What Is Cybersecurity? Threats, Trends, Regulations, and Best Practices

With cybersecurity spending forecasted grow 15% this year, effective cyber defenses are a universal objective – not a niche priority.  

But staying ahead of modern cyber threats can feel like an uphill battle. Between evolving adversary tactics, fragmented legacy tooling, and ever-expanding networks, even well-resourced teams are struggling to secure their dynamic digital landscapes.  

We’ll break down what cybersecurity is, why it’s more important than ever, explore the trends shaping the threat landscape, and outline core best practices.  

What Is Cybersecurity?  

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting IT networks, devices, applications, and data from malicious activities such as data breaches and ransomware.  

The main goal of cybersecurity is to prevent unauthorized access and criminal usage of systems and data. A strong cybersecurity program incorporates technical solutions like multi-factor authentication (MFA), firewalls, network segmentation, and various detection and response solutions.  

Creating strong passwords and updating them often, keeping systems and applications up to date, and educating users to look out for suspicious emails are some of the operational ways organizations can keep their networks and data safe. 

Why Is Cybersecurity Important?  

Cyberattacks are no longer rare or confined to specific sectors. In 2024, the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million globally, with typical costs in some regions and industries hovering closer to $9 million. Attacks targeting financial systems, healthcare infrastructure, critical services, and supply chains have made clear that cybersecurity is not just an IT issue – it's a business risk, a compliance concern, and even a threat to everyday people.  

In the wake of high-profile ransomware attacks and stealthy supply chain intrusions, cybersecurity is vital not just for preventing financial loss or downtime but also for ensuring trust, compliance, and operational resilience. 

Types of Cyber Threats  

Cyber threats are diverse, sophisticated, and constantly evolving. Some common categories include:  

Identity-Based Threats  

Attackers often exploit weak, reused, or stolen credentials to impersonate users and gain initial access to systems. In fact, stolen credentials are the number one initial action used by hackers in a breach. These identity-based intrusions are especially dangerous when privileged or service accounts are compromised. 

Ransomware  

Over 75% of security leaders say ransomware is their top cybersecurity concern – and for good reason. Ransomware encrypts critical data and systems, demanding payment to restore access. Variants today often include data exfiltration and double extortion tactics. 

Phishing  

Phishing campaigns use deceptive emails or messages to trick users into revealing credentials or installing malware. Modern phishing attacks often bypass traditional detection tools, one of the many ways hackers bypass legacy defenses.  

Lateral Movement 

Once inside the network, attackers move laterally to find and exploit critical systems. Common lateral movement techniques fall into categories like session hijacking, alternate authentication, or remote services tactics, where hackers use legitimate protocols such as SMB, RDP, and RPC to blend in with normal traffic.  

Privilege Escalation  

Adversaries seek to elevate access by exploiting misconfigurations or vulnerabilities, often targeting service accounts or admin users with excessive privileges. 

Zero-Day Attacks  

Zero-day vulnerabilities are flaws unknown to vendors. The term “zero day” itself denotes the number of days the vulnerability was known to a vendor before being exploited. These vulnerabilities give attackers a temporary advantage and are especially dangerous because no patch or defense may yet exist, leaving organizations without proactive controls defenseless. And, as modern networks have larger, more complex footprints that create more attack vectors (think hybrid, on-prem, and cloud environments with countless devices connecting to the network), zero-day attacks can easily disrupt critical systems and operations.  

Insider Threats 

Malicious or careless insiders, like employees or vendors, can pose risks due to their authorized access to internal systems. Because insiders do not have to breach perimeter defenses and already have legitimate credentials, malicious actions are much harder to detect, making them much harder to stop.  

Top Cybersecurity Trends: The Evolving Threat Landscape 

Attackers are more sophisticated and well-resourced than ever. In 2025, global ransomware costs are expected to reach $57 billion – that means cybercriminals have the means and motivation to evolve their strategies.  

While the threat landscape is constantly shifting, some of today’s top trends include:  

Automated Attacks 

Attackers increasingly use automation and AI to scan for vulnerabilities and launch large-scale attacks or tailor social engineering schemes with minimal manual input. These tools can rapidly test for misconfigurations, exposed ports, or unpatched systems across thousands of targets, increasing the speed and scale of a compromise. 

Living off the Land  

Many modern attackers avoid raising alarms by "living off the land," using legitimate tools like PowerShell, PsExec, and WMI. This makes them harder to detect and allows them to persist for extended periods, allowing the attacker to explore the network and find vulnerabilities to target. Then, they move laterally across the network to steal sensitive data and exploit organizations.  

