From Kinetic Surprise to Cyber Lessons — What Iran and Israel Teach Us
The initial Israeli strike on Iranian assets was swift, deliberate, and unexpected. In those opening hours, Iran found itself stunned — not unlike a CISO jolted awake by an alert signalling unauthorised lateral movement or mass data exfiltration. That moment of paralysis, of needing to understand the scope before responding, is something we see not just on global battlefields, but in security operations centres across the world.
Iran didn’t crumble. It pulled out its intelligence community playbook, ran triage, assessed the damage, and launched a counter-offensive. The goal wasn’t just kinetic retaliation — it was also information warfare. Messaging, narrative shaping, influencing global sentiment. This is exactly what organisations must do when facing the aftermath of a breach. It’s not just about containment — it’s about controlling the story, preserving trust, and regaining strategic ground.
What followed was a layered, multi-domain conflict. Israel underestimated Iran’s asymmetric and digital capabilities. Iran underestimated Israel’s and America’s persistence — a tenacity seen in long-standing APTs who don’t care about optics, only outcomes. These nation-state behaviours mirror what we see in targeted attacks against enterprises: underestimated adversaries, overconfident defences, and persistent campaigns that don’t stop until the mission is accomplished — or fails quietly.
A Real-World Parallel from the Cyber Front
It was a quiet Sunday morning when alerts lit up across our Eclipse.XDR console. PowerShell abuse. Credential dumping. WMI activity from unusual admin accounts. At first glance, it looked like another red team simulation. But this wasn’t training. The technique was old. The timing, perfect. The adversary — deliberate and nation-grade.
Like Iran, we moved quickly. We triaged. We hunted. And in the patterns we saw — we recognised Volt Typhoon signatures. APT-level reconnaissance mixed with mundane system tools, obscuring their intent beneath a layer of legitimacy. But we knew where to look because we understood the strategic intent — not just the technical noise.
Cybersecurity Is Now a Theatre of Influence and Perception
Much like geopolitical conflicts, modern cyber defence is not just about tools. It’s about posture, timing, intelligence, and narrative. Governments influence allies and adversaries alike through visible strength and subtle pressure. In cybersecurity, organisations do the same through visibility, detection maturity, and fast containment.
Leadership Must Think Like Strategists
It’s time for CISOs and boards to approach cybersecurity as more than IT hygiene. They must understand game theory, deterrence, deception, and perception. They must think like generals — not just technicians.
The Defender’s Strategic Playbook
If you’re still waiting for malware alerts, you’re behind. Today’s defenders must:
• Detect early-stage activity like privilege escalation and lateral movement
• Correlate behaviours across users, hosts, networks, and cloud
• Use Managed XDR to bring 24/7 visibility and active response to the fight
• Conduct daily post-breach assessments even when no alerts triggered or malware is found
Cyber Conflict: A Global Crossfire
Cyber conflict doesn’t respect borders. Just as traditional geopolitical skirmishes draw in neutral parties — whether economically, diplomatically, or geographically — cyber incidents spill over into every sector and every nation. A malware strain used in a conflict between two nations can just as easily land in a Singaporean energy company, an Australian logistics firm, or a European healthcare provider.
This is because adversaries don’t just target their enemies — they target the allies, the suppliers, the vulnerable and the unaware. The digital supply chain is interconnected. A single compromised endpoint in a partner organisation can provide the adversary with a beachhead to stage a larger attack. This makes cyber resilience not just an enterprise concern, but a matter of national and global stability.
In a world where diplomacy is digital and war is waged with both missiles and macros, organisations can no longer afford to view themselves as ‘off the radar’. Whether you’re a government contractor, a financial institution, or a managed service provider, you’re part of the modern battlefield — and how you prepare determines whether you’re a pawn or a player.
Executive Reflections: What Leadership Must Now Embrace
1. Think in Terms of Perception and Narrative
In modern cyber conflict, perception is as valuable as protection. Just as governments shape the narrative during kinetic conflicts to maintain public trust and international support, organisations must control the story during and after a cyber incident. This means preparing not just technical playbooks, but also communication strategies for media, regulators, and shareholders. Reputation, not just recovery, is now part of the cyber risk equation.
2. Detect the Intent, Not Just the Indicator
Many detection systems focus on known indicators of compromise (IOCs) — hash values, IP addresses, or domain names. But sophisticated actors rarely reuse them. The key is to understand and anticipate adversary behaviours. What does credential dumping look like in your environment? What’s your baseline for PowerShell usage? Detecting intent means using behavioural analytics, cross-domain correlation, and threat hunting to spot the why, not just the what.
