Understanding your posture with our Essential Cyber Health Check
Understanding your posture with our Essential Cyber Health Check
A one-off, standards-based cyber health check is an effective starting point for organisations that want clarity before investing further. By assessing your current security posture against CIS Controls v8, the report provides a concise view of where you stand today, where your main gaps are, and which steps will deliver the most impact in reducing risk of a successful cyber attack.
This is a high-level report, with prioritised issues, clear risk-based recommendations, and a narrative that connects the controls back to steps taken from real cyber attacks. From there, ongoing Security Consulting as a Service can help turn recommendations into concrete change through targeted testing, configuration hardening, process refinement and training, ensuring that your posture keeps improving as your business evolves.
Your Security Posture vs. The Cyber Killchain
The Cyber Killchain
The cyber kill chain is a model developed by Lockheed Martin that breaks an attack down into distinct, repeatable stages, from initial reconnaissance through to the attacker achieving their objective. A cyber attack typically starts with information gathering and weaponisation, followed by delivery and exploitation to gain a foothold in your environment. Once inside, the attacker installs tooling, establishes command and control, then moves towards their goal, such as data theft or system encryption. Looking at cyber attacks through this lens helps you see where specific controls can interrupt the chain and how small weaknesses early on can snowball into full business disruption.
From attack chain to practical controls
One useful way to explain the link between ransomware and posture report is to walk through the attack chain and show which types of controls would have made life harder for the attacker at each step.
Initial compromise: Weak or reused passwords, public-facing vulnerabilities (for example in VPN appliances), and convincing phishing emails are common entry points. Here, controls around asset inventory, secure configuration, vulnerability management, and basic email and endpoint protections are crucial.
Establish foothold: Once in, attackers aim for persistence and command and control, often by abusing standard tools or allowed services. Least privilege access, hardening of baseline configurations, and well-managed malware defences make it harder for them to stay invisible.
Escalate and recon: Credential dumping, Active Directory enumeration and use of built‑in utilities help attackers move laterally and identify “crown jewels”. Network segmentation, role-based access, and proper logging and monitoring make it easier to spot abnormal activity and limit movement.
Mission completion: Finally, they exfiltrate data, destroy backups and encrypt systems. Here, well‑designed backup and recovery strategies, network monitoring, and clear incident response playbooks directly influence how much damage they can do and how quickly you can recover.
A standards-based posture report can visualise this journey for your organisation, showing concrete examples of “what could happen here” tied back to the controls that would mitigate that step.