incidents and Misuse

Incident	What happened	Root cause / machine identity failure	Impact
Microsoft Teams Outage (Feb 2020)	Microsoft users unable to sign in / use Teams/Office services	An authentication certificate expired.	Several-hour outage for many users; disruption of business communication and collaboration.
Microsoft SharePoint / Outlook / Teams Certificate Outage (2023)	SharePoint / Teams / Outlook service problems	Mis‑assignment / misuse of TLS certificate or other certificate mis‑configuration.	Users experienced interruption; even if the downtime was short, it affected trust and operations.
NVIDIA / LAPSUS$ breach	Code signing certificates stolen in breach	Attackers gained access to private code signing certificates; used them to sign malware.	Malware signed with legitimate certificates; potential for large-scale spread, supply chain trust damage.
GitHub (Dec 2022)	Attack on “machine account” / repositories; code signing certificates stolen or exposed	A compromised personal access token associated with a machine account allowed theft of code signing certificates.	Risk of malicious software, supply chain breach.

Best Practices for Securing Machine Identities

Establish Full Inventory & Ownership
Adopt Lifecycle Management
Least Privilege & Segmentation
Use Secure Vaults / Secret Management Systems
Automation and Policy Enforcement
Monitoring, Auditing, Alerting
Incident Recovery and Revocation Pathways
Integrate with CI/CD / DevOps Pipelines

Tools & Vendor vs In‑House

Requirement	Key Features to Look For	Vendor Solutions	In-House Considerations
Discovery & Inventory	Multi-environment scanning, API key/secret detection	AppViewX, CyberArk, Keyfactor	Manual discovery may miss shadow identities.
Certificate Lifecycle Management	Automated issuance, revocation, monitoring	CLM tools, PKI-as-a-Service	Governance-heavy; skill-intensive.
Secret Management	Vaults, access controls, integration	HashiCorp Vault, cloud secret managers	Requires secure key handling.
Least Privilege / Access Governance	RBAC, minimal permissions, JIT access	IAM platforms, Zero Trust tools	Complex role mapping.
Monitoring & Anomaly Detection	Logging, usage tracking, alerts	SIEM/XDR integrations	False positives, tuning challenges.

Integrating Machine Identity Management with CI/CD / DevOps

Automate identity issuance during deployments.
Scan for embedded secrets and misconfigurations.
Use ephemeral credentials.
Store secrets securely within pipelines.

Monitoring, Alerting, Incident Recovery

Set up expiry alerts, anomaly detection, usage logging.
Define incident playbooks.
Plan for credential compromise and certificate revocation.

Roadmap & Metrics

Suggested Roadmap Phases

Baseline & Discovery
Policy & Ownership
Automate Key Controls
Monitoring & Audit
Resilience & Recovery
Continuous Improvement

Key Metrics To Track

Identity count and classification
Privilege levels and violations
Rotation and expiration timelines
Incidents involving machine credentials
Audit findings and policy compliance

More Info and Help

Need help mapping, securing, and governing your machine identities? MicroSolved has decades of experience helping organizations of all sizes assess and secure non-human identities across complex environments. We offer:

Machine Identity Risk Assessments
Lifecycle and PKI Strategy Development
DevOps and CI/CD Identity Integration
Secrets Management Solutions
Incident Response Planning and Simulations

References

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

The Largest Benefit of the vCISO Program for Clients

Posted on September 3, 2025 by Brent Huston

If you’ve been around information security long enough, you’ve seen it all — the compliance-driven checkboxes, the fire drills, the budget battles, the “next-gen” tools that rarely live up to the hype. But after decades of leading MSI’s vCISO team and working with organizations of all sizes, I’ve come to believe that the single largest benefit of a vCISO program isn’t tactical — it’s transformational.

It’s the knowledge transfer.

Not just “advice.” Not just reports. I mean a deep, sustained process of transferring mental models, systems thinking, and tools that help an organization develop real, operational security maturity. It’s a kind of mentorship-meets-strategy hybrid that you don’t get from a traditional full-time CISO hire, a compliance auditor, or a MSSP dashboard.

And when it’s done right, it changes everything.

From Dependency to Empowerment

When our vCISO team engages with a client, the initial goal isn’t to “run security” for them. It’s to build their internal capability to do so — confidently, independently, and competently.

We teach teams the core systems and frameworks that drive risk-based decision making. We walk them through real scenarios, in real environments, explaining not just what we do — but why we do it. We encourage open discussion, transparency, and thought leadership at every level of the org chart.

