Five defender priorities from the Talos Year in Review

With attackers moving faster than ever, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This blog breaks down five practical priorities from the Cisco Talos 2025 Year in Review to help defenders focus and prioritize, amidst all the noise.

A familiar theme in security right now is that the barrier to entry for attackers is at an all-time low. AI tools can spin up websites within minutes that can easily direct data to disposable external data stores and send alerts for new captures — all without code.   One such case was recently detailed in the latest  Cisco Talos Incident Response Quarterly Trends  report. Proof-of-concept code for exploiting new vulnerabilities used to take attackers months to create. Now they take hours. All of this is very concerning for defenders.

Yesterday, my colleague told me about a recent conference Q&A he hosted, where he was asked to provide some hope to those in the room who have faced an overwhelming amount of change in recent months.   His answer was to focus on the here and now. Focus on what you can control, and what you have influence over.