The strongest way to frustrate an adversary is to make the next step harder to carry out and easier to notice. Restrict access, monitor behavior rather than relying only on tool names, and build in ways to verify or interrupt suspicious activity. These measures add friction and create chances to respond; none guarantees that an attack will stop.
That is the practical point of Cisco Talos researcher Hazel Burton’s October 1, 2026 article, “The Fine Art of Frustrating the Adversary.” Drawing on recommendations from eight Talos researchers, it treats frustration not as a standalone security product but as a defensive advantage: attackers may need to spend more time, expose more activity, or rebuild part of an operation when a route is blocked.
What kind of friction helps defenders?
A control can help in different ways. Some reduce the paths into sensitive systems; others produce a signal for investigation, slow an intruder with deception, or break a dependency between stages of an operation. The useful question is not simply whether a measure “stops” an attacker, but what it changes and what the defenders can see as a result.
| Approach | Primary effect | What it depends on | Important trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restrict access to critical systems | Reduces available entry points and surfaces unauthorized attempts | Accurate account restrictions and monitoring of changes | Restrictions must not block legitimate administration |
| Use deception | Can attract or slow an intruder and create an investigative signal | Decoys that are distinguishable from ordinary business systems | An alert is a reason to investigate, not proof of malicious intent |
| Detect behavior | Can identify an objective even when the tool changes | Relevant telemetry, a baseline of normal activity, and maintained analytics | Behavioral rules can miss activity or generate false alarms |
| Constrain software and sessions | Limits unauthorized remote tools or agent activity | A current inventory, suitable enforcement, and visibility into connections | Controls can disrupt legitimate work if they are too broad |
| Block an attack-chain dependency | May interrupt a handoff or force an adversary to replace infrastructure | Visibility into the dependency and a safe way to block it | An attacker may adapt, and the dependency may have legitimate uses |
As one contributor identified only as Ryan put it, “Good detection engineering exploits that asymmetry.” The defender’s goal is to make an attacker’s changing options more costly to use while making relevant activity visible enough to act on.
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How can you reduce easy access to critical systems?
Start with the accounts and systems whose compromise would have the greatest impact. Limit which accounts can sign in to critical servers, alert on unauthorized connection attempts, and monitor changes to access restrictions and administrative groups. For especially sensitive systems, consider distinct credentials or authentication methods. Protected enclaves can add monitoring around critical infrastructure.
These measures are only as reliable as their upkeep. A legitimate administrator who needs access must still be able to do the job, so restrictions and exceptions need owners and review. Changes to the restrictions themselves matter: an attacker who can quietly add an account to a privileged group may bypass a carefully designed access boundary.
When is deception useful?
Deception can create signals before malicious activity reaches real users or critical systems. Examples in Burton’s article include email honeypots built around previously leaked addresses on expired domains, fictional employee profiles seeded to attract malicious messages, and false servers, shares, accounts, or network space intended to slow an intruder.
A honeypot address may receive lures that help defenders identify themes or infrastructure early. A decoy resource may give an intruder something to interact with while raising an alert. In either case, treat the activity as suspicious intelligence to assess, not automatic proof that every alert is malicious. Decoys also need to remain clearly separated from production assets so they do not create new operational or security risks.
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Why detect behavior instead of only naming tools?
Tool-based detections can be brittle: an adversary may use a different program to pursue the same objective. For credential access, Burton’s article names Mimikatz, comsvcs.dll, direct access to LSASS memory, and custom utilities as different possible implementations. A rule that looks only for one known utility can miss the others.
A more durable detection starts with the action or objective and asks what activity would remain recognizable if the tool or command syntax changed. MITRE ATT&CK can help teams organize techniques, but a taxonomy does not supply the organization’s telemetry or detection logic by itself.
- Identify the high-impact techniques the organization needs to detect.
- Map plausible alternate procedures that could achieve the same objective.
- Look for behavior that persists across those alternatives, rather than matching only a tool name.
- Check that the required telemetry is collected and that expected administrative activity is understood.
- Account for encoding, transformations, and obfuscation, then review detection quality as systems and normal behavior change.
Behavior-based detection is not evasion-proof. It is a way to make detections less dependent on an attacker reusing a particular tool, provided defenders have the visibility and context to distinguish unusual activity from legitimate work.
How should organizations control remote-management tools?