Once a team starts to internalize these models, you can see the shift:

They begin to ask more strategic questions.
They optimize their existing tools instead of chasing shiny objects.
They stop firefighting and start engineering.
They take pride in proactive improvement instead of waiting for someone to hand them a policy update.

The end result? A more secure enterprise, a more satisfied team, and a deeply empowered culture.

ChatGPT Image Sep 3 2025 at 03 06 40 PM

It’s Not About Clock Hours — It’s About Momentum

One of the most common misconceptions we encounter is that a CISO needs to be in the building full-time, every day, running the show.

But reality doesn’t support that.

Most of the critical security work — from threat modeling to policy alignment to risk scoring — happens asynchronously. You don’t need 40 hours a week of executive time to drive outcomes. You need strategic alignment, access to expertise, and a roadmap that evolves with your organization.

In fact, many of our most successful clients get a few hours of contact each month, supported by a continuous async collaboration model. Emergencies are rare — and when they do happen, they’re manageable precisely because the organization is ready.

Choosing the Right vCISO Partner

If you’re considering a vCISO engagement, ask your team this:
Would you like to grow your confidence, your capabilities, and your maturity — not just patch problems?

Then ask potential vCISO providers:

What’s your core mission?
How do you teach, mentor, and build internal expertise?
What systems and models do you use across organizations?

Be cautious of providers who over-personalize (“every org is unique”) without showing clear methodology. Yes, every organization is different — but your vCISO should have repeatable, proven systems that flex to your needs. Likewise, beware of vCISO programs tied to VAR sales or specific product vendors. That’s not strategy — it’s sales.

Your vCISO should be vendor-agnostic, methodology-driven, and above all, focused on growing your organization’s capability — not harvesting your budget.

A Better Future for InfoSec Teams

What makes me most proud after all these years in the space isn’t the audits passed or tools deployed — it’s the teams we’ve helped become great. Teams who went from reactive to strategic, from burned out to curious. Teams who now mentor others.

Because when infosec becomes less about stress and more about exploration, creativity follows. Culture follows. And the whole organization benefits.

And that’s what a vCISO program done right is really all about.

* The included images are AI-generated.

CISO AI Board Briefing Kit: Governance, Policy & Risk Templates

Posted on July 31, 2025 by Brent Huston

Imagine the boardroom silence when the CISO begins: “Generative AI isn’t a futuristic luxury—it’s here, reshaping how we operate today.” The questions start: What is our AI exposure? Where are the risks? Can our policies keep pace? Today’s CISO must turn generative AI from something magical and theoretical into a grounded, business-relevant reality. That urgency is real—and tangible. The board needs clarity on AI’s ecosystem, real-world use cases, measurable opportunities, and framed risks. This briefing kit gives you the structure and language to lead that conversation.

Problem: Board Awareness + Risk Accountability

Most boards today are curious but dangerously uninformed about AI. Their mental models of the technology lag far behind reality. Much like the Internet or the printing press, AI is already driving shifts across operations, cybersecurity, and competitive strategy. Yet many leaders still dismiss it as a “staff automation tool” rather than a transformational force.

Without a structured briefing, boards may treat AI as an IT issue, not a C-suite strategic shift with existential implications. They underestimate the speed of change, the impact of bias or hallucination, and the reputational, legal, or competitive dangers of unmanaged deployment. The CISO must reframe AI as both a business opportunity and a pervasive risk domain—requiring board-level accountability. That means shifting the picture from vague hype to clear governance frameworks, measurable policy, and repeatable audit and reporting disciplines.

Boards deserve clarity about benefits like automation in logistics, risk analysis, finance, and security—which promise efficiency, velocity, and competitive advantage. But they also need visibility into AI-specific hazards like data leakage, bias, model misuse, and QA drift. This kit shows CISOs how to bring structure, vocabulary, and accountability into the conversation.

Framework: Governance Components

1. Risk & Opportunity Matrix

Frame generative AI in a two-axis matrix: Business Value vs Risk Exposure.

Opportunities:

Process optimization & automation: AI streamlines repetitive tasks in logistics, finance, risk modeling, scheduling, or security monitoring.
Augmented intelligence: Enhancing human expertise—e.g. helping analysts faster triage security events or fraud indicators.
Competitive differentiation: Early adopters gain speed, insight, and efficiency that laggards cannot match.

Risks:

Data leakage & privacy: Exposing sensitive information through prompts or model inference.
Model bias & fairness issues: Misrepresentation or skewed outcomes due to historical bias.
Model drift, hallucination & QA gaps: Over- or under-tuned models giving unreliable outputs.
Misuse or model sprawl: Unsupervised use of public LLMs leading to inconsistent behaviour.

Balanced, slow-trust adoption helps tip the risk-value calculus in your favor.

