What Iran-Based Activity Can Teach Us About Everyday Security Resilience

The recent escalation with Iran has put security teams on high alert. The research we recently published demonstrates that Iran-based threat actors have continued to evolve their tactics over the last 21 months, specifically targeting critical infrastructure, government contractors, and organizations connected to national security. This trend is much larger than just Iran’s tactics, however: nation-state threat actors around the world are increasingly picking on supply chain targets versus military or government systems directly, because these much smaller organizations typically have less robust defenses.

Ok, that’s the scary news. Here’s the good news: while geopolitical tensions certainly amplify certain risks, the fundamentals of good security remain unchanged. What changes is our level of vigilance and readiness, and the same mitigation strategies that help address nation-state threats can address other threats and risks to your organization.

Beyond Threats: Building Operational Resilience

When we built our security operations platform, we started with a simple premise: perfect defense is impossible, but effective resilience is very achievable.

Operational resilience helps you plan for the unplannable by recognizing that on a long enough timeline, incidents are inevitable. However, you can mitigate the risk they pose and minimize disruption by focusing your efforts on building an environment where you can immediately spot unusual activity across your systems, understand what's happening quickly in order to respond appropriately, and recover to get back to business without missing a beat. This approach is key, regardless of whether you're facing a nation-state actor, a criminal organization, or an insider threat. The source of a risk or threat matters less than your ability to detect comprehensively, understand rapidly, and respond like a pro.

Visibility Changes Everything

The most dangerous attacks aren't necessarily the most sophisticated or rare – they're the ones you don't see until the damage is done. Iranian threat actors, like many other advanced groups, rely on this awareness gap in their operations. They gain initial access through relatively straightforward means like phishing, exposed services, or credential theft, and then move laterally throughout your environment while staying under the radar and looking for opportunities to borrow or elevate their level of access.

Traditional security tools built for a perimeterized environment where external traffic is scrutinized but internal access is much more easily granted and retained are insufficient. Firewalls and antivirus might stop an initial breach attempt, but what happens when an attacker is already inside your network?

This is why continuous monitoring across your entire environment matters so much. When you can connect the dots between seemingly isolated events, such as a suspicious login here, or an unusual file access there, patterns emerge that would otherwise remain unseen. Quickly identifying abnormal activity starts with a comprehensive picture of what normal looks like.

An Integrated Strategy for Detection and Response

As GI Joe told us decades ago, knowing is half the battle: continuous monitoring helps to identify what’s happening in an environment, but effective security relies on being able to respond and do something about what you’ve seen. Response without proper context or practice (better described as “reacting”) can often cause more harm than good. A truly integrated approach combines three key elements:

1. Comprehensive visibility brings together data from across your entire digital landscape – endpoints, network, cloud services, and applications – to capture a complete picture of your environment. This holistic view allows you to spot connections between events that might seem unrelated when viewed in isolation. Remember that “visibility” and “awareness” aren’t synonyms, though: capturing the full picture is important, but quickly identifying suspicious activity depends on solid threat detection that identifies attacker behaviors early, such as flagging scanning activity before a successful exploit occurs.
2. Contextual understanding transforms raw data into meaningful insights. When an alert fires, you need to immediately understand what happened, why it matters, and what systems are affected. Context separates actual threats from the background noise that plagues many security teams.
3. Flexible response options are critical for addressing different types of security findings. Some clearly-malicious signals can be quickly addressed through automated containment. Others require deeper triage and investigation, along with the guidance of well-documented response playbooks. And sometimes, you need direct support from security experts who can walk you through complex incidents.

The secret sauce is having all three approaches in your metaphorical spice rack (automated, guided, and supported) so you can address each finding proportionately based on its nature and severity.

Practical Steps to Strengthen Your Security Posture

So, if the latest in world news has you nervously reassessing your security strategy, here are some concrete steps you can take toward resilience and some peace of mind:

Shore Up Your Fundamentals

Take a fresh look at your environment with an eye toward what threat actors are most likely to target. In our research on attacks from Iran, the most likely targets are valuable data sources (whether healthcare, financial, confidential, or proprietary) and availability services, alongside third-party attacks specifically targeting a client/vendor of the intended victim. Free resources like the CSF Quick Start Guides can provide structure to this assessment and help you start with the most important systems and data. Once identified, start by patching external-facing systems that might be most exposed to scanning and exploitation, as these systems often serve as the initial entry point for attackers.

Review your remote access solutions like VPN and RDP configurations. Remote access services (including commercial RMMs) are prime targets because they provide direct entry to your network when compromised. Ensure they're properly configured, using current protocols, and restricted to only those who truly need them. Then monitor for suspicious activity (like password failures in a short period that could indicate a spraying attack) to catch anything else.

Strong authentication is your best defense against credential-based attacks. Implement multi-factor authentication wherever possible, especially for administrative accounts. Even if passwords are compromised, MFA provides an additional barrier that raises the level of difficulty for attackers to overcome. How do we  know that strong authentication is doing its job? After literal decades at the top of the list, stolen/reused credentials are dropping in the rankings of most common attack vectors, while session token theft (which can sidestep MFA by stealing already-authenticated legitimate access) is now on the rise.

These fundamentals may not be glamorous, but they're consistently effective against even sophisticated threat actors. The most successful attacks often exploit basic security gaps rather than employing advanced techniques.

Enhance Your Visibility

You can't protect what you can't see. Comprehensive logging forms the foundation of effective security monitoring, and a quality Security Information and Event Management tool (SIEM) that collects and analyzes logs across your entire tech stack makes it Grand Central Station for knowing what’s happening. Ensure you're collecting logs from all critical systems – servers, firewalls, cloud services, and key applications. Many successful attacks go undetected simply because the affected systems weren't being monitored, and many attacks have succeeded in “secure” environments by targeting the edge case or entrenched legacy hardware that isn’t supported for integration.

