Page 218 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

Regaining the upper hand

The writing is on the wall: an over-reliance on CVEs and agent-based approaches won’t keep you safe.
So what else can you do to regain the upper hand?

Combining active scanning, passive discovery and API integrations is an effective method for gaining
comprehensive visibility into both the internal and external attack services, including unknown and
unmanaged assets like OT and IoT endpoints.

Once identified, the next step is to profile each asset in depth. This is when fingerprinting technology can
play an integral part in extracting context-rich data. The more expansive the research is into what service
a device uses, who the asset owner is, whether it’s unpatched or misconfigured and what it’s connected
to, the more accurate the insight. This enables exposures that may otherwise remain an enigma to
network defenders, to be understood.

Above all, solutions must be simple and data driven. That means consolidating capabilities into a single
platform that has the capacity to deliver risk-based, prioritized alerts. Security teams are already
overwhelmed by false positives, alert fatigue, and situational blindness, and what they need is to cut
through the noise and see what exposures and vulnerabilities truly poses a threat.

About the Author

Tod Beardsley is the VP of Security Research at runZero. He "kicks
assets and fakes frames." Prior to 2025, he was the Section Chief
for the Vulnerability Response section for CSD/VM/VRC at CISA, the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the US
government. He's also a founder and CNA point of contact for AHA!.
He spends much of his time involved in vulnerability research and
coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD). He has over 30 years of
hands-on security experience, stretching from in-band telephony
switching to modern ICS/OT implementations. He has held IT ops,
security, software engineering, and management positions in large
organizations such as the Rapid7, 3Com, Dell, and Westinghouse,
as both an offensive and defensive practitioner. Tod is a CVE Board
member, has authored several research papers, and hosted Rapid7's Security Nation podcast with Jen
Ellis. He is also a Travis County Election Judge in Texas, and is an internationally-tolerated horror fiction
expert.

Tod can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/todb/ and at our company website
https://www.runzero.com/

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 218
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