Supply Chain Exploits 

Adversaries target third-party vendors, MSPs, or software providers to breach multiple downstream victims. These attacks are particularly damaging because they bypass conventional access controls and EDR tools.  

Identity-Centric Attacks 

Service accounts, admin credentials, and identity tokens are highly sought after by attackers – and that’s not about to change. As Chris Boehm, field CTO for the Americas at Zero Networks put it, “Identity is the new perimeter, but most networks were never designed to handle identity as a segmentation boundary.”  

Gaining access to these accounts enables hackers to escalate privileges and impersonate trusted users. Identity is the new perimeter, and it’s under siege; most organizations still lack key defenses to lock down identity vulnerabilities.  

Modern Cybersecurity Challenges and Why Traditional Defenses Fail 

In our digital-first world, cybersecurity is critical but it’s not easy. Despite rising investments, globally reported data breaches rose more than 300% last year.  

What’s going wrong? Most security teams are struggling to secure sprawling networks with a patchwork of point solutions that require too much manual work without effectively protecting against modern threats.  

In other words, piecemeal updates to traditional security strategies aren’t cutting it.  

Most Organizations Lack Holistic Security  

Most cybersecurity tech stacks are noisy and provide a siloed view: organizations have point tools in place that were purpose-built to solve a specific problem but were not purpose-built to address cyber risk management in a holistic way.  

Existing point solutions may flag threats or anomalies but fail to look at the enterprise as a whole, understanding the hundreds of activities that take place each day and correlating it with the organization’s intrinsic risk. Plus, they overwhelm security teams with alerts, making it harder and harder to discern and prioritize meaningful risk. 

Fragmented security controls give attackers room to evade detection and make immediate threat containment nearly impossible. 

Traditional Security Tools Require Too Much Manual Work  

Legacy security tools rely on static configurations, requiring endless manual effort to define policies, monitor activity, and adjust to network changes. Rule-based systems don’t scale in dynamic environments and are prone to misconfigurations. 

Meanwhile, the cybersecurity skills gap grows wider every day – two-thirds of organizations face additional risks due to global cyber talent shortages. Without the staff or bandwidth to manage labor-intensive security tools, organizations need to embrace modern solutions with robust automation capabilities.  

Perimeter-Based Defenses Aren’t Enough  

The traditional “castle-and-moat” model assumes that threats stay outside the network and trusted users operate inside. But cloud applications, BYOD policies, remote work, and more have erased those boundaries.  

Cybersecurity is no longer as simple as keeping the bad people out. Now, security teams have to treat all traffic as potentially risky; this requires evolving beyond the flat architectures of the past and implementing network segmentation.  

Sprawling Networks Expand Attack Surfaces 

IT and security pros today are tasked with securing massive networks – 64% of cyber professionals say there are more than 5,000 assets connected to their corporate networks.  

On top of this, business growth often leads to complex, interconnected environments with overlapping systems, legacy infrastructure, and shadow IT. This sprawl introduces unmanaged endpoints, forgotten credentials, and hidden risks that attackers exploit. 

These ever-expanding attack surfaces introduce another challenge: data overload. With an influx of data sources, security teams struggle to draw the insights needed to show how attacks unfold. Forty percent of security teams say their attack surface has grown in recent years; nearly the same percentage agree the volume and complexity of alerts has increased.  

Modern Attackers Evade Detection 

As mentioned, adversaries have adapted to traditional monitoring – now, the bad guys know how to blend in.  

Low and slow attacks have become the new norm, even in DDoS attacks. Cybercriminals purposely take their time, spreading their malicious activity over the course of days, weeks, or months to avoid detection. By using the noise generated by benign operational activity as a backdrop, cybercriminals can blend into day-to-day activity without being noticed.  

Cybersecurity Regulations and Frameworks Are Driving Change  

For organizations across all sectors, cybersecurity is a matter of regulatory obligation. A growing number of laws and industry frameworks require security teams to implement specific technical safeguards to reduce risk, ensure resilience, and demonstrate due diligence. 

HIPAA 

Healthcare organizations subject to HIPAA must implement controls to secure electronic protected health information (ePHI) – key cybersecurity requirements for HIPAA compliance include: 

• Implement technical and administrative policies and procedures to ensure only authorized users have access to PHI 
• Ensure third-party service providers implement standards consistent with HIPAA mandates 
• Enforce robust MFA for access to internal networks 

PCI DSS 

PCI DSS mandates that any organization handling payment card data must secure cardholder environments through network segmentation, encryption, and MFA.  