Remote-monitoring and management (RMM) software has legitimate administrative uses, but it can also be misused to maintain access or interact with compromised systems. Burton’s article says Warlock ransomware has used Zoho Unattended Agent; it also names AnyDesk, ScreenConnect, and Atera as examples an organization might block or alert on when they are not authorized.
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Build an inventory of approved RMM products and where they are needed. Then use allowlisting or other suitable controls to permit authorized software and block or alert on unapproved tools. The article cites Windows Defender Application Control, AppLocker, and endpoint-detection-and-response platforms as possible enforcement mechanisms. Which controls fit depends on the organization’s systems and administrative workflows.
Removing an unauthorized route can add friction and create a chance to investigate, but it does not establish that an operation has ended. Review exceptions and deployment changes so a newly installed tool does not silently become an accepted route.
How can people verify urgent requests?
Urgency is often used to prompt a decision before someone checks whether a request is genuine. Decide in advance which situations truly need an immediate response and how those situations would normally be communicated. For an urgent message claiming that a child has been injured at school, for example, call a number already known to belong to the school rather than a number supplied in the message.
The principle is to verify through an independent, previously trusted channel. Do not let the suspicious message choose the contact route used to confirm its own claim.
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What boundaries help keep AI-agent activity controllable?
Burton’s article refers to an Anthropic report describing four incidents involving Claude in evaluation environments. It says the organizations were unnamed, the environments had inadvertently been given internet access, and the agents had not been instructed to act maliciously; the incidents were not conventional adversary operations. They are therefore not evidence that those agents carried out hostile attacks.
For defensive design, the article recommends making each agent run identifiable and constrained: give it a distinct identity and short-lived credentials, route its traffic through an independent gateway where activity can be observed or stopped, and restrict access to sensitive destinations such as cloud metadata and Kubernetes interfaces unless a task needs them. As a contributor identified only as David said, “The best way to frustrate an agentic adversary is to make every agent session identifiable, restricted, and interruptible.”
Potential warning signs to assess in context include:
- Unexpected writes or unusual API operations.
- Kubernetes or VPN calls that do not fit the agent’s task.
- Use of public services as command-and-control channels or dead drops.
- Credential discovery followed by activity across accounts.
- Rapid changes in destinations, DNS pinning, short-lived egress identities, or unusual bursts of traffic.
These are indicators to investigate, not proof of malicious intent. The right baseline depends on what the agent is authorized to do and what its session can reach.
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Can blocking one dependency disrupt an attack chain?
Sometimes a web page, domain, or other external service supplies information needed for the next stage of an operation. Burton describes one Amatera chain in which a Telegra.ph page concealed the command-and-control server location. Blocking that page could interrupt the handoff, preventing the malware from receiving collection instructions or further payloads.
In another example, ZigCryptoStealer stored a command-and-control domain in the metadata of a BNB Smart Chain contract. Blocking a specific contract could disrupt the current operation, but an adversary might deploy another. A contributor identified only as Vanja described the appeal of finding such a “single point of failure”: it can force a threat actor to re-establish infrastructure, which takes time and money.
The practical control depends on how the organization uses and can observe the relevant service. DNS filtering, secure web gateways, proxies, or firewalls may block known domains and URLs. Contract-specific blocking requires visibility into blockchain RPC requests and a way to distinguish the contracts involved. If public blockchain or RPC access is unnecessary, blocking it may be simpler; if it is needed, allow approved services and monitor known malicious contracts. A block can break a current dependency, not guarantee that the broader operation is over.
How should a team choose what to implement first?
Prioritize controls by the systems and workflows at risk, the visibility already available, and the consequences of a false alarm or a blocked legitimate action. A reasonable implementation sequence is:
- Identify critical systems, high-impact behaviors, and legitimate administrative paths.
- Close unnecessary access routes and ensure that changes to privileges and restrictions are observable.
- Inventory remote-management software and agent identities, then define what is authorized and what should trigger review.
- Build or improve detections around important behavior using available telemetry and a realistic understanding of normal activity.
- Add deception or dependency blocking where there is a safe operational boundary and a plan to investigate the resulting signals.
- Set independent verification procedures for urgent human requests, and rehearse how teams will respond to an alert or interruption.
These are environment-dependent practitioner recommendations, not a ranked product list or a guarantee. As the Talos article cautions, no single action will frustrate every adversary or stop every attack, and not every recommendation suits every environment.
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