The defining moments of a cyber incident are not measured by how many alerts were generated or how advanced your detections were. They are defined by what happens next. Who escalates? How quickly? Is the right person on-call? Is the scope understood? Is the communication plan clear?

In critical situations, performance depends on more than just having the right tools. What truly determines the outcome is how clearly your team can act, how fast they can escalate, and how effectively they can contain the threat. When pressure hits, teams don’t rise to the level of their technology. They fall to the level of their incident response plan.

The gap isn’t in the tooling. It’s in the operational readiness. And in cybersecurity, that’s where most of the real risk lives.

Common Incident Response Failures and How to Fix Them

Even well-resourced organisations can struggle to respond effectively if response readiness is not treated as a core capability. Detection may function as intended, but it is only the starting point. What follows determines whether a situation is contained quickly or escalates into a business-critical crisis.

Common breakdown points include:

• Undefined ownership in the first 15 minutes. There is confusion around who takes the lead and how quickly decisions can be made.
  
• Ambiguous escalation pathways. If a key individual is unavailable, it is unclear who steps in, leading to delays.
  
• Fragmented visibility. Logs are siloed, alerts lack context, and investigations stall due to missing or inaccessible data.
  
• Over-reliance on specific individuals. One or two people become critical dependencies, increasing operational risk.
  
• Manual communications and reporting. Critical minutes are lost compiling stakeholder updates rather than executing the response.

These aren’t failures of technology. They’re the result of untested, underdeveloped incident response processes and a lack of operational readiness. In most environments, it’s the assumption that plans will hold under pressure that becomes the greatest vulnerability.

Response Isn’t a Product. It’s a Capability.

Building a capable response function requires more than drafting a plan. It involves embedding response into the day-to-day fabric of operations and maintaining it through regular validation.

Organisations with mature cybersecurity risk management approaches typically do the following:

• Conduct structured response simulations, not just tabletop exercises
  
• Define clear roles and thresholds for escalation
  
• Test tooling in real-world conditions, not only during onboarding
  
• Centralise telemetry and make it actionable in real time
  
• Run formal post-incident reviews and adapt based on findings
  

This is where most teams fall short. They invest in tooling but don’t embed the response muscle to match. The result is a disconnect; visibility without action, alerts without ownership.

Five Tactical Questions to Assess Cybersecurity Readiness

If you’re unsure where to begin, here are five questions we ask when assessing an organisation’s readiness:

1. If a ransomware alert were triggered right now, who would respond, and how quickly?
   
2. Are your logs centralised, accessible, and useful during a live investigation?
   
3. Can critical incidents be escalated after hours without confusion or delay?
   
4. Do you have a consistent method for documenting incidents as they unfold?
   
5. Have you recently reviewed a past incident to identify and resolve gaps in speed or clarity?

If any of these questions are difficult to answer confidently, it may be time to prioritise a response maturity review.

Why a Hybrid SOC is Essential to Modern MDR

Effective Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is about more than just identifying threats. It’s about responding quickly and decisively when incidents occur. A Hybrid SOC model plays a critical role in enabling that response.

By combining internal knowledge with external expertise, a hybrid approach empowers teams to act with greater speed, clarity, and confidence,  all while maintaining visibility and control.

This model doesn’t replace your internal capability. It strengthens it, extending your team with the right people, processes, and insights to ensure you’re ready when it matters most.

Test Your First 30 Minutes With Our Experts

When an incident strikes, you don’t need more alerts,  you need a trusted partner who knows how to respond. Cube Cyber delivers just that.

Cube Cyber serves as a trusted cybersecurity partner for organisations that want to strengthen their response capability without increasing internal complexity. Our co-managed Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service operates as an extension of your team, providing 24/7 visibility, expert-led triage, and real-time escalation from our Brisbane-based Security Operations Centre.

Book your MDR Readiness Assessment to identify hidden gaps and get expert, actionable recommendations tailored to your environment,  before the next breach puts your team to the test.

How resilient is your network security? Following recent tensions between Russia and a number of NATO member countries, Russian state-sponsored cyber actors have begun targeting network infrastructure devices belonging to governments and organisations of countries such as the US, UK and Australia.

The U.K. and the U.S. have blamed Russian hackers for a campaign aimed at taking control of routers inside government, critical infrastructure, internet service providers and within small and home offices. The warning came in a joint announcement from British intelligence, the National Security Council (NSC), the DHS and the FBI.

Specifically, these attacks are targeting devices such as Wide Area Network (WAN) routers that tend to reside on the external or outside of firewalls.

But how? In order to infiltrate these devices, hackers are using compromised routers to conduct spoofing (i.e., man-in-the-middle) activity to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks, and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations.

So, if such major organisations are being proven to be vulnerable, this then raises the question ‘how can I ensure my small-scale business data is protected?’ To answer this question, let’s first take a look at some common network security vulnerabilities.

Network vulnerabilities

Network devices such as external routers are easy targets, so if not correctly secured and hardened, they can provide attackers with an excellent point at which they can access your data. Once installed, many network devices are not maintained at the same security level as other general-purpose desktops and servers. In addition to this, the following factors can also contribute to the vulnerability of network devices:

• Few network devices-especially SOHO and residential-class routers are subject to the same level of integrity-maintenance as devices located at head-office, these maintenance activities would include regular patching and software updates.
• Manufacturers build and distribute these network devices with exploitable services, which are enabled for ease of installation, operation, and maintenance.
• Owners and operators of network devices do not change vendor default settings or security harden them for operations.
• ISPs do not replace equipment on a customer’s property when that equipment is no longer supported by the manufacturer or vendor.
• Owners and operators often overlook network devices when they investigate, examine for intruders, and restore general-purpose hosts after cyber intrusions.