Work on establishing baseline behaviors in your environment. When you understand what normal activity looks like, unusual patterns become much easier to spot. Pay particular attention to privileged account usage, as administrator accounts are prime targets for attackers seeking to expand their control. Historical activity isn’t just reference material for an investigation; it’s a readout over time of your environment’s health and risk factors – make the most of it!

Look for ways to correlate events across different systems. The most dangerous attacks don’t usually appear as one big noisy event – instead, they can be identified by activity patterns that could be harmless on their own but collectively show an attacker’s intent. Event correlation helps you see these patterns before things fall apart.

Finally, implement intelligent continuous monitoring rather than relying on time-intensive, costly “eyes on glass” analysis for detections. Cybercrime isn’t a 9-to-5 kind of gig, which means security can’t be, either.

Prepare Your Response

When incidents occur, confusion and delay can result in more damage than the initial attack itself. Incident response planning is about building capacity before you need it, so you can respond decisively and confidently when events occur.

Document clear workflows for common scenarios, including who needs to be notified, which immediate actions should be taken and who is responsible for taking them, and how decisions will be made. Maintaining clear communications and avoiding duplicated (or contradictory) efforts is one of the trickiest elements of response planning, so define communication channels and decision-making authority in advance.

Consider conducting tabletop exercises that simulate security incidents, which you can take from actual previously-detected activity or major headlines that could similarly affect your own organization. These practice sessions help identify gaps in your plans and build muscle memory for responding to real events. They're also excellent opportunities to bring technical and business teams together to establish shared understanding and expectations. A plan isn’t really a plan until it’s been tested, so make sure your response playbooks are road-tested and not just theoretical.

Speaking of “road-tested,” test your backup and recovery processes regularly to ensure they actually work when needed. Many organizations discover too late that their backups or restoration processes are incomplete. In many scenarios including ransomware attacks, reliable backups often make the difference between a major disruption and a close call.

Stay Informed…Within Reason

Whether a doctor on-call for emergencies, an IT administrator on-call for outages, or any person who simply has too many phone apps, too much information can be harmful, thanks to the effects of alert fatigue. When everything is categorized as an emergency, nothing actually gets treated as an emergency. This doesn’t just apply to dashboards but to our own information diet as well – threat intelligence is valuable, but information overload can be paralyzing. Focus on following trusted sources that provide clear, contextualized, and actionable intelligence rather than trying to keep up with every new article in every feed. Quality matters much more than quantity when trying to stay up-to-date on current risks.

While we’re at it, remember that networks aren’t just for computers – industry peer groups can be incredibly helpful and provide early warnings about emerging threats targeting organizations like yours. Contributing to and leveraging these resources can help you prepare before being directly targeted.

Practice the skill of translating general security advisories into specific actions for your environment. Not every threat applies to every organization, and prioritization is essential for making the most of limited security resources – that includes reactive prioritization to emergent threats, as well as proactive prioritization of risks to your operational resilience. Focus on addressing the risks most relevant to your specific business conditions.

Remember that security is a journey, not a set destination – continuous improvement is the name of the game, and your focus should be on strategic evolution rather than complete re-invention. If you start with your most critical risks and measure success through incremental progress, you’ll find your operational resilience will steadily grow over time.

Finding the Right Strategy for Where You Are, Right Now

Security isn’t just about technology; it’s about building resilience to whatever challenges come our way. Whether you’re concerned about nation-state threat actors or everyday risks, the foundations of a good security practice remain the same: get visibility into what’s happening in your environment, gather the context to understand what it means, and have a clear plan to respond when something goes sideways. That’s not just good security – it’s also good business!

Immediate Actions You Can Take

1. Conduct a Vulnerability Assessment

Given the increased threat activity, now is the time to conduct a comprehensive vulnerability scan of your network infrastructure. Iranian actors are particularly adept at exploiting outdated systems and unpatched software. Focus on:

• Internet-facing systems and services
• Remote access solutions (RDP, VPN, SSH)
• Web applications and databases
• IoT and operational technology devices
  
  

2. Strengthen Access Controls

• Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all remote access, especially RDP and SSH
• Review and update access permissions to ensure users only have the minimum access necessary
• Monitor for credential harvesting and unusual authentication patterns
• Consider implementing zero-trust architecture principles
  
  

3. Enhance Monitoring and Detection

• Deploy comprehensive logging across all systems and network devices
• Implement network segmentation to limit lateral movement
• Monitor for Iranian IP ranges and known indicators of compromise
• Establish baseline network behavior to identify anomalous activity
  
  

4. Prepare Your Incident Response

• Update incident response plans to account for nation-state threats
• Conduct tabletop exercises simulating Iranian attack scenarios
• Establish communication protocols for coordinating with law enforcement and industry partners
• Ensure backup and recovery systems are isolated and regularly tested
  
  

5. Stay Informed

• Subscribe to threat intelligence feeds that track Iranian cyber activity
• Monitor geopolitical developments that might trigger increased cyber activity
• Participate in information sharing with industry peers and government agencies
• Regularly review and update security policies based on evolving threats
  
  

Now It’s Your Move – But We Can Help!

At Blumira, we've built our security operations platform specifically to address these challenges. Our solution provides:

• Immediate deployment with hundreds of pre-built threat detection rules, so you only see alerts that are worth your time and you can focus on what matters
• Hybrid support combining guided, automated, and expert-supported security analysis and response
• Real-time threat intelligence incorporating the latest Iranian Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)  and indicators
• Customized recommendations based on your specific industry and threat profile, with best-practice playbooks that help you respond to any new finding like a pro