Cybersecurity.webp "Anna Morrison")
June 24, 2025
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Cyberattacks have shifted from being occasional challenges to persistent threats. According to the UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024, over 70% of large enterprises and 50% of medium-sized firms faced cyber incidents last year. Yet, only 30% conduct regular risk assessments, leaving key vulnerabilities exposed.
The moment you adapt to one threat, it learns from your behavior and evolves into something more sophisticated. As organizations adopt cloud platforms, remote access, and third-party integrations, new and often underestimated cybersecurity vulnerabilities emerge. Threats are evolving faster than many defence strategies can keep up with. This article highlights common cybersecurity gaps, top business risks, and critical IT vulnerabilities. It also addresses 2025 data security challenges and highlights the importance of conducting regular risk assessments to achieve long-term resilience.
Cybersecurity gaps often begin as small oversights but can quickly escalate into serious threats. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 highlights misconfigured cloud settings, outdated software, and limited asset visibility as some of the most common weaknesses in enterprise security.
These flaws often remain hidden until they are exploited, such as a misconfigured firewall or an unmonitored device becoming an entry point for malicious activity. As digital infrastructure expands across cloud and hybrid environments, these vulnerabilities tend to scale quietly.
Unnoticed cybersecurity gaps can lead to data breaches, financial loss, fines, and reputational harm. A single flaw can allow attackers to steal data, deploy ransomware, or disrupt operations, especially in high-risk industries.
The rapid advancements and increasing adoption of digital platforms globally are matched by an equally evolving cyberthreat landscape. Cybercrime today is increasing not just in scale but also in sophistication. As our digital footprints widen, so does the potential attack surface for nefarious actors. It is essential that we work together to address this growing menace. The borderless nature of the internet necessitates collaboration across various jurisdictional limitations to ensure that threat actors have no safe haven for their evil activities.
Secretary of Information and Communications Technology of the Philippines.
Despite 61% of leaders identifying cybersecurity as the top risk for 2025, many organizations still face critical blind spots. As AI, cloud, and connected technologies expand the attack surface, building end-to-end cyber resilience is more urgent than ever, starting with addressing these seven key cybersecurity gaps.
Many enterprises still operate without a unified, real-time inventory of their IT and cloud assets. This gap creates a silent but critical vulnerability. Untracked endpoints, SaaS apps, service accounts, and workloads often run outside the scope of security monitoring, leaving exploitable blind spots across the organization.
In hybrid and cloud-native environments, traditional inventory methods, such as spreadsheets, periodic scans, or RMM tools, simply can’t keep pace. They fail to detect dynamic changes in configurations, software deployments, or user permissions. As a result, essential controls such as patch management, access reviews, vulnerability scanning, and incident response become fragmented or misdirected.
Worse still, shadow IT, abandoned infrastructure, and orphaned identities widen the threat surface. These unmanaged elements are often exploited by attackers using sophisticated reconnaissance techniques, privilege escalation, or lateral movement.
Asset visibility isn’t just an operational need, it’s a strategic imperative. It underpins every security function, from risk assessment to zero trust enforcement. By automating asset inventory with real-time monitoring across endpoints, cloud workloads, identities, and configurations, businesses can eliminate guesswork, close security gaps, and enable proactive protection at scale.
Cloud misconfigurations such as publicly accessible storage, overly permissive roles, or exposed management interfaces remain among the most exploited vulnerabilities in modern enterprise environments. These issues often stem from default settings, limited visibility, and the complexity of hybrid or multi-cloud deployments. In many cases, critical logs are disabled or not monitored, making it difficult to detect unauthorized activity promptly.
A high-profile example of such misconfiguration occurred in 2021, when Microsoft Power Apps portals inadvertently exposed the data of 38 million users. Misconfigured permissions in the default settings left sensitive data, including COVID-19 contact tracing information, job applicant records, and vaccination data, publicly accessible online. Affected organizations included government agencies, large corporations, and healthcare institutions. The incident highlighted how even low-code platforms can introduce significant risks when default configurations aren’t properly secured, and when automated security tools, such as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), aren’t in place.
Organizations also frequently fail to audit configurations or deploy automated tools, such as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), which continuously identify misalignments with security policies and compliance standards. Shadow IT and human error contribute to these risks by introducing unmanaged assets outside formal governance processes.
To reduce exposure, enterprises should enforce least-privilege access, enable logging by default, and embed configuration scanning into DevOps workflows. Cloud misconfiguration is not just a technical issue; it represents a systemic risk that must be addressed proactively.