2. Policy Templates

Provide modular templates that frame AI like a “human agent in training,” not just software. Key policy areas:

Prompt Use & Approval: Define who can prompt models, in what contexts, and what approval workflow is needed.
Data Governance & Retention: Rules around what data is ingested or output by models.
Vendor & Model Evaluation: Due diligence criteria for third-party AI vendors.
Guardrails & Safety Boundaries: Use-case tiers (low-risk to high-risk) with corresponding controls.
Retraining & Feedback Loops: Establish schedule and criteria for retraining or tuning.

These templates ground policy in trusted business routines—reviews, approvals, credentialing, audits.

3. Training & Audit Plans

Reframe training as culture and competence building:

AI Literacy Module: Explain how generative AI works, its strengths/limitations, typical failure modes.
Role-based Training: Tailored for analysts, risk teams, legal, HR.
Governance Committee Workshops: Periodic sessions for ethics committee, legal, compliance, and senior leaders.

Audit cadence:

Ongoing Monitoring: Spot-checks, drift testing, bias metrics.
Trigger-based Audits: Post-upgrade, vendor shift, or use-case change.
Annual Governance Review: Executive audit of policy adherence, incidents, training, and model performance.

Audit AI like human-based systems—check habits, ensure compliance, adjust for drift.

4. Monitoring & Reporting Metrics

Technical Metrics:

Model performance: Accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score.
Bias & fairness: Disparate impact ratio, fairness score.
Interpretability: Explainability score, audit trail completeness.
Security & privacy: Privacy incidents, unauthorized access events, time to resolution.

Governance Metrics:

Audit frequency: % of AI deployments audited.
Policy compliance: % of use-cases under approved policy.
Training participation: % of staff trained, role-based completion rates.

Strategic Metrics:

Usage adoption: Active users or teams using AI.
Business impact: Time saved, cost reduction, productivity gains.
Compliance incidents: Escalations, regulatory findings.
Risk exposure change: High-risk projects remediated.

Boards need 5–7 KPIs on dashboards that give visibility without overload.

Implementation: Briefing Plan

Slide Deck Flow

Title & Hook: “AI Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.”
Risk-Opportunity Matrix: Visual quadrant.
Use-Cases & Value: Case studies.
Top Risks & Incidents: Real-world examples.
Governance Framework: Your structure.
Policy Templates: Categories and value.
Training & Audit Plan: Timeline & roles.
Monitoring Dashboard: Your KPIs.
Next Steps: Approvals, pilot runway, ethics charter.

Talking Points & Backup Slides

Bullet prompts: QA audits, detection sample, remediation flow.
Backup slides: Model metrics, template excerpts, walkthroughs.

Q&A and Scenario Planning

Prep for board Qs:

Verifying output accuracy.
Legal exposure.
Misuse response plan.

Scenario A: Prompt exposes data. Show containment, audit, retraining.
Scenario B: Drift causes bad analytics. Show detection, rollback, adjustment.

When your board walks out, they won’t be AI experts. But they’ll be AI literate. And they’ll know your organization is moving forward with eyes wide open.

More Info and Assistance

At MicroSolved, we have been helping educate boards and leadership on cutting-edge technology issues for over 25 years. Put our expertise to work for you by simply reaching out to launch a discussion on AI, business use cases, information security issues, or other related topics. You can reach us at +1.614.351.1237 or info@microsolved.com.

We look forward to hearing from you!

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Continuous Third‑Party Risk: From SBOM Pipelines to SLA Enforcement

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Brent Huston

Recent supply chain disasters—SolarWinds and MOVEit—serve as stark wake-up calls. These breaches didn’t originate inside corporate firewalls; they started upstream, where vendors and suppliers held the keys. SolarWinds’ Orion compromise slipped unseen through trusted vendor updates. MOVEit’s managed file transfer software opened an attack gateway to major organizations. These incidents underscore one truth: modern supply chains are porous, complex ecosystems. Traditional vendor audits, conducted quarterly or annually, are woefully inadequate. The moment a vendor’s environment shifts, your security posture does too—out of sync with your risk model. What’s needed isn’t another checkbox audit; it’s a system that continuously ingests, analyzes, and acts on real-world risk signals—before third parties become your weakest link.

ThirdPartyRiskCoin

The Danger of Static Assessments

For decades, third-party risk management (TPRM) relied on periodic rites: contracts, questionnaires, audits. But those snapshots fail to capture evolving realities. A vendor may pass a SOC 2 review in January—then fall behind on patching in February, or suffer a credential leak in March. These static assessments leave blind spots between review windows.

