States, Stakes and Your Stack

This isn’t fearmongering; it’s acknowledging the terrain. Rival states use cyber operations the way they once used trade restrictions and spy games: to shape outcomes.  They pilfer IP to accelerate domestic industries, pre-position in critical infrastructure as leverage, and run financially motivated campaigns to circumnavigate sanctions and fund other priorities. That activity doesn’t stop at government perimeters—it bleeds into telecom, logistics, cloud platforms, professional services, hospitals, and the boutique firm down the street. Forget industry or zip code; exposure comes from the platforms you use, the partners you trust, and the information you hold.

“Okay, but we’re small.  Why would anyone target us?” I hear that a lot.  Here’s the hard truth: the internet flattened the playing field for both innovation and intrusion.  Attackers don’t vet you for Fortune 500 status before they phish your employees.  They aim for access, leverage, and liquidity.  If they can’t reach the crown jewels directly, they’ll move through your shared vendors, your remote access hardware, or your personal email forwarding rule from 2017.  Geopolitics has raised the stakes and lowered the thresholds.

So, what’s different about a geopolitical cyber campaign versus “regular” crimeware?  Three things:

1. Resourcing and patience: Nation-linked operators don’t mind playing the long game.  Living Off the Land (LOTL), avoiding malware until late, burrowing into edge devices; none of that is flashy, but it’s brutally effective.
2. Intent: It’s not always about a quick payout.  Sometimes it’s pre-positioning to disrupt later, sometimes it’s theft at industrial scale, sometimes it’s message-sending.  Your logs won’t tell you which; your response strategy has to assume any or all of them.
3. Spillover: When tensions rise, opportunistic actors pile on.  What starts as targeted can turn “everyone with Vulnerability X is fair game.” The line between geo-driven and cash-driven blurs fast in the real world.

If that sounds daunting, good…it should.  But it shouldn’t paralyze you – you should be alerted not alarmed.  The counter is not some exotic, unreachable resilience plan, available only to the Fortune 500.  It’s disciplined, repeatable, and already within reach if you commit to it.

Three activities, executed like clockwork, convert geopolitical noise into manageable operational risk: penetration testing, threat hunting, and tabletop exercises.

Pentesting: Find the Keys You Didn’t Know You Dropped

A solid external and internal pen test, scoped to how your business operates, does more than generate a glossy report.  Done right, it answers “Could a determined operator starting on our edge actually move to the systems that matter?” That means testing identity paths (MFA exceptions, legacy protocols, stale service accounts), control bypasses (EDR taming, logging blind spots), and real-world ingress (SaaS misconfigurations, exposed dev tools, forgotten VPN portals).  Geopolitics makes edge devices and identity the first battlegrounds; your pen test should, too.

Two upgrades for 2025 reality:

• Assume valid credentials exist: Measure how far an attacker can go with a single compromised user account and no malware.  That models LOTL and tells you whether your segmentation, conditional access, and detections are doing their jobs.
• Chain vendor access: If a facility, accounting, or IT provider can reach your systems, include them (contractually and technically) in scope. Sovereign risk flows through supply chains; your test should, too.

Then treat findings like safety issues, not “IT chores.” Track them with owners and deadlines.  If a critical auth gap lingers quarter after quarter, you’re not under-resourced, you’re under-prioritized.

Threat Hunting: Stop Waiting for Alarms

Threat hunting is not “watching the SIEM harder.” It’s a hypothesis-driven search for stealthy behaviors, Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and threat actor tradecraft, that good actors and good tools miss.  In a geopolitical context, this means looking for quiet persistence: service creation under unusual parents, scheduled tasks with harmless names, cloud tokens used from impossible locations, admin tools invoked in off hours, tiny data egress over lengthy periods, and authentications that are valid but weird.

Two practical moves:

• Intelligence-led hunts: When credible advisories name techniques against your sector (edge device hijacking, identity abuse, specific LOLBins), translate them into queries in your data, on your endpoints, not just “we read the PDF.”
• Hunt the identity plane: Correlate sign-ins, device posture, and privilege changes. Most modern intrusions pivot on identity, not exploits.  If you can surface anomalous privilege escalations and token reuse, you can eject intruders before they touch sensitive data.

If you don’t have people or time, buy outcome-based help, but insist on transfer of knowledge and artifacts you can run monthly.  Hunting isn’t a one-off; it’s a habit.

Tabletop Exercises: Rehearse the Hard Parts Before They Matter

Tabletops aren’t PowerPoint theaters.  They’re where you burn down ambiguity before the fire starts.  In a geo-driven scenario, pressure points shift: regulators might call first, law enforcement might advise quiet containment, a foreign partner might go dark, or your board might ask whether you’re seeing the same tactics splashed across the news.  You resolve those dilemmas in a tabletop, not during an incident.

Make your next tabletop model a long-dwell intrusion discovered through odd identity patterns, not ransomware fireworks.  Force decisions on: when to rotate credentials at scale, how to communicate with customers while you still don’t know the full scope, what to do if a critical vendor won’t share logs, and who speaks if government partners are involved.  Document roles, thresholds, and pre-approved language.  Then do it again in six months.  Reps build muscle.  Don’t do it until you get it right, do it until you can’t get it wrong.

“We’re Not a Target” vs.  “We’re Not Ready”