Moving Beyond Awareness: How Threat Hunting Builds Readiness

Every October brings a familiar rhythm – pumpkin-spice everything in stores and cafés, alongside a wave of reminders, webinars, and checklists in my inbox. Halloween may be just around the corner, yet for those of us in cybersecurity, Security Awareness Month^[1] is the true seasonal milestone.

Make no mistake, as a security professional, I love this month. Launched by CISA and the National Cybersecurity Alliance back in 2004, it’s designed to make security a shared responsibility. It helps regular citizens, businesses, and public agencies build safer digital habits. And it works. It draws attention to risk in its many forms, sparks conversations that otherwise might not happen, and helps employees recognize their personal stake in and influence over the organization’s security.

Security Awareness Month initiatives boost confidence, sharpen instincts, and keep security at the front of everyone’s mind…until the winter holiday season decorations start to go up, that is.

After that, the momentum slips. Awareness without reinforcement fades quickly. People know what to do, yet daily pressure and shifting priorities let weak passwords, misconfigurations, and unused accounts slip back in. Real progress needs a structure that verifies what people remember and catches what they miss – systems that continuously validate identity, configuration, and privilege.

In this article, I’ll take a closer look at why awareness alone can’t carry the full weight of security and how proactive threat hunting closes the gap between what we know and what we can actually prevent.

The Limits of Awareness

Security Awareness Month highlights the human side of defense. It reminds employees that every click, credential, and connection matters. That focus has value, and I’ve seen organizations invest heavily in creative campaigns that genuinely change employee behavior.

Yet many of these same organizations still experience serious breaches. The reason is that many breaches start in places that training just cannot reach. Security misconfigurations alone account for more than a third^[2] of all cyber incidents and roughly a quarter of cloud security^[3] incidents. The signal is clear: awareness has its limits. It can improve decision-making, but it cannot fix what people never see.

Part of the problem is that traditional defenses focus primarily on detection and response. EDR alerts on suspicious activity. SIEM correlates events after they occur. Vulnerability scanners identify known weaknesses. These tools operate primarily on the right side of the Cyber Defense Matrix^[4], focusing on the reactive phases of defense.

Effective defense needs to start earlier. The proactive left side of the Matrix – identification and protection – should be based on assurances, not assumptions. Proactive threat hunting establishes a mechanism that provides these assurances, lending power to the process that awareness initiates. Creates a mechanism that provides those assurances – lending power to the process that awareness kicks off. It searches for the misconfigurations, the exposed credentials, and the excessive privileges that create attack opportunities, then removes them before an adversary can exploit them.

Proactive Threat Hunting Changes the Equation

The best defense begins before the first alert. Proactive threat hunting identifies the conditions that allow an attack to form and addresses them early. It moves security from passive observation to a clear understanding of where exposure originates.

This move from observation to proactive understanding forms the core of a modern security program: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). Instead of a one-time project, a CTEM program provides a structured, repeatable framework to continuously model threats, validate controls, and secure the business. For organizations ready to build this capability, A Practical Guide to Getting Started With CTEM^[5] offers a clear roadmap.

Attackers already follow this model. Today’s campaigns threat actors link identity misuse, credential reuse, and lateral movement across hybrid environments at machine speed. AI-driven automation maps and arms entire infrastructures in minutes. Teams that examine their environments through an attacker’s perspective can see how small minor oversights connect into full attack paths allowing threat actors to weave through defensive layers. This turns scattered risk data into a living picture of how compromise develops and how to stop it early.

Defenders need the depth of contextual visibility that attackers already possess. Proactive threat hunting creates that visibility – building readiness in three stages:

1. Get the Right Data – Collect vulnerability, network design, and each system’s connectivity, identity (both SSO, and data cached on systems), and configuration data from every part of the environment to create a single attacker-centric view. The goal is to see what an adversary would see, including weak credentials, cloud posture gaps, and privilege relationships that create entry points. A digital twin offers a practical way to safely replicate the environment and view all exposures in one place.
2. Map the Attack Paths – Utilize the digital twin to connect exposures and assets, illustrating how a compromise could progress through the environment and impact critical systems. This mapping reveals the chains of exploitation that matter. It replaces assumptions with evidence, showing exactly how multiple small exposures converge to form an attack path.
3. Prioritize by Business Impact – Link each validated path to the assets and processes that support business operations. This stage translates technical findings into business risk, focusing remediation on the exposures that could cause the greatest business disruption. The result is clarity – a verified, prioritized set of actions that directly strengthen resilience.

Awareness is a critical building block. But proactive threat hunting gives defenders something awareness alone can never provide – proof. It shows exactly where the organization stands and how quickly it can close the gap between visibility and prevention.

From Awareness to Readiness

Security Awareness Month reminds us that awareness is an essential step. Yet real progress begins when awareness leads to action. Awareness is only as powerful as the systems that measure and validate it. Proactive threat hunting turns awareness into readiness by keeping attention fixed on what matters most – the weak points that form the basis for tomorrow’s attacks.

Awareness teaches people to see risk. Threat hunting proves whether the risk still exists. Together they form a continuous cycle that keeps security viable long after awareness campaigns end. This October, the question for every organization is not how many employees completed the training, but how confident you are that your defenses would hold today if someone tested them. Awareness builds understanding. Readiness delivers protection.

Note: This article was written and contributed by Jason Frugé^[6], CISO in Residence, XM Cyber.