Point-in-time audits also breed complacency. When a questionnaire is checked, it’s filed; no one revisits until the next cycle. During that gap, new vulnerabilities emerge, dependencies shift, and threats exploit outdated components. As noted by AuditBoard, effective programs must “structure continuous monitoring activities based on risk level”—not by arbitrary schedule AuditBoard.

Meanwhile, new vulnerabilities in vendor software may remain undetected for months, and breaches rarely align with compliance windows. In contrast, continuous third-party risk monitoring captures risk in motion—integrating dynamic SBOM scans, telemetry-based vendor hygiene signals, and SLA analytics. The result? A live risk view that’s as current as the threat landscape itself.

Framework: Continuous Risk Pipeline

Building a continuous risk pipeline demands a multi-pronged approach designed to ingest, correlate, alert—and ultimately enforce.

A. SBOM Integration: Scanning Vendor Releases

Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) are no longer optional—they’re essential. By ingesting vendor SBOMs (in SPDX or CycloneDX format), you gain deep insight into every third-party and open-source component. Platforms like BlueVoyant’s Supply Chain Defense now automatically solicit SBOMs from vendors, parse component lists, and cross-reference live vulnerability databases arXiv+6BlueVoyant+6BlueVoyant+6.

Continuous SBOM analysis allows you to:

Detect newly disclosed vulnerabilities (including zero-days) in embedded components
Enforce patch policies by alerting downstream, dependent teams
Document compliance with SBOM mandates like EO 14028, NIS2, DORAriskrecon.com+8BlueVoyant+8Panorays+8AuditBoard

Academic studies highlight both the power and challenges of SBOMs: they dramatically improve visibility and risk prioritization, though accuracy depends on tooling and trust mechanisms BlueVoyant+3arXiv+3arXiv+3.

By integrating SBOM scanning into CI/CD pipelines and TPRM platforms, you gain near-instant risk metrics tied to vendor releases—no manual sharing or delays.

B. Telemetry & Vendor Hygiene Ratings

SBOM gives you what’s there—telemetry tells you what’s happening. Vendors exhibit patterns: patching behavior, certificate rotation, service uptime, internet configuration. SecurityScorecard, Bitsight, and RiskRecon continuously track hundreds of external signals—open ports, cert lifecycles, leaked credentials, dark-web activity—to generate objective hygiene scores arXiv+7Bitsight+7BlueVoyant+7.

By feeding these scores into your TPRM workflow, you can:

Rank vendors by real-time risk posture
Trigger assessments or alerts when hygiene drops beyond set thresholds
Compare cohorts of vendors to prioritize remediation

Third-party risk intelligence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. As CyberSaint’s blog explains: “True TPRI gives you dynamic, contextualized insight into which third parties matter most, why they’re risky, and how that risk evolves”BlueVoyant+3cybersaint.io+3AuditBoard+3.

C. Contract & SLA Enforcement: Automated Triggers

Contracts and SLAs are the foundation—but obsolete if not digitally enforced. What if your systems could trigger compliance actions automatically?

Contract clauses tied to SBOM disclosure frequency, patch cycles, or signal scores
Automated notices when vendor security ratings dip or new vulnerabilities appear
Escalation workflows for missing SBOMs, low hygiene ratings, or SLA breaches

Venminder and ProcessUnity offer SLA management modules that integrate risk signals and automate vendor notifications Reflectiz+1Bitsight+1. By codifying SLA-negotiated penalties (e.g., credits, remediation timelines) you gain leverage—backed by data, not inference.

For maximum effect, integrate enforcement into GRC platforms: low scores trigger risk team involvement, legal drafts automatic reminders, remediation status migrates into the vendor dossier.

D. Dashboarding & Alerts: Risk Thresholds

Data is meaningless unless visualized and actioned. Create dashboards that blend:

SBOM vulnerability counts by vendor/product
Vendor hygiene ratings, benchmarks, changes over time
Contract compliance indicators: SBOM delivered on time? SLAs met?
Incident and breach telemetry

Thresholds define risk states. Alerts trigger when:

New CVEs appear in vendor code
Hygiene scores fall sharply
Contracts are breached

Platforms like Mitratech and SecurityScorecard centralize these signals into unified risk registers—complete with automated playbooks SecurityScorecardMitratech. This transforms raw alerts into structured workflows.

Dashboards should display:

Risk heatmaps by vendor tier
Active incidents and required follow-ups
Age of SBOMs, patch status, and SLAs by vendor

Visual indicators let risk owners triage immediately—before an alert turns into a breach.

Implementation: Build the Dialogue

How do you go from theory to practice? It starts with collaboration—and automation.

