Cybersecurity Testing Can Ensure Cyber Resilience—Here's How to Do It

Forbes

24-07-2025

By Zach Amos
Too many businesses are dangerously overestimating their cyber resilience.
Any business that has an online presence is vulnerable to a cyberattack. Most vulnerabilities are due to legacy or unpatched systems that still power core operations, exposing critical entry points. However, the biggest weakness isn't always technical, but in a company's perception.
Too many businesses are dangerously overestimating their cyber resilience because they see investments in digital tools and services as an all-in-one solution. This false sense of protection can create a blind spot, leading to significant financial losses and reputational harm if left unresolved.
Here is why this happens and how businesses can accurately test and strengthen their security posture.
Disconnect Between Confidence and Actual Cybersecurity Readiness
Cyberattacks have become more prevalent in recent years, with healthcare, finance, and manufacturing the most targeted industries due to their valuable data and the ways this information can be exploited. In fact, nearly six in 10 companies had to protect themselves from ransomware incidents.
Despite these sobering numbers, Bain & Company revealed that 43% of industry leaders believe they're following the best cybersecurity practices, yet only 24% of those actually met the standards. This complacency creates a gap between perceived and actual readiness, leaving firms vulnerable to ransomware, data loss, and extended business downtime.
What causes this disconnect between confidence and actual cybersecurity readiness? It can stem from various factors, which may be technical, organizational, or psychological. Here are some of the most common reasons:
5 Warning Signs a Company Is Overestimating Its Cybersecurity Posture
Knowing the red flags can help businesses identify whether they're among the overconfident majority. Here are five common indicators:
If an organization has never performed a breach and attack simulation (BAS) or red team exercise, it's likely operating in the dark. These simulations expose real-world weaknesses that standard security reviews often miss.
Security posture assessments should occur regularly, especially as business environments, tools, and threats evolve. Relying on annual reviews or outdated risk models is a strong sign of overconfidence. It is generally recommended to evaluate risk annually, but some companies benefit from quarterly or even monthly reviews.
Mistaking regulatory compliance for comprehensive protection is common, but it's a misleading reality. Compliance provides a baseline, not a guarantee that a business will likely survive an attack.
Assessing a company's resilience must include evaluating its risk exposure. Micro, small, and medium Enterprises (MSMEs) can take a critical hit from a cyberattack. If a recovery plan hasn't been tested under stress, it's unlikely to hold up in a real-world scenario with much higher stakes.
True cyber resilience is cross-functional, not only the responsibility of the IT team. If executive leaders, finance, operations, and legal teams aren't involved in incident response planning, the organization may not be as prepared as it thinks. With 95% of data breaches tied to human error, any employee can jeopardize the company.
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How to Perform Cybersecurity Testing to Evaluate Cyber Resilience
Organizations must conduct realistic and data-driven inspections of their current readiness to bridge the gap between confidence and actual capability.
A good starting point is a comprehensive security posture assessment (SPA). It probes into the technical controls a business has set up, including firewalls, EDR configurations, and access management policies. It also considers employees' user behavior, such as their susceptibility to phishing or unsafe browsing habits on company computers. SPAs help identify gaps in policy enforcement and recovery preparedness.
Running BAS tools helps businesses examine how well their systems can survive the latest adversarial tactics by emulating them. These technologies run thousands of real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures mapped to MITRE ATT&CK frameworks to highlight where current defenses fail before a threat actor exploits them.
Organizations must also track and benchmark key performance indicators, such as the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to respond (MTTR). If it takes a team days to detect an intrusion versus the industry standard of hours for well-prepared corporations, they may not know how to react in real-time.
Simulate attack scenarios involving all departments, from the C-suite to front-line responders, to ensure everyone understands their role in a crisis. These exercises reveal critical coordination gaps that technical testing alone cannot.
For example, who notifies law enforcement if a ransomware attack encrypts customer data and demands payment within 24 hours? Who speaks to the media? Does the legal team know if ransom payment is allowed under local laws? These exercises expose coordination gaps and practice decision-making under pressure.
Validating backup and recovery systems under real conditions is nonnegotiable. Many firms skip stress testing continuity plans, assuming backup systems will work. In reality, backups can be encrypted by the same ransomware if not properly segmented.
Routinely run live restoration drills from cold storage, cloud snapshots, and isolated backup networks. Check if the customer database can be fully restored within a 24-hour recovery time after simulated data corruption. If it takes longer or fails outright, the business continuity plan needs revision now, not after a breach.
Strengthen Cyber Resilience Before It's Too Late
Once the gaps are identified, businesses must act quickly and decisively to reinforce their defenses. Here's how:
Company Confidence Is Not Risk Resilience
The harsh truth is that if organizations haven't rigorously tested their defenses in the past six months, their cyber resilience is likely far below what company leaders assume. Overconfidence can be more damaging than being underprepared, because it prevents businesses from taking action to protect themselves.
Business leaders should not wait for a breach to be a wake-up call. By honestly assessing security posture, testing rigorously and acting proactively, companies can replace misplaced confidence with genuine resilience by assessing security posture, testing rigorously, and acting proactively.