3. Operate Like an Intelligence Team, Not a Helpdesk
Today’s security teams must mirror the structure and mission of national intelligence agencies. It’s not enough to respond — teams must proactively hunt, assess geopolitical risk, map adversary infrastructure, and maintain operational readiness. Threat modelling, red teaming, and external telemetry should be part of weekly practice, not yearly audits. Cyber defence isn’t IT support — it’s a continuous game of outthinking the adversary.
From IT Hygiene to Strategic Command — Rethinking the Role of the CISO
In most organisations, cybersecurity is still viewed through the lens of operational maintenance: patching systems, managing vendors, responding to alerts. It’s risk mitigation at best — box-ticking at worst.
But in today’s threat landscape, that mindset is dangerously outdated.
Just as military generals don’t win wars by only fixing broken radios or refueling tanks, CISOs won’t outsmart APTs by merely updating AV definitions or waiting for alerts. Cyber defence today requires the same intellectual frameworks that underpin military and geopolitical strategy:
Game Theory — Every move your organisation makes — deploying new defences, changing architecture, disclosing a breach — signals intent to adversaries. Understanding the adversary’s incentives, likely moves, and deterrence thresholds is essential.
Deterrence — Like nuclear deterrence in geopolitics, cyber deterrence isn’t about stopping every breach — it’s about making your organisation such an expensive or unattractive target that the attacker moves on.
Deception — In war, deception wins battles. Feints, misinformation, and camouflage confuse and slow the enemy. Cybersecurity can do the same through honeypots, canary tokens, and misleading lateral movement traps.
Perception — How stakeholders perceive your readiness, your transparency, and your recovery posture shapes your fate after an incident. Boards must understand that cyber response is as much PR as IR.
The Modern Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
The modern CISO isn’t a GRC expert. They are a strategist, a diplomat, and a systems thinker. They coordinate defence the way generals manage battlefronts: with intelligence, foresight, and command over limited resources.
It’s time boards see cybersecurity not as a department — but as a posture. And it’s time CISOs are trained, empowered, and supported as strategic operators — not just responders.
Just as Iran called on its allies and the wider Axis of Resistance, many organisations must rely on external support to navigate complex incidents. Calling in the ‘big brother’ — the United States — is equivalent to escalating to your Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) or external Incident Response (IR) team. Having one ready could be the difference between containment and catastrophe.
Kinetic wars are often wars of attrition — a test of endurance and sustained damage. In cybersecurity, this maps to the concept of cyber resilience: how long can you maintain operations under duress? If your primary defences are compromised, do you have the redundancies, processes, and plans to stay afloat?
The targeting of critical infrastructure — fuel depots, communication hubs, intelligence headquarters — is akin to attackers in cyberspace disabling EDR agents, taking down admin consoles, or killing endpoint processes. The goal is the same: to blind the defenders and accelerate the path to control.
When Israel defends against missile attacks, not every incoming threat is blocked. The Iron Dome may miss some. This is cybersecurity’s harsh truth too: no system is 100% impenetrable. Defence will fail at some point — which is why cyber resilience is not optional. It is the fail-safe that determines whether your business survives an attack or becomes its casualty.
And finally, Israel’s use of drones launched from within Iranian airspace mirrors the advanced stage of cyber attacks where the adversary has already breached internal systems. They’ve bypassed your perimeter, established a beachhead, escalated privileges, and are now executing operations from inside your network — where implicit trust and reduced scrutiny create the perfect environment for impact.
How Do You Know You’ve Removed the Threat?
The truth is, many organisations never truly know the full scope or persistence of an attack. Unless you conduct an independent forensic investigation, remnants of the compromise may linger silently, waiting to reemerge.
This is why CyberStash’s Compromise Assessment capability exists. It’s designed to validate whether your defences have fully removed the adversary — or merely pushed them further underground. By leveraging advanced telemetry, threat hunting, and forensic methodologies, we help you draw a definitive line under the breach and restore trust in your environment.
→ Learn more: Contact our team to discuss how we can support your real-time defenses and incident and post-breach recovery.
Whether you’re a logistics company in Brisbane or a legal firm in Singapore, you’re already in the theatre. You’re a proxy. You’re a signal. You’re a potential stepping stone for adversaries with larger goals. The war may not start with you — but you might still become part of the battlefield.