Tool Setup

Begin by integrating SBOM ingestion and vulnerability scanning into your TPRM toolchain. Work with vendors to include SBOMs in release pipelines. Next, onboard security-rating providers—SecurityScorecard, Bitsight, etc.—via APIs. Map contract clauses to data feeds: SBOM frequency, patch turnaround, rating thresholds.

Finally, build workflows:

Data ingestion: SBOMs, telemetry scores, breach signals
Risk correlation: combine signals per vendor
Automated triage: alerts route to risk teams when threshold is breached
Enforcement: contract notifications, vendor outreach, escalations

Alert Triage Flows

A vendor’s hygiene score drops by 20%? Here’s the flow:

Automated alert flags vendor; dashboard marks “at-risk.”
Risk team reviews dashboard, finds increase in certificate expiry and open ports.
Triage call with Vendor Ops; request remediation plan with 48-hour resolution SLA.
Log call and remediation deadline in GRC.
If unresolved by SLA cutoff, escalate to legal and trigger contract clause (e.g., discount, audit provisioning).

For vulnerabilities in SBOM components:

New CVE appears in vendor’s latest SBOM.
Automated notification to vendor, requesting patch timeline.
Pass SBOM and remediation deadline into tracking system.
Once patch is delivered, scan again and confirm resolution.

By automating as much of this as possible, you dramatically shorten mean time to response—and remove manual bottlenecks.

Breach Coordination Playbooks

If a vendor breach occurs:

Risk platform alerts detection (e.g., breach flagged by telemetry provider).
Initiate incident coordination: vendor-led investigation, containment, ATO review.
Use standard playbooks: vendor notification, internal stakeholder actions, regulatory reporting triggers.
Continually update incident dashboard; sunset workflow after resolution and post-mortem.

This coordination layer ensures your response is structured and auditable—and leverages continuous signals for early detection.

Organizational Dialogue

Success requires cross-functional communication:

Procurement must include SLA clauses and SBOM requirements
DevSecOps must connect build pipelines and SBOM generation
Legal must codify enforcement actions
Security ops must monitor alerts and lead triage
Vendors must deliver SBOMs, respond to issues, and align with patch SLAs

Continuous risk pipelines thrive when everyone knows their role—and tools reflect it.

Examples & Use Cases

Illustrative Story: A SaaS vendor pushes out a feature update. Their new SBOM reveals a critical library with an unfixed CVE. Automatically, your TPRM pipeline flags the issue, notifies the vendor, and begins SLA-tracked remediation. Within hours, a patch is released, scanned, and approved—preventing a potential breach. That same vendor’s weak TLS config had dropped their security rating; triage triggered remediation before attackers could exploit. With continuous signals and automation baked into the fabric of your TPRM process, you shift from reactive firefighting to proactive defense.

Conclusion

Static audits and old-school vendor scoring simply won’t cut it anymore. Breaches like SolarWinds and MOVEit expose the fractures in point-in-time controls. To protect enterprise ecosystems today, organizations need pipelines that continuously intake SBOMs, telemetry, contract compliance, and breach data—while automating triage, enforcement, and incident orchestration.

The path isn’t easy, but it’s clear: implement SBOM scanning, integrate hygiene telemetry, codify enforcement via SLAs, and visualize risk in real time. When culture, technology, and contracts are aligned, what was once a blind spot becomes a hardened perimeter. In supply chain defense, constant vigilance isn’t optional—it’s mandatory.

More Info, Help, and Questions

MicroSolved is standing by to discuss vendor risk management, automation of security processes, and bleeding-edge security solutions with your team. Simply give us a call at +1.614.351.1237 or drop us a line at info@microsolved.com to leverage our 32+ years of experience for your benefit.

The Zero Trust Scorecard: Tracking Culture, Compliance & KPIs

Posted on July 16, 2025 by Brent Huston

The Plateau: A CISO’s Zero Trust Dilemma

I met with a CISO last month who was stuck halfway up the Zero Trust mountain. Their team had invested in microsegmentation, MFA was everywhere, and cloud entitlements were tightened to the bone. Yet, adoption was stalling. Phishing clicks still happened. Developers were bypassing controls to “get things done.” And the board wanted proof their multi-million-dollar program was working.

This is the Zero Trust Plateau. Many organizations hit it. Deploying technologies is only the first leg of the journey. Sustaining Zero Trust requires cultural change, ongoing measurement, and the ability to course-correct quickly. Otherwise, you end up with a static architecture instead of a dynamic security posture.

This is where the Zero Trust Scorecard comes in.