Specific PCI DSS cybersecurity requirements include: 

• MFA for all access to the Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) 
• Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know 
• Implement robust security protocols to protect cardholder data during transmission over public networks 

DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) 

The EU’s DORA regulation is transforming cybersecurity expectations across the financial sector. To achieve DORA compliance with rules articulated in the regulatory technical standards (RTS) for risk management, organizations need:  

• Separation of production environments from development, testing, and other non-production environments 
• Network security management strategies including the segregation and segmentation of systems and networks, as well as measures to isolate subnetworks, network components, and devices 
• Identity management policies and procedures leveraging automation where possible 

NYDFS (23 NYCRR Part 500) 

This New York regulation requires financial institutions to limit privileged access, monitor third-party connections, and respond swiftly to security incidents.  

Key mandates for NYDFS compliance revolve around: 

• Limiting and regularly reviewing access privileges 
• Implementing MFA for users accessing internal networks from an external network 
• Maintaining a cybersecurity program capable of identifying, protecting against, detecting, responding to, and recovering from cybersecurity incidents 

NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 

The NIST CSF is a widely adopted framework offering a structured approach to risk management through five core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.  

Among other things, NIST CSF compliance requires that organizations: 

• Limit asset access to authorized users, services, and hardware with identity-based access controls  
• Control communication at both external and internal network boundaries to enable the minimum necessary communications 
• Prevent the expansion of a cyber incident and mitigate its effects, automating threat containment when possible 

While the NIST CSF outlines five core functions, Robert Bigman, the CIA’s first CISO, only considers one of them key: 

“The NIST cybersecurity framework identifies five main concurrent and continuous functions for cybersecurity: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover. To me, there’s only one that matters: Protect. And to hackers, there’s only one that matters: how well you are protecting your network and systems. Organizations need to be primarily focused on data and system protections. Yes, you do want a response program, a training program, and other things in cybersecurity, but you better focus on Protect.” 

Alignment with these and other frameworks not only improves organizational security but also enhances audit readiness, streamlines cyber insurance compliance, and enhances resilience against evolving threats. 

Cybersecurity Best Practices 

To effectively address the shifting threat landscape, foundational cybersecurity best practices boil down to a few key takeaways.  

Embrace a Zero Trust Mindset  

Nine out of ten cyber pros say Zero Trust is key to enhancing overall security posture, but before implementing a Zero Trust security strategy in practice organizations must embrace a Zero Trust mindset. According to Dr. Chase Cunningham, aka Dr. Zero Trust, “We're spending more money ... to try and solve the problem. However, some folks are still not accepting that a breach is an inevitability and they're not applying controls to limit the scope of the breach, if you will. And I think that's where we get a lot of this wrong. I tell people all the time when I'm talking zero trust: accept breach.” 

This approach assumes that threats can emerge from both inside and outside the network and that no user or system should be trusted by default. Instead, every request for access must be verified based on identity, device, and behavior. Implementing Zero Trust means enforcing least-privilege access controls and using just-in-time MFA to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive systems – and only when necessary. 

Build a Layered Defense  

A layered defense strategy combines multiple security controls, each reinforcing the other, to ensure that if one element is bypassed, another stands ready to contain the threat. 

A key pillar of proactive cyber defense is microsegmentation, which isolates assets and enforces least-privilege access across environments. Unlike traditional segmentation approaches, modern microsegmentation dynamically learns network behavior and automatically creates and enforces policies.  

In parallel, next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) remain critical for monitoring, filtering, and controlling traffic at the perimeter and between network zones. When combined, these solutions enable robust protection across every dimension of network traffic. Albert Estevez, Field CTO at Zero Networks says, "When a hacker enters a network protected with this holistic security combination, they won’t be able to move laterally or really do anything – they'll be left stranded and penniless." 

Streamline Security Strategies  

Modern networks are complex, and security strategies must evolve to manage this complexity without overwhelming IT teams. Instead of relying on a fragmented collection of point solutions, organizations need unified platforms that centralize visibility and automate key cybersecurity functions.  

Automation plays a critical role here – by dynamically updating policies, blocking lateral movement in real time, and ensuring consistent enforcement across cloud, on-premises, and remote environments, next-gen solutions reduce manual workload while strengthening resilience. 

How Zero Networks Simplifies Cybersecurity  

Traditional microsegmentation solutions are notoriously complex to implement and difficult to manage. Zero Networks is different – with our automated microsegmentation solution, we’re shifting the balance of power in cybersecurity, putting control back in the hands of defenders.  

By automating asset tagging and grouping, and policy creation and enforcement, Zero enables organizations to: 

• Microsegment in days, not years 
• Instantly contain threats and stop lateral movement 
• Eliminate excessive privileges and dynamically close privileged ports  

Take a self-guided product tour for an inside look at the next generation of cybersecurity solutions.