So how can you protect your business?

Protecting your business from hackers and malicious attacks don’t need to be stressful or even costly. In order to protect your data and safeguard your networks, our team recommend some general mitigation techniques that can be employed to ensure your external devices such as Internet routers are correctly hardened and not an easy target.

• Do not allow unencrypted plaintext management protocols (e.g. Telnet) to enter an organization from the Internet. When encrypted protocols such as SSH, HTTPS, or TLS are not possible, management activities from outside the organization should be done through an encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) where both ends are mutually authenticated.
• Do not allow Internet access to the management interface of any network device. The best practice is to block Internet-sourced access to the device management interface and restrict device management to an internal trusted and whitelisted host or LAN. If access to the management interface cannot be restricted to an internal trusted network, restrict remote management access via encrypted VPN capability where both ends are mutually authenticated. Whitelist the network or host from which the VPN connection is allowed and deny all others.
• Disable legacy unencrypted protocols such as Telnet and SNMPv1 or v2c. Where possible, use modern encrypted protocols such as SSHv2 and SNMPv3. Harden the encrypted protocols based on current best security practice. Where possible, replace legacy devices that cannot be configured to use modern protocols.
• Immediately change default passwords and enforce a strong password policy. Do not reuse the same password across multiple devices. Where possible, avoid legacy password-based authentication, and implement two-factor authentication based on public-private keys.

As an initial step, the team at Cube Cyber can remotely scan your external network infrastructure to ensure a basic level of security is in place and insecure protocols and services are identified where in use. We will also recommend ways to secure and harden your external infrastructure to ensure your business assets are protected and your peace of mind restored.

For more information about securing your network to mitigate risk and prevent data breaches, have a chat with the experts at Cube Cyber today on 1300 085 366 or online via this link.

What is the Cisco Advanced Architecture Specialisation Program?

The Cisco Advanced Architecture Specialisation program identifies highly specialised partners that can work with customers to design and implement Cisco most advanced technology solutions.

The Cisco Advanced Security Architecture Specialisation acknowledges organisations who have achieved comprehensive and specialised knowledge providing solutions used to detect and mitigate cyber security threats. Continually setting the industry standard for cybersecurity, Cisco provides partners with comprehensive training and upskilling required to enhance sales, design and technical knowledge in addition to validation of this knowledge through annual recertification and arbitrary auditing.

Why should you choose a certified cyber security provider?

When installing complex business security systems, design, deployment and maintenance must be completed with absolute precision to ensure seamless integration with your environment, which is why using a certified partner is so essential.

As all partners are required to undergo rigorous training and strict assessment in order to obtain their certification, and are required to re-certify on a yearly basis, you can be confident that they have the most advanced skills and knowledge to deploy and manage Cisco’s industry-leading systems.

Moreover, through undertaking continuous retraining and upskilling, Cisco’s partners are always at the forefront of systems and technological advances. For this reason, Cisco partners are better equipped to provide customised cybersecurity solutions to align with technical and other business requirements.

For many businesses, having an in-house IT team isn’t feasible for many reasons ranging from practicality to affordability and beyond. Engaging an outsourced Cisco partner allows you to be confident that you’ll receive the most up-to-date advice and support by an industry leading professional.

Cisco Australia’s Cyber Security Partner Specialist, Anthony Miller said “In today’s world where cyber threats can go undetected in a customer network for over 100 days, it is vital that organisations use specialised Partners such as Cube Cyber who have undergone significant training around Cisco’s security solutions. These partners bring unique abilities to be able to build out security solutions that leverage the integrations Cisco has built throughout our product set. In addition, leveraging Cisco’s Threat Research arm (TALOS) who has over 250 threat researchers and blocking 20 billion threats daily, TALOS is the co-ordination point for all Cisco’s Security Products. Cisco’s TALOS provides you access to the richest set of threat intelligence in the world. So, if we see something malicious anywhere in the world, we can block everywhere – see once, block everywhere.”

What should you expect from a cybersecurity provider?

When approaching cybersecurity providers, you want to ensure they’re equipped to provide and maintain the best possible solution for your individual business needs. As such, you should expect your potential provider to have a strong reputation in the industry paired with a multitude of experience in design, implementation and support of security systems that safeguard business information and reputation. To achieve this, they should be able to demonstrate a blended technology portfolio that utilises products and systems from industry leading security providers.

Cube Cyber

Through rigorous training and certification, Cube Cyber has attained the status of Advanced Security Architecture Specialisation from Cisco. This specialisation identifies Cube Cyber as having satisfied Cisco’s stringent requirements to design, sell and deploy complex Cisco security solutions. Through achieving such a high level of certification, Cube Cyber has demonstrated our ability to deliver sophisticated solutions through superior sales capabilities, technological knowledge and service offerings. Our portfolio of previous works demonstrates our superior expertise and proven track record on complex cybersecurity projects whilst always maintaining a best-for-business attitude. Our clients depend on our team to understand their individual challenges and provide recommendations for the most appropriate and secure cybersecurity solutions for their unique needs.

Cube Cyber Cisco Specialisations

Through attaining a Cisco Advanced Security Architecture partner status, Cube Cyber are certified to deliver the following products and services from Cisco:

Advanced Malware Protection (AMP)

Endpoint Security & VPN Security Clients

Network Visibility and Enforcement using Identity Services Engine

Next Generation Firewalls

Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems

Cloud Security, Web Security & Email Security

Security Management

Don’t leave your data security to chance! If you’re ready to take control of your vital business information, get in touch with the experts at Cube Cyber and organise your complimentary cybersecurity assessment today on 1300 085 366.