ZeroTrustScorecard

Why Metrics Change the Game

Zero Trust isn’t a product. It’s a philosophy—and like any philosophy, its success depends on how people internalize and practice it over time. The challenge is that most organizations treat Zero Trust as a deployment project, not a continuous process.

Here’s what usually happens:

Post-deployment neglect – Once tools are live, metrics vanish. Nobody tracks if users adopt new patterns or if controls are working as intended.
Cultural resistance – Teams find workarounds. Admins disable controls in dev environments. Business units complain that “security is slowing us down.”
Invisible drift – Cloud configurations mutate. Entitlements creep back in. Suddenly, your Zero Trust posture isn’t so zero anymore.

This isn’t about buying more dashboards. It’s about designing a feedback loop that measures technical effectiveness, cultural adoption, and compliance drift—so you can see where to tune and improve. That’s the promise of the Scorecard.

The Zero Trust Scorecard Framework

A good Zero Trust Scorecard balances three domains:

Cultural KPIs
Technical KPIs
Compliance KPIs

Let’s break them down.

🧠 Cultural KPIs: Measuring Adoption and Resistance

Stakeholder Adoption Rates
Track how quickly and completely different business units adopt Zero Trust practices. For example:
- % of developers using secure APIs instead of legacy connections.
- % of employees logging in via SSO/MFA.
Training Completion & Engagement
Zero Trust requires a mindset shift. Measure:
- Security training completion rates (mandatory and voluntary).
- Behavioral change: number of reported phishing emails per user.
Phishing Resistance
Run regular phishing simulations. Watch for:
- % of users clicking on simulated phishing emails.
- Time to report suspicious messages.

Culture is the leading indicator. If people aren’t on board, your tech KPIs won’t matter for long.

⚙️ Technical KPIs: Verifying Your Architecture Works

Authentication Success Rates
Monitor login success/failure patterns:
- Are MFA denials increasing because of misconfiguration?
- Are users attempting legacy protocols (e.g., NTLM, basic auth)?
Lateral Movement Detection
Test whether microsegmentation and identity controls block lateral movement:
- % of simulated attacker movement attempts blocked.
- Number of policy violations detected in network flows.
Device Posture Compliance
Check device health before granting access:
- % of devices meeting patching and configuration baselines.
- Remediation times for out-of-compliance devices.

These KPIs help answer: “Are our controls operating as designed?”

📜 Compliance KPIs: Staying Aligned and Audit-Ready

Audit Pass Rates
Track the % of internal and external audits passed without exceptions.
Cloud Posture Drift
Use tools like CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) to measure:
- Number of critical misconfigurations over time.
- Mean time to remediate drift.
Policy Exception Requests
Monitor requests for policy exceptions. A high rate could signal usability issues or cultural resistance.

Compliance metrics keep regulators and leadership confident that Zero Trust isn’t just a slogan.

Building Your Zero Trust Scorecard

So how do you actually build and operationalize this?

🎯 1. Define Goals and Data Sources

Start with clear objectives for each domain:

Cultural: “Reduce phishing click rate by 50% in 6 months.”
Technical: “Block 90% of lateral movement attempts in purple team exercises.”
Compliance: “Achieve zero critical cloud misconfigurations within 90 days.”

Identify data sources: SIEM, identity providers (Okta, Azure AD), endpoint managers (Intune, JAMF), and security awareness platforms.

📊 2. Set Up Dashboards with Examples

Create dashboards that are consumable by non-technical audiences:

For executives: High-level trends—“Are we moving in the right direction?”
For security teams: Granular data—failed authentications, policy violations, device compliance.

Example Dashboard Widgets:

% of devices compliant with Zero Trust posture.
Phishing click rates by department.
Audit exceptions over time.

Visuals matter. Use red/yellow/green indicators to show where attention is needed.

📅 3. Establish Cadence and Communication

A Scorecard is useless if nobody sees it. Embed it into your organizational rhythm:

Weekly: Security team reviews technical KPIs.
Monthly: Present Scorecard to business unit leads.
Quarterly: Share executive summary with the board.

Use these touchpoints to celebrate wins, address resistance, and prioritize remediation.

Why It Works

Zero Trust isn’t static. Threats evolve, and so do people. The Scorecard gives you a living view of your Zero Trust program—cultural, technical, and compliance health in one place.

It keeps you from becoming the CISO stuck halfway up the mountain.

Because in Zero Trust, there’s no summit. Only the climb.

Questions and Getting Help

Want to discuss ways to progress and overcome the plateau? Need help with planning, building, managing, or monitoring Zero Trust environments?

Just reach out to MicroSolved for a no-hassle, no-pressure discussion of your needs and our capabilities.

