“The keyboard is now a weapon of war.”
The statement from UK Defence Secretary John Healey, as he committed £1 billion to a new AI and cyber unit, was a signal to every organisation operating in today’s digital world. Warfare, as we know it, has changed. The battlefield has changed. And it now extends into the systems, devices and connections that power everyday businesses.
Thanks to AI, attacks are faster, more targeted and increasingly sophisticated. As the lines between the physical and digital blur, the threat is no longer isolated to governments or critical national infrastructure. Every organisation is now at risk. Understanding your cyber exposure is the key to staying ahead.
This isn’t just a buzzword either; it’s about knowing where you stand and what’s at risk. Knowing every asset, every connection, every potential weakness across your digital ecosystem is now the first step in building a defence that can keep pace with modern threats.
But before you can manage your exposure, you need to understand what’s driving it – and why the modern attack surface is so difficult to defend.
The evolving cyber battlefield
The modern attack surface isn’t just growing, it’s multiplying. From IoT and OT systems to cloud infrastructure, mobile workforces and remote access tools, every new connection expands the digital terrain. And with it, the number of potential entry points for attackers.
The problem is that many of these connections are misunderstood, unmanaged or simply overlooked. From building management systems to legacy industrial controls to third-party devices, each can become a blind spot. And attackers know it. They don’t waste time on the hardest targets. They look for the easiest way in: an unpatched system, a forgotten endpoint, a misconfigured tool.
This is especially true in operational environments, where legacy systems and IoT devices are deeply embedded in critical workflows. These systems weren’t built with security in mind, and in many cases, they can’t be patched or taken offline for updates. That makes them ideal targets for attackers looking to exploit vulnerabilities. The recent string of cyberattacks on high street retailers, like M&S, is a case in point. The breach at M&S disrupted online orders for nearly two months, customer data was compromised, and the company now faces an estimated £300 million hit to operating profits alongside reputational damage.
Meanwhile, Europol warns of a cybercriminal ecosystem that’s splintering and multiplying. As law enforcement disrupts ransomware groups and dark web marketplaces, new variants emerge – faster, more agile, and harder to track. The result is a chaotic threat landscape where attacks evolve quicker than defences can adapt. This instability is fuelling a surge in AI-driven cybercrime targeting the most vulnerable parts of digital infrastructure: E-merchants, supply chains and operational systems that lack the resources or resilience to respond. It’s no wonder that UK organisations are now paying an average of £5.6 million in ransomware demands, with one in eight organisations paying over £7.9 million for a single attack.
And behind many of these attacks are nation-state actors with far more than profit in mind. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre recently confirmed that Russian intelligence has been targeting public and private organisations since 2022, hitting sectors like defence, transport and IT services. These attacks aim to disrupt, destabilise and exploit the nation as a whole.
So, what’s the solution?
Building a proactive shield
Reacting after the fact is no longer enough. By the time an alert is triggered, the damage may already be done. That’s why more organisations are shifting their focus from incident response to exposure management. It’s about building defences that start with understanding, not the aftermath.
Cyber exposure management is the framework behind that shift. It’s not a tool or a dashboard, it’s a different and more strategic approach to continuously identifying, assessing, prioritising and reducing cyber risk across an organisation’s entire ecosystem. From IT to OT, cloud to on-prem, it brings together the full picture of your environment so you can act before threats take hold.
And it all starts with contextual awareness: knowing what’s in your environment, how it’s connected and where the weak points are. Again, this is just the start. What matters most from here is contextual intelligence. This is about understanding what each asset does, how critical it is to operations, how it behaves under normal conditions and, importantly, what it’s connected to.
For example, a modern retail environment often includes everything from CCTV cameras and electric car charging stations to point-of-sale readers and self-checkout kiosks. Each of these technologies introduces new pathways for attacks, but also new dependencies. Without understanding how they interact, what data they handle and how they impact operations, it’s impossible to prioritise risk effectively.
This becomes incredibly important across sectors where operational resilience is non-negotiable, such as healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and yes, retail. These environments are often a patchwork of legacy systems, IoT devices, third-party platforms and cloud services. Traditional security tools weren’t built to handle that complexity. Exposure management simply helps make sense of them.
By consolidating data from across the environment and layering it with contextual intelligence, cyber exposure management allows security teams to move beyond passive monitoring. It’s not just about seeing more, it’s about knowing what matters and acting on it. That means identifying risks earlier, prioritising them more effectively and taking action before they escalate.
Increasingly, this is where AI plays a key role. As attackers use machine learning to automate reconnaissance and adapt malware in real-time, defenders must respond in kind. AI-driven exposure management can process vast volumes of asset and threat data, automatically classify devices and surface the most urgent risks often before they’re exploited. But the real value lies in what happens next. With a deeper understanding of their environment, organisations can work across the wider ecosystem to anticipate where threats are likely to emerge and take steps to harden those areas in advance.
Mastering your digital defence
Effective and modern cybersecurity is shifting to shaping the battlefield before threats even arrive. That’s down to the value of understanding your cyber exposure. After all, it’s not just about knowing what’s in your environment, it’s about knowing how it all fits together – what’s exposed, what’s critical and where the next threat is likely to emerge.
This level of awareness transforms cybersecurity from a defensive scramble into something far more effective. It gives leaders the clarity to focus on what matters, act earlier and build resilience into every decision before threats can take hold.
About the Author
Alex Mosher is President at Armis. Armis, the cyber exposure management & security company, protects the entire attack surface and manages an organization’s cyber risk exposure in real time. In a rapidly evolving, perimeter-less world, Armis ensures that organizations continuously see, protect and manage all critical assets – from the ground to the cloud. Armis secures Fortune 100, 200 and 500 companies as well as national governments, state and local entities to help keep critical infrastructure, economies and society stay safe and secure 24/7.