Compromised identities are a primary entry point for attackers. Weak IAM practices, such as stale credentials, overprivileged accounts, weak passwords, and missing multi-factor authentication (MFA), create easy entry points and make lateral movement difficult to detect. With AI-driven phishing and credential theft on the rise, attackers are increasingly targeting identity layers over networks.
A notable example is the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, which severely disrupted fuel distribution across the U.S. East Coast. The breach occurred through a compromised VPN account that lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA). The account was no longer in active use, but had not been deprovisioned, highlighting two critical IAM failures: use of stale credentials and the absence of enforced multi-factor authentication. Once inside, attackers were able to move laterally, ultimately gaining access to critical infrastructure and forcing the company to shut down operations.
Without automated provisioning, regular entitlement reviews, and real-time access governance, enforcing the principle of least privilege becomes nearly impossible. Shadow IT and unmanaged non-human identities further increase exposure. IAM is no longer just one layer of defense, it now defines the perimeter. To strengthen it, organizations must enforce RBAC, adopt just-in-time access, implement PAM and ITDR tools, and ensure full visibility across all identity types.
Delayed patching remains one of the most exploited and underestimated risks in cybersecurity. Even when vulnerabilities are disclosed and fixes are available, organizations often delay implementation due to fears of downtime, complex testing requirements, or concerns around system compatibility, especially in legacy environments. However, attackers exploit these delays with precision, often weaponizing newly disclosed vulnerabilities within days.
Modern ransomware campaigns, zero-day exploits, and supply chain attacks increasingly target unpatched systems, where outdated libraries, kernels, or services act as open doors. Delayed patching is not just a technical lapse; it’s a strategic liability that can lead to compliance violations, reputational damage, and financial loss.
To strengthen cyber hygiene, organizations must automate patch deployment, use live-patching solutions where possible, and embed patching into CI/CD pipelines. Timely patching is not optional; it is foundational to maintaining a secure and resilient digital infrastructure.
DNS tunneling is a stealthy technique that allows attackers to encode and transmit data through DNS queries, often bypassing traditional firewalls and security tools. This method leverages the fact that DNS traffic is almost always permitted through network defenses, as it is essential for resolving web addresses. However, assuming DNS traffic is inherently safe creates a serious security gap. When DNS requests are not properly inspected, filtered, or behaviorally analyzed, they become a blind spot for malicious activity such as command-and-control communication and data exfiltration.
Key misconfigurations and security gaps that enable DNS tunneling include:
No DNS threat intelligence or detection of known tunneling techniques To address this risk, organizations must treat DNS traffic as a potential threat channel and implement layered controls that restrict, monitor, and intelligently inspect DNS communication.
Third-party vendors introduce risk through integrations, remote access, or the handling of sensitive data. Yet, many organizations do not regularly assess or monitor their vendors’ cybersecurity posture. As supply chains become increasingly digitized, attackers are increasingly using vendors as backdoors into larger targets. Without ongoing risk scoring, compliance tracking, vendor tiering, and contractual security clauses, enterprises remain unaware of how vendor behavior affects their risk surface. In addition to cybersecurity exposure, vendor partnerships also present risks that include regulatory non-compliance, operational failures, reputational damage, strategic misalignment, and financial loss, each capable of layered harm if unmanaged. Supply chain attacks are not theoretical; they have already disrupted global operations and undermined trust.
A prime example is the SolarWinds supply chain attack, one of the most significant vendor-related breaches in history. In this incident, attackers compromised SolarWinds’ Orion software updates, which were trusted and widely used by thousands of government agencies and global enterprises, to deliver malware to downstream clients through routine update processes. Because SolarWinds was a trusted vendor, malicious code was unknowingly deployed into secure environments, giving attackers deep access to internal systems. The breach remained undetected for months, impacting critical infrastructure and national security. This case underscores the profound risk of insufficient vendor oversight and the importance of continuous assessment and trust validation.
To reduce exposure, enterprises should automate vendor assessments, assign risk tiers, enforce continuous monitoring, and embed security clauses into contracts, thereby transforming third-party management from a checkbox compliance approach to resilient partnership governance.
When a breach occurs, the speed and coordination of your response can determine whether the incident is contained or spirals into a crisis. Yet, many organizations still lack a structured and tested incident response (IR) plan. This leads to delays in containment, unclear roles, compliance failures, and increased financial and reputational damage. Invensis helps organizations design and operationalize response frameworks tailored to their unique risk profiles and regulatory needs.
Many teams rely on static or outdated playbooks that are disconnected from the evolving threats they face. Others fail to integrate critical stakeholders such as legal, HR, PR, and third-party vendors. Invensis ensures your IR planning is aligned across business units, regularly tested through simulations, and responsive to the latest threat intelligence.