Phone: +1.614.351.1237 or Email: info@microsolved.com

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Evolving the Front Lines: A Modern Blueprint for API Threat Detection and Response

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Brent Huston

As APIs now power over half of global internet traffic, they have become prime real estate for cyberattacks. While their agility and integration potential fuel innovation, they also multiply exposure points for malicious actors. It’s no surprise that API abuse ranks high in the OWASP threat landscape. Yet, in many environments, API security remains immature, fragmented, or overly reactive. Drawing from the latest research and implementation playbooks, this post explores a comprehensive and modernized approach to API threat detection and response, rooted in pragmatic security engineering and continuous evolution.

APIMonitoring

The Blind Spots We Keep Missing

Even among security-mature organizations, API environments often suffer from critical blind spots:

Shadow APIs – These are endpoints deployed outside formal pipelines, such as by development teams working on rapid prototypes or internal tools. They escape traditional discovery mechanisms and logging, leaving attackers with forgotten doors to exploit. In one real-world breach, an old version of an authentication API exposed sensitive user details because it wasn’t removed after a system upgrade.
No Continuous Discovery – As DevOps speeds up release cycles, static API inventories quickly become obsolete. Without tools that automatically discover new or modified endpoints, organizations can’t monitor what they don’t know exists.
Lack of Behavioral Analysis – Many organizations still rely on traditional signature-based detection, which misses sophisticated threats like “low and slow” enumeration attacks. These involve attackers making small, seemingly benign requests over long periods to map the API’s structure.
Token Reuse & Abuse – Tokens used across multiple devices or geographic regions can indicate session hijacking or replay attacks. Without logging and correlating token usage, these patterns remain invisible.
Rate Limit Workarounds – Attackers often use distributed networks or timed intervals to fly under static rate-limiting thresholds. API scraping bots, for example, simulate human interaction rates to avoid detection.

Defenders: You’re Sitting on Untapped Gold

For many defenders, SIEM and XDR platforms are underutilized in the API realm. Yet these platforms offer enormous untapped potential:

Cross-Surface Correlation – An authentication anomaly in API traffic could correlate with malware detection on a related endpoint. For instance, failed logins followed by a token request and an unusual download from a user’s laptop might reveal a compromised account used for exfiltration.
Token Lifecycle Analytics – By tracking token issuance, usage frequency, IP variance, and expiry patterns, defenders can identify misuse, such as tokens repeatedly used seconds before expiration or from IPs in different countries.
Behavioral Baselines – A typical user might access the API twice daily from the same IP. When that pattern changes—say, 100 requests from 5 IPs overnight—it’s a strong anomaly signal.
Anomaly-Driven Alerting – Instead of relying only on known indicators of compromise, defenders can leverage behavioral models to identify new threats. A sudden surge in API calls at 3 AM may not break thresholds but should trigger alerts when contextualized.

Build the Foundation Before You Scale

Start simple, but start smart:

1. Inventory Everything – Use API gateways, WAF logs, and network taps to discover both documented and shadow APIs. Automate this discovery to keep pace with change.
2. Log the Essentials – Capture detailed logs including timestamps, methods, endpoints, source IPs, tokens, user agents, and status codes. Ensure these are parsed and structured for analytics.
3. Integrate with SIEM/XDR – Normalize API logs into your central platforms. Begin with the API gateway, then extend to application and infrastructure levels.

Then evolve:

Deploy rule-based detections for common attack patterns like:

Failed Logins: 10+ 401s from a single IP within 5 minutes.
Enumeration: 50+ 404s or unique endpoint requests from one source.
Token Sharing: Same token used by multiple user agents or IPs.
Rate Abuse: More than 100 requests per minute by a non-service account.

Enrich logs with context—geo-IP mapping, threat intel indicators, user identity data—to reduce false positives and prioritize incidents.

Add anomaly detection tools that learn normal patterns and alert on deviations, such as late-night admin access or unusual API method usage.

The Automation Opportunity

API defense demands speed. Automation isn’t a luxury—it’s survival:

Rate Limiting Enforcement that adapts dynamically. For example, if a new user triggers excessive token refreshes in a short window, their limit can be temporarily reduced without affecting other users.
Token Revocation that is triggered when a token is seen accessing multiple endpoints from different countries within a short timeframe.
Alert Enrichment & Routing that generates incident tickets with user context, session data, and recent activity timelines automatically appended.
IP Blocking or Throttling activated instantly when behaviors match known scraping or SSRF patterns, such as access to internal metadata IPs.

And in the near future, we’ll see predictive detection, where machine learning models identify suspicious behavior even before it crosses thresholds, enabling preemptive mitigation actions.

