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Cybersecurity threats continue to increase in frequency, sophistication, and financial impact. Organisations now operate in an environment where cyberattacks are persistent, automated, and highly adaptive. Attackers no longer rely solely on simple malware or isolated phishing emails. Modern threat actors use ransomware, cloud exploitation, credential theft, AI-generated scams, supply chain attacks, and long-term infrastructure compromise to target businesses, governments, and critical services.
From the beginning of January 2026, several high-profile cyber incidents demonstrated how exposed many organisations remain. One major example involved the ransomware group RansomHub, which continued targeting healthcare providers, logistics companies, and public sector organisations across Europe and North America. The group used double-extortion techniques, encrypting systems while simultaneously threatening to leak stolen data publicly. These attacks highlighted how exposed organisations remain to credential theft, poor segmentation, and unpatched systems.
Another major concern involved the cybercriminal collective Scattered Spider, which became associated with social engineering attacks against telecommunications and cloud service providers. The group exploited helpdesk procedures by impersonating employees and convincing support staff to reset credentials or bypass multi-factor authentication protections. This showed that organisational exposure is not limited to technical systems; human processes can also create major security weaknesses.
Security agencies also continued warning about activity associated with the Chinese state-linked group Volt Typhoon. Investigations suggested the attackers maintained hidden access within critical infrastructure systems for extended periods. Rather than immediately disrupting services, the group appeared focused on persistence, reconnaissance, and positioning for future operations. This demonstrated how exposed critical infrastructure can become when visibility into networks and operational technology systems is limited.
The financial sector also experienced increasing attacks involving AI-generated phishing campaigns and voice impersonation scams. Criminal groups used generative artificial intelligence to create highly convincing emails, cloned voices, and fraudulent communications at scale. These attacks lowered the barrier for cybercrime and increased the effectiveness of social engineering operations.
Meanwhile, several retail and software organisations suffered supply chain breaches during the 2025 holiday period after attackers compromised third-party vendors and service providers. These incidents showed that organisations are exposed not only through their own infrastructure, but also through trusted external relationships.
These attacks reveal an important reality about modern cybersecurity: many organisations do not fully understand where they are exposed. Traditional cybersecurity strategies often focus on defending networks after systems are already deployed. However, modern attackers continuously search for weaknesses across cloud platforms, remote devices, APIs, third-party suppliers, identity systems, and internet-facing infrastructure.
As a result, cybersecurity has increasingly shifted toward a model known as continuous exposure management. Instead of relying on occasional assessments or static defences, organisations continuously identify, evaluate, prioritise, and reduce their exposure to cyber threats.
What Continuous Exposure Management Means
Continuous exposure management is a proactive cybersecurity strategy focused on identifying and reducing security weaknesses before attackers can exploit them.
Traditional cybersecurity programmes often relied on periodic audits, annual penetration testing, and compliance checklists. While these activities remain useful, they are no longer sufficient in environments where infrastructure changes daily and attackers move rapidly.
Continuous exposure management assumes that:
Organisations are constantly changing
New vulnerabilities appear continuously
Attack surfaces expand over time
Threat actors actively search for weaknesses
Visibility gaps create security risks
The goal is therefore to continuously discover and manage exposures across the organisation rather than reacting only after incidents occur. ,An exposure is any weakness, misconfiguration, vulnerability, or access path that could allow attackers to compromise systems or data. Exposures may include:
Unpatched software vulnerabilities
Weak passwords
Excessive access permissions
Misconfigured cloud storage
Insecure APIs
Legacy systems
Third-party supplier risks
Poor network segmentation
Exposed administrative interfaces
Modern organisations often have thousands of potential exposures at any given time. The challenge is not simply identifying vulnerabilities, but determining which exposures represent the greatest business risk.
This is why continuous exposure management focuses heavily on prioritisation. Security teams must understand:
Which systems are most critical
Which vulnerabilities are actively exploitable
Which assets are internet-facing
Which exposures attackers are most likely to target
Which weaknesses could lead to major operational disruption
This approach is closely connected to the concept of an attack surface,