An effective IR plan must be dynamic, cross-functional, regularly tested, and built for continuous learning and adaptation. Partnering with a trusted cybersecurity provider like Invensis ensures your organization is prepared to respond decisively, minimize damage, and recover with confidence.
Cybersecurity readiness doesn’t always require an overhaul. Often, what organisations need is clarity, consistency, and ownership. The following are practical, high-impact actions that directly address today’s most common gaps, grounded in both field experience and industry-recognised frameworks.
Mapping your full digital environment is the first step toward closing security gaps. Many businesses still operate with outdated inventories or untracked endpoints. Using asset discovery tools or internal audits can reveal what’s unmanaged or misconfigured. This baseline helps prioritise and plan mitigation efforts. Regular posture assessments also support audit readiness for security certifications. Our cyber risk assessments and gap analysis map your entire digital ecosystem, pinpointing vulnerabilities and contextualizing them with real-world exploit data. This establishes a solid baseline for prioritizing mitigation efforts and supports ongoing audit readiness for certifications such as ISO 27001, NIST, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA.
Trying to fix everything at once leads to stalled security programs. Prioritise threats based on business risk, data sensitivity, and exploitability. A low-risk legacy server doesn’t require the same level of urgency as a publicly exposed API connected to sensitive customer data. Use a structured risk matrix to guide decisions, ensuring the most dangerous weaknesses are resolved first.
Security controls without accountability tend to degrade quickly. Assign clear owners for tasks like patch management, vendor reviews, and IAM policies. When ownership is distributed and tracked, organisations see better follow-through and faster response to audits. Integrating these responsibilities into KPIs or quarterly goals ensures that security does not become an afterthought.
Modern security platforms often include built-in support for frameworks like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. These tools automate policy enforcement, generate compliance reports, and reduce manual tracking. Choosing tools that align with your regulatory landscape not only enhances efficiency but also minimizes the risk of non-compliance during audits.
Incident response shouldn’t rely on long, unread PDFs. A concise checklist helps teams respond quickly and effectively to breaches. Key elements include escalation paths, legal notification triggers, and initial containment steps. Simpler frameworks are more likely to be used in real-time, reducing confusion when every minute counts.
Even the best technical safeguards can be bypassed by a single careless click. Conduct quarterly security awareness sessions, focusing on phishing, ransomware, and credential hygiene. Utilize interactive simulations, gamified quizzes, and live attack scenarios to keep users engaged and reinforce desired behaviors. Frequent refreshers significantly lower the likelihood of human-driven breaches.
Not every organisation has the in-house resources to manage complex security needs, particularly in areas such as 24/7 monitoring, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and compliance management. Outsourcing cybersecurity services to specialised security partners can offer faster remediation, access to niche expertise, and improved scalability. However, oversight is critical: organisations must define responsibilities clearly, thoroughly vet partners, and maintain audit visibility. When done right, outsourcing becomes a force multiplier rather than a liability.
The most damaging cybersecurity breaches in 2025 won't stem from unknown threats – they’ll come from known gaps left unaddressed. From misconfigured cloud setups to incomplete incident plans, every overlooked weakness is a doorway for exploitation. Closing these gaps demands more than checklists; it requires ownership, risk-driven prioritisation, and expert intervention where needed.
Invensis helps organisations bridge these gaps with tailored security solutions, continuous risk monitoring, and compliance-focused support.
Secure your infrastructure before attackers find the gaps.
Common gaps include outdated asset inventories, misconfigured cloud environments, weak identity and access controls, neglected patch management, and insufficient employee training.
Organisations should conduct risk assessments at least once a year, or whenever significant changes occur in their IT environment, to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Employees are often the first line of defence; well-trained staff recognize phishing attempts and avoid risky behaviours that could expose the organisation to attacks.
While possible, many small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) benefit from outsourcing specific functions, such as 24/7 monitoring or compliance management, due to limited internal resources and expertise.
A clear, actionable incident response plan ensures rapid containment and recovery, minimizing damage and regulatory consequences after a security breach.
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Anna Morrison is an esteemed authority in Chemical & Manufacturing industry, with extensive expertise cultivated over years in the industry. With a nuanced understanding of the intricacies of chemical manufacturing and related services, Anna adeptly navigates complexities. Her proficiency spans diverse sectors within the field, consistently delivering invaluable insights and efficient solutions to optimize operations and ensure regulatory compliance. As a prominent writer in the Chemical & Manufacturing BPO domain, Anna provides concise, practical advice, empowering businesses to streamline processes, enhance productivity, and navigate regulations seamlessly.
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