October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and this year’s focus feels more urgent than ever. Why? A wave of global advisories, from Salt Typhoon’s sprawling campaigns to FBI warnings about Russian state-sponsored attacks on U.S. infrastructure, underscores an uncomfortable truth: cyber warfare is entering a new phase.

“Salt Typhoon symbolizes a beginning,” noted Jennifer Ewbank, former CIA deputy director for digital innovation. We’re now seeing patient, state-backed campaigns embedded across infrastructure in more than 80 countries, marked by technical sophistication, persistence, and intent.

The lesson is clear: attackers are no longer smash-and-grab opportunists. They’re systematic and play the long game. For security and business leaders, survival can no longer hinge on detection and response alone. The 2025 imperative is resilience, that is preparing to withstand attacks, recover quickly, and operate with confidence.

Why Resilience Is the New Mandate

Consider Salt Typhoon’s assaults. Attackers gained entry through routers, devices often overlooked and unmonitored, using them for every stage of attack: access, persistence, movement, collection, and exfiltration. As former CISA Director Jen Easterly noted, “Routers are the soft underbelly and connective tissue exploited by our adversaries.”

These methods reveal a hard truth: threat actors don’t need new exploits to succeed. Russian-sponsored groups, the FBI warns, still target a seven-year-old Cisco CVE. Attackers need opportunity, not novelty.

For businesses, resilience must replace reaction. As FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “We know what new risks look like... The time to act is now.”

Four Trends Reshaping Cyber Resilience

As warnings converge with regulatory drive, four resiliency-first strategies are becoming the blueprint for 2025 and beyond.

1. Network Segmentation as a Firebreak Against Lateral Movement

Segmentation is no longer a “nice to have.” When attackers use AI to automate and accelerate their lateral movement, foundational segmentation and least privilege access architectures and principles are the ultimate last line of defense, containing the attackers and constraining the blast radius of a breach. It’s a simple model: build digital firebreaks that prevent AI enabled attackers from turning one breach into an existential threat to your business.

2. Visibility Across the Entire Network

Today’s blind spots are among the most dangerous risks. To combat adversaries who tamper with logs and mask their activity, organizations require constant, real-time visibility into network configuration changes and access controls. Equally critical, visibility must extend to exposure against advanced persistent threats (APTs). By using business critical threat and compromise risk management solutions at enterprise scale, security teams can drill down to individual devices and remediate and respond with pinpoint accuracy, transforming visibility from passive observation to active risk reduction underpinning business readiness and resilience assurance.

3. Pre-Emptive Remediation to Reduce Current and Future “Threat Debt”

Classic vulnerability management has long suffered from alert fatigue and a compliance-first mindset. APTs like Volt and Salt Typhoon have shown that legacy network VM programs fail to deliver foundational security, providing attackers a blueprint by exploiting under-monitored infrastructure. While AI accelerates threat growth by the minute, the CVEs and network misconfigurations it targets remain relatively static. Preemptively remediating those vulnerabilities reduces existing threat debt, shrinks attack surfaces, and prevents future variants from exploiting the same weaknesses. In short, it shifts security teams from reactive firefighting to proactive fire prevention, putting defenders back in control.

4. CMDB-Centric Recovery for Faster Response

Finally, resilience is measured not only in defense, but in recovery. An accurate configuration management database (CMDB) is the “source of truth” in incidents, making it possible to do pre-deployment testing, rollbacks instantly, forensic-level root cause analysis, and to ensure that operational and security states are minimally maintained or hopefully improved after configuration changes. In the wake of Salt Typhoon, this capability is not theoretical, it is essential.

Beyond Technology: A Leadership Imperative

While these strategies are technical at their core, their significance is organizational and foundational to revenue protection and growth programs like digital transformation. They require cultural mind shifts and buy-in, focused and likely re-purposed investment and continuous monitoring and governance. They require urgency, too. Telecommunications networks support critical aspects of daily life, from national defense and public safety to economic growth, making it urgent to modernize security safeguards without delay.  However, these seismic network centric attacks on telcos are blue-prints for successful attacks on other critical infrastructure and businesses generally, so they should be viewed as a wake-up call for all businesses.

The stakes could not be clearer. For adversaries, routers and other connective devices provide both treasure maps and attack pathways to critical infrastructure. For defenders, they are points of vulnerability that can be hardened, monitored, and pre-emptively secured. Readiness and resilience, therefore, becomes more than just buzzwords; they become the standard by which future-ready organizations are measured.

The Bottom Line: Resilience Is Business Continuity

As National Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds us, awareness by itself is insufficient. The threats are real, the campaigns are global, and the impacts are increasingly seismic. However, awareness can be the spark for change, change that takes organizations from reactive defense to proactive resilience.

The age of resilience has arrived. For boards, executives, CIOs and CISOs, the question is no longer whether they should prepare, only when. Those that implement network segmentation, visibility, pre-emotive remediation, and CMDB-based recovery will not only ride out the storms ahead but thrive despite them.