Short, opinionated pieces from Wolfe Defense Labs on how attackers actually operate in cloud, SaaS, and identity-driven environments—and what boards, CISOs, and engineers need to do differently if they want to survive the next five years.
Use these as inputs to strategy, tabletops, and architecture changes—not as finished doctrine.
Filter notes by focus area. Tags on each card map to a single primary category for browsing.
How attackers turn legitimate cloud features—mail rules, app consents, automation, and shared identities—into long-term persistence with no malware and minimal noise.
Read note →Why most detection stacks produce infinite alerts but little insight, and how to design a small, opinionated signal set that your team can actually investigate.
Read note →Most tabletops are scripted success stories. This note outlines how to design exercises that expose real decision bottlenecks, authority gaps, and blind spots.
Read note →MFA is not a magic shield. When the underlying identity and tenant design is flawed, strong authentication simply protects bad assumptions.
Read note →Why board dashboards, maturity scores, and compliance status often fail to reflect how an organization will actually fare in a serious incident—and what to measure instead.
Read note →As organizations plug LLMs into internal data and workflows, models inherit insider access without human judgment.
Read note →Stale accounts—ex-employees, migration users, abandoned service principals— quietly become ideal attacker footholds.
Read note →What happens when the systems you rely on to detect, log, and contain an intrusion are themselves degraded or compromised.
Read note →Lateral movement now flows through vendors, MSPs, SaaS apps, and identity providers— not just subnets.
Read note →Half-finished Zero Trust programs often increase complexity without improving survivability.
Read note →A person with concentrated authority, access, and knowledge can block or derail critical response actions—often invisibly.
Read note →Attackers rarely “beat MFA.” They walk around it—through legacy auth paths, session reuse, token abuse, and app permissions that were never brought fully under policy control.
Read note →Global Admin is a tenant-level superpower. When over-assigned or routinely used, it turns normal mistakes into total tenant compromise—and gives attackers control of policy, visibility, and recovery paths.
Read note →Break-glass is a recovery control—not a convenience account. Most implementations create a permanent bypass: rarely tested, lightly monitored, and assumed safe because it’s “not used.” This note covers failure modes and a safer operating model that survives real incidents.
Read note →Password theft is noisy and increasingly ineffective. Token theft is quiet, durable, and bypasses MFA entirely. This note breaks down how attackers abuse sessions, OAuth, and delegated trust—and why most identity programs are defending the wrong layer.
Read note →Conditional Access governs authentication—not behavior. Treating it like a firewall creates dangerous blind spots where attackers operate entirely within “allowed” access. This note breaks down where CA works, where it doesn’t, and how those gaps get abused.
Read note →Ransomware targeting is deliberate and economic. Crews prioritize disruption leverage, recovery weakness, and decision friction—often selecting victims long before encryption begins. This note explains the signals attackers use and how leaders can reduce “payment probability.”
Read note →EDR is necessary—but not sufficient. Modern ransomware campaigns succeed by operating outside endpoint visibility: identity abuse, remote management tooling, unmanaged assets, and recovery sabotage. This note breaks down where EDR stops—and attackers keep going.
Read note →Backups reduce data loss—not business risk. In real ransomware events, restores fail under pressure due to compromised backup infrastructure, slow timelines, missing dependencies, and unrealistic staffing assumptions. This note explains why “we have backups” collapses and what recovery readiness looks like.
Read note →Encryption is no longer the primary threat. Modern ransomware operations assume data theft first, disruption second, and public pressure always. This note explains why recovery alone doesn’t neutralize extortion—and why disclosure readiness is now a governance issue.
Read note →Most ransomware outcomes are decided before encryption finishes and before leadership has clarity. This note examines the predictable governance, identity, and communication failures that derail response in the first hour—and create irreversible attacker leverage.
Read note →Modern ransomware crews shape leverage weeks in advance—stabilizing access, stealing high-pressure data, weakening recovery paths, and mapping what the business cannot tolerate. By the time encryption begins, the “decision” has often already been engineered.
Read note →Backup dashboards stay green until ransomware hits. This note explains why restores fail under pressure—identity lockouts, missing dependencies, unrealistic timelines—and why recovery readiness is an operating capability, not a storage feature.
Read note →When identity is centralized, compromise scales through trust relationships—across SaaS, vendors, and internal apps. This note explains how OAuth, tokens, federation, and standing access turn a single foothold into multi-domain impact.
Read note →Conditional Access rarely fails all at once. It erodes through exceptions, legacy auth paths, and “temporary” bypasses until enforcement no longer matches the threat model. This note covers how drift happens—and how to restore coverage that actually reduces risk.
Read note →Many organizations can detect intrusions quickly; but still fail to prevent impact. The constraint is not alert quality, but authority, tooling, and decision-making under pressure. This note explains why alerts alone don’t change outcomes.
Read note →Vendors, MSPs, and third-party integrations often hold standing access that exceeds internal admins. This note explains why supply chain access is one of the highest-risk identity surfaces in modern environments and how attackers exploit it quietly.
Read note →MFA hardens logins; not outcomes. Token theft, session replay, OAuth consent abuse, and legacy authentication paths allow attackers to persist without ever “beating MFA.” This note explains where MFA stops and real identity risk begins.
Read note →As teams connect models to internal data and action-taking systems, AI inherits insider-like access without human judgment. This note explains how privilege emerges through integrations, approvals, and automation; and how governance should adapt.
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