A single cracked password should not allow a pivot across half the organisation. Legacy assumptions kick in: implicit trust, flat networks, privileges handed out “just in case” and never revoked. We’ve known better for years. We just haven’t done better.


Virtualisation: the jackpot


Admin access in hand, attackers target the real crown jewels: virtualisation infrastructure.


Hypervisors like VMWare ESXi consolidate the organisation’s digital estate. Compromise one host, and you’ve effectively compromised everything it runs.


Ransomware on a desktop disrupts a user. Ransomware on ESXi shuts down the business. That’s what happened at M&S: encrypted VMs, compromised backups, and recovery plans not designed for this scale of impact.


The mistake isn’t just poor patching or weak credentials. It’s assuming these systems are secure by default. They’re often reachable from the network, managed with domain credentials, and administered using outdated tools. They’re rarely segmented, infrequently audited, and almost never treated with the level of sensitivity they deserve. That makes them perfect ransomware targets – and leaves defenders improvising under pressure.


Security tooling isn’t a fix


Faced with this kind of failure, the instinct is to buy another solution: EDR, XDR, SIEM, SOAR, NGAV, and another dashboard to plug them all together.


But these are compensating controls, not cures. You can’t fix bad architecture by stacking more products on top of it. Each new tool adds complexity. Another agent to deploy. Another system to monitor. Another failure point. And as Crowdstrike’s recent outage showed, even the best tools can become critical liabilities.


Complexity doesn’t create resilience – it erodes it. Systems become harder to manage, harder to recover, and easier to break. Worse, layers of tooling create a false sense of safety. Alerting isn’t understanding. Correlating logs doesn’t equal insight (even if you plug AI into the picture). If your architecture allows one cracked password to collapse everything, no EDR in the world is going to save you.


Fixing the foundation


Secure by design isn’t a buzzword – it’s a mindset. It means building systems to resist compromise by default, not reacting


to compromise after the fact.


It means removing implicit trust. Designing for failure. Segmenting access. Reducing privilege. Treating administrative operations as high-risk, high-scrutiny actions every time – not just at initial login. We’ve known these principles since the 1970s. We still rarely see them taken seriously.


CHERI, a UK-supported hardware architecture, reworks how memory is managed at the chip level – removing entire categories of exploit. But we don’t need to wait for future hardware. Secure architecture – zero trust, least


© CITY SECURITY MAGAZINE – SUMMER 2025 www.citysecuritymagazine.com


privilege, or just good engineering – is achievable today. It includes redesigning help desk flows to verify identity properly. These aren’t costly changes, they just require thought, discipline, and the will to build better.


James Bore CSyP. www.bores.com


Security Institute – Cyber Security Special Interest Group


www.security-institute.org >


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