When an incident hits, a mature API response process looks like this:

Detection – Alerts trigger via correlation rules (e.g., multiple failed logins followed by a success) or anomaly engines flagging strange behavior (e.g., sudden geographic shift).
Containment – Block malicious IPs, disable compromised tokens, throttle affected endpoints, and engage emergency rate limits. Example: If a developer token is hijacked and starts mass-exporting data, it can be instantly revoked while the associated endpoints are rate-limited.
Investigation – Correlate API logs with endpoint and network data. Identify the initial compromise vector, such as an exposed endpoint or insecure token handling in a mobile app.
Recovery – Patch vulnerabilities, rotate secrets, and revalidate service integrity. Validate logs and backups for signs of tampering.
Post-Mortem – Review gaps, update detection rules, run simulations based on attack patterns, and refine playbooks. For example, create a new rule to flag token use from IPs with past abuse history.

Metrics That Matter

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Monitor these key metrics:

Authentication Failure Rate – Surges can highlight brute force attempts or credential stuffing.
Rate Limit Violations – How often thresholds are exceeded can point to scraping or misconfigured clients.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) – Benchmark how quickly threats are identified and mitigated.
Token Misuse Frequency – Number of sessions showing token reuse anomalies.
API Detection Rule Coverage – Track how many OWASP API Top 10 threats are actively monitored.
False Positive Rate – High rates may degrade trust and response quality.
Availability During Incidents – Measure uptime impact of security responses.
Rule Tuning Post-Incident – How often detection logic is improved following incidents.

Final Word: The Threat is Evolving—So Must We

The state of API security is rapidly shifting. Attackers aren’t waiting. Neither can we. By investing in foundational visibility, behavioral intelligence, and response automation, organizations can reclaim the upper hand.

It’s not just about plugging holes—it’s about anticipating them. With the right strategy, tools, and mindset, defenders can stay ahead of the curve and turn their API infrastructure from a liability into a defensive asset.

Let this be your call to action.

More Info and Assistance by Leveraging MicroSolved’s Expertise

Call us (+1.614.351.1237) or drop us a line (info@microsolved.com) for a no-hassle discussion of these best practices, implementation or optimization help, or an assessment of your current capabilities. We look forward to putting our decades of experience to work for you!

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Core Components of API Zero Trust

Posted on June 19, 2025 by Brent Huston

APIs are the lifeblood of modern applications—bridging systems, services, and data. However, each endpoint is also a potential gateway for attackers. Adopting Zero Trust for APIs isn’t optional anymore—it’s foundational.

Never Trust, Always Verify

An identity-first security model ensures access decisions are grounded in context—user identity, device posture, request parameters—not just network or IP location.

1. Authentication & Authorization with Short‑Lived Tokens (JWT)

Short-lived lifetimes reduce risk from stolen credentials.
Secure storage in HTTP-only cookies or platform keychains prevents theft.
Minimal claims with strong signing (e.g., RS256), avoiding sensitive payloads.
Revocation mechanisms—like split tokens and revocation lists—ensure compromised tokens can be quickly disabled.

Separating authentication (identity verification) from authorization (access rights) allows us to verify continuously, aligned with Zero Trust’s principle of contextual trust.

2. Micro‑Perimeter Segmentation at the API Path Level

Fine-grained control per API method and version defines boundaries exactly.
Scoped RBAC, tied to token claims, restricts access to only what’s necessary.
Least-privilege policies enforced uniformly across endpoints curtail lateral threat movement.

This compartmentalizes risk, limiting potential breaches to discrete pathways.

3. WAF + Identity-Aware API Policies

Identity-integrated WAF/Gateway performs deep decoding of OAuth₂ or JWT claims.
Identity-based filtering adjusts rules dynamically based on token context.
Per-identity rate limiting stops abuse regardless of request origin.
Behavioral analytics & anomaly detection add a layer of intent-based defense.

By making identity the perimeter, your WAF transforms into a precision tool for API security.

Bringing It All Together

Layer	Role
JWT Tokens	Short-lived, context-rich identities
API Segmentation	Scoped access at the endpoint level
Identity-Aware WAF	Enforces policies, quotas, and behavior

️ Final Thoughts

Identity-centric authentication—keep tokens lean, revocable, and well-guarded.
Micro-segmentation—apply least privilege rigorously, endpoint by endpoint.
Intelligent WAFs—fusing identity awareness with adaptive defenses.

The result? A dynamic, robust API environment where every access request is measured, verified, and intentionally granted—or denied.

Brent Huston is a cybersecurity strategist focused on applying Zero Trust in real-world environments. Connect with him at stateofsecurity.com and notquiterandom.com.

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.