Every October, everything goes pumpkin spice in stores and cafes, and my inbox is flooded with reminders, webinars, and checklists. Halloween may be around the corner, but for those of us in cybersecurity, Security Awareness Month is a seasonal milestone.
Without a doubt, as a security professional, I love this month. Launched in 2004 by CISA and the National Cybersecurity Alliance, the service aims to make security a shared responsibility. Helping citizens, businesses, and public institutions build safer digital habits. And it works. This draws attention to different forms of risk, sparks conversations that might not otherwise occur, and helps employees recognize their personal stake and influence in the organization’s security.
Security Awareness Month initiatives will boost your confidence, sharpen your instincts, and keep security top of mind for everyone. That is, until the winter holiday decorations start.
After that, the momentum slows down. Without reinforcement, awareness quickly fades. People know what to do, but day-to-day pressures and shifting priorities mean weak passwords, misconfigurations, and unused accounts re-enter. Real progress requires a structure that validates what people remember and finds what they’re missing: a system that continually validates their identities, settings, and privileges.
In this article, we take a closer look at why awareness alone can’t carry the full weight of security, and how proactive threat hunting can bridge the gap between what we know and what can actually be prevented.
limits of recognition
Security Awareness Month focuses on the human side of defense. Remind employees that every click, credential, and connection matters. This focus is valuable, and I’ve seen organizations invest heavily in creative campaigns that truly change employee behavior.
However, many of these same organizations still experience serious breaches. That’s because many breaches begin in places that training can’t reach. Security misconfigurations alone account for more than one-third of all cyber incidents and approximately one-quarter of cloud security incidents. The signals are clear. Recognition has its limits. You can improve decision making, but you can’t fix something people will never see.
Part of the problem is that traditional defenses primarily focus on detection and response. EDR alerts you to suspicious activity. SIEM correlates events after they occur. Vulnerability scanners identify known weaknesses. These tools primarily operate on the right side of the cyber defense matrix and focus on the reactive phase of defense.
Effective defense must start earlier. The positive left side of the matrix, i.e. identification and protection, should be based on assurances rather than assumptions. Proactive threat hunting establishes mechanisms to provide these assurances and empowers the process in which awareness begins. Create mechanisms to provide these guarantees and empower the process by which recognition begins. Search for misconfigurations, leaked credentials, and excessive privileges that create attack opportunities and remove them before attackers can exploit them.
Proactive threat hunting changes the equation
The best defense begins before the first alert. Proactive threat hunting identifies conditions that allow attacks to form and responds to them early. This moves your security from passive observation to a clear understanding of where your security is at risk.
This shift from observation to proactive understanding forms the core of modern security programs: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Rather than being a one-time project, a CTEM program provides a structured, repeatable framework for continually modeling threats, validating controls, and protecting your business. For organizations ready to build this capability, the Practical Guide to Getting Started with CTEM provides a clear roadmap.
Attackers are already following this model. Threat actors in current campaigns are combining identity abuse, credential reuse, and lateral movement between hybrid environments at the speed of machines. Create AI-driven automation maps and prepare your entire infrastructure in minutes. Teams that examine environments from an attacker’s perspective can see how small oversights can lead to complete attack vectors, allowing threat actors to slip past layers of defense. This turns distributed risk data into a living picture of how breaches occur and how to stop them early.
Defenders need the depth of contextual visibility that attackers already have. Proactive threat hunting increases visibility and builds readiness in three stages:
Get the right data – Collect vulnerabilities, network design, connectivity for each system, identity (both SSO and system-cached data), and configuration data from every part of your environment to create a single, attacker-centric view. The goal is to see what attackers see, such as weak credentials, gaps in cloud posture, and privilege relationships that create entry points. Digital twins provide a practical way to securely replicate your environment and view all your exposures in one place. Attack path mapping – Leverage digital twins to connect exposures and assets to show how a breach progresses through your environment and impacts critical systems. This mapping reveals important chains of exploitation. Replace assumptions with evidence and show exactly how multiple small exposures converge to form an attack path. Prioritize by business impact – Link each validated path to assets and processes that support business operations. At this stage, you translate technical discoveries into business risks and focus on remediating the risks that can cause the most disruption to your business. The result is clarity and a validated, prioritized set of actions that directly strengthen resilience.
Awareness is a key component. But active threat hunting provides defenders with something that awareness alone can never provide: evidence. This shows exactly where your organization stands and how quickly you can close the gap between visibility and prevention.
From awareness to preparation
Security Awareness Month reminds us that raising awareness is an important step. But real progress begins when awareness leads to action. Perception is only as powerful as the systems that measure and verify it. Proactive threat hunting turns awareness into readiness by keeping your attention on what matters most: the weaknesses that form the basis of tomorrow’s attacks.
Awareness teaches people to recognize risks. Threat hunting proves whether the risk still exists. These work together to form a continuous cycle that ensures security persists long after the awareness campaign ends. This October, the question for every organization is not how many employees complete the training, but whether today’s defenses will hold up if someone tests them. Awareness builds understanding. Preparation provides protection.
Note: This article was written and contributed by Jason Frugé, resident CISO at XM Cyber.
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