According to Forrester’s Security Survey, 2025, IT environment complexity, limited visibility, and alert fatigue are some of the most common information security challenges organizations face. Your Zero Trust strategy, no matter how complex, expensive, “compliant,” and AI driven, will remain plagued by mediocrity if those issues go unaddressed.

While we obsess over frameworks and compliance checkboxes, threat actors are studying our environments like seasoned cartographers, mapping every weakness and opportunity. Every misconfiguration, forgotten asset, and rigid ill-fitting policy becomes a valuable asset on the path to compromise, and adapting this approach and thinking like an adversary is essential to elevating security and building resilience.

Insecure environments share similar characteristics: organizational opacity, operational friction, and mountains of technical debt. Beyond their negative operational implications, they’re what attackers count on to succeed. Security pros need to be aware that:

  • Low visibility creates threat incubators. While you’re trying to inventory assets with spreadsheets and aging configuration management databases (CMDBs), attackers are already three steps ahead and have effective techniques to inventory assets you have no idea exist. They thrive in environments where shadow IT runs rampant, trust relationships go undocumented, and assets slip through the cracks. You can’t protect what you can’t see, and threat actors know this better than anyone.
  • Static security models are predictably brittle. That firewall rule from 2019? The access policy riddled with “emergency exceptions”? Attackers see these rigid, unchanging patterns as roadmaps. Traditional network controls that rely on easily forgeable values like MAC addresses and extended detection and response (EDR) presence offer little protection against sophisticated spoofing techniques. While it may meet the standard compliance requirements, the illusion of security is a gift to creative attackers.
  • Operational friction amplifies attack opportunities. Three teams, two change advisory boards, five signoffs, and three days to approve a simple transport layer security (TLS) upgrade don’t tell an attacker you have good processes, governance, or bureaucracy; they instead communicate exploit deployment windows. While your security operations center (SOC) analyst spends 30 minutes investigating a low-priority alert, lateral movement is already happening.
  • Technical debt creates treasure maps for attackers. That legacy Java application that’s “isolated” but actually reachable from your cloud environment because of a misconfigured web application running an aging database is a lateral movement highway and a key ingredient of getting remote code execution (RCE) and become an administrator. Technical debt inherently creates undocumented workarounds and implied trust relationships, exactly the kind of complexity that makes attackers’ jobs easier.

From Theoretical Framework To Proven Resilience

The solution isn’t more controls. It’s systematic testing through an attacker’s lens that reveals whether your Zero Trust implementation actually prevents compromise. This means:

  • Weekly automated validation that verifies policy effectiveness, not just policy existence.
  • Production-mirrored testing environments where you can safely simulate real attack patterns.
  • Scenario-based testing that chains together authentication, privilege escalation, and monitoring validation.
  • Continuous asset discovery to catch unauthorized instances, orphaned service principals, and exposed APIs before attackers do.
  • Offensive security used as an optimization engine that turns security findings into operational improvements.

Pleasant Side Effect: Better Operations Through Better Security

Thinking like an attacker doesn’t just improve your security posture; it can also improve operations. When your red team discovers unmonitored EC2 instances running outdated software, it presents an opportunity to, of course, fix a gap, but also one to consolidate workloads, eliminate waste, and potentially reduce cloud spend. By framing security improvements as operational efficiency gains, you speak directly to developer and IT incentives: speed, shipping, and efficiency.

Hunt Your Own Weaknesses

Start by deploying asset discovery tools to catch rogue instances, using identity mapping to follow trust relationships that create privilege escalation paths, and testing segmentation by attempting lateral movement. By validating your controls against attacker techniques, every successful attack chain in your testing environment becomes a blueprint for both security enhancement and operational streamlining.

Zero Trust success requires more than good intentions and compliance frameworks. It demands a fundamental shift from defensive thinking to adversarial validation, creating resilient operations that can withstand sophisticated threats while maintaining business velocity.

Our new report, Build Resilience With Zero Trust: Think Like A Threat Actor, provides the tactical guidance and testing frameworks you need to validate your controls through an attacker’s lens and transform your Zero Trust strategy from theoretical framework to proven resilience.

Let’s Connect

Forrester clients can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to do a deeper dive on how to use offensive security testing to improve the resilience of your infrastructure.