Organisations can make security more effective by studying how attackers behave: how they get in, move through systems, avoid detection and pursue their goals. That perspective helps teams find defensive gaps, strengthen identity and patching practices, protect the evidence needed for investigations, and test whether their controls work in practice.
What does it mean to learn from an attacker’s playbook?
It means examining adversary behaviors rather than relying only on threat labels or a checklist of tools. MITRE ATT&CK organizes tactics and techniques observed in real-world activity. Defenders can use that framework to identify gaps, organize detections, hunt for threats and validate mitigations, according to CISA’s guidance on mapping to ATT&CK.
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The practical question is not simply whether an organisation owns a security product. It is whether a relevant behavior would be prevented or detected, whether the team would have enough visibility to investigate it, and whether someone knows what to do next. As CISA puts it, “The success network defenders have in detecting and mitigating cyberattacks depends on this understanding.”
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Security controls can be effective in one area while leaving blind spots elsewhere. In a CISA red-team assessment, testers achieved persistent access and moved laterally across multiple sites without detection. MFA prompts did block access to one sensitive business system. These are findings from one assessment, not evidence of how often the same gaps occur across organisations.
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The contrast is useful: a control can stop a particular path to a sensitive system, while monitoring and response elsewhere may still fail to reveal an attacker’s activity. The CISA red-team advisory recommends using realistic adversary behaviors to evaluate prevention and detection, then tuning people, processes and technology in response.
How should organisations turn attacker behavior into better defenses?
1. Map behaviors to controls
Choose relevant ATT&CK techniques and identify which systems, people and processes should prevent or detect them. The map is a way to expose coverage gaps, not a score that proves an organisation is secure. Prioritise behaviors that could affect the organisation’s important systems and operations.
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2. Test prevention and detection
For each selected behavior, establish what a successful defense should look like. Test whether controls prevent the activity, whether monitoring generates useful signals if prevention fails, and whether responders can act on those signals. CISA’s advisory describes selecting techniques, aligning relevant technologies, testing them, analysing performance and tuning the response.
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Use multifactor authentication (MFA), maintain sound identity and access management, and patch systems with priority for known exploited vulnerabilities. These are among the measures recommended in joint guidance from CISA, the FBI and the NSA. Threat-specific recommendations should be checked against current advisories because actor behavior changes.
4. Preserve useful security logs
Logs can help teams detect suspicious activity and reconstruct what happened, but only if they are available and trustworthy. CISA advises organisations to establish logging and monitoring procedures, restrict unauthorised access or deletion, retain logs in line with policy and compliance requirements, and assign incident-response roles. See CISA’s logging guidance for businesses.
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5. Exercise response and continuity plans
Prepare incident-response and continuity plans, practise them, define how incidents are reported and who must be contacted, and address gaps in IT and operational technology (OT) security coverage. These operational steps are part of the joint CISA, FBI and NSA guidance; tools alone cannot make decisions or coordinate a response.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How can teams compare defensive options?
There is no universal product ranking established by these government sources. Compare controls by the behaviors they address and by the organisation’s ability to operate and validate them.
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| Question | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Which behavior does it address? | Identify the attacker behavior the option is meant to prevent or detect. |
| Does it prevent, detect or both? | Be clear about whether it blocks activity, raises a signal, or supports both outcomes. |
| Can its effectiveness be tested? | Define a safe, relevant test and the expected result before relying on the control. |
| What visibility and response coverage does it provide? | Determine what evidence reaches defenders and whether someone is responsible for acting on it. |
| What ongoing effort is needed? | Account for the people and processes required to configure, monitor, investigate and tune the option. |
What should leaders take away?
Attacker behavior offers a practical way to check whether security measures match the risks an organisation needs to manage. The work is continuous: map relevant behaviors, test controls, preserve evidence and improve response. CISA’s Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Eric Goldstein, wrote that “Leaders at all organizations, and particularly those that support National Critical Functions, should engage in urgent conversations to address technology bad practices.” CISA’s statement on bad practices underscores that leadership attention is part of the defensive work.
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