Modern attackers move quietly and if you can’t spot them early, the impact can be huge!
For many UK organisations, cyber security still focuses primarily on prevention. You have firewalls in place, anti-virus software deployed, and policies and processes established. But most of the serious breaches in recent years have happened, not because the affected organisations had no controls in place, but because malicious activity went undetected for too long.
Modern attacks are designed to ‘blend in’
Once they’re inside your network, attackers will often use legitimate credentials to move laterally, quietly escalate privileges, test backup systems. Today’s threat actors are sophisticated. They’re happy to act slowly, patiently, insidiously. The longer they dwell within your network, the greater the operational, financial and reputational impact will be when an attack is finally triggered; increasing their chances of them monetising their time.
Prevention is still important, but this cannot be the sole focus. Organisations need to pay equal attention to detecting any network infiltration early, and then responding decisively.
Spotting the early signs
Here are four practical areas UK organisations should focus on in 2026:
• Improve visibility across your estate: If you can’t see what’s happening across endpoints, cloud platforms and user accounts, you won’t be able to respond quickly. Ensure logging is enabled, retained appropriately and actively monitored
• Focus on behaviour, not just malware signatures: Many attacks now rely on using perfectly legitimate tools in ingeniously malicious ways, making traditional endpoint security redundant. Solutions should identify suspicious patterns such as unusual admin activity, impossible travel logins, privilege escalation and abnormal data access
• Understand business tolerances: It’s important to understand what level of impact your organisation can sustain. This enables you to put processes in place that will enable you to respond and recover within an appropriate period of time. It’s important to ask yourself questions like 'Would we be able to isolate a compromised workstation at 2am on a Sunday?’ If you’re not confident you would, you need to address that gap
• Clarify containment authority: When suspicious activity is identified, it’s important that everyone is clear about who has the authority to isolate which systems, who needs to be informed about system isolation, and what other actions would need to be taken to mitigate any impact. Delays in decision-making can materially undermine the effectiveness of any response.
For many organisations, building a full in-house security operations centre is neither realistic, nor cost effective. What matters is ensuring that you are prepared. For many organisations, that means being able to call on the support of experienced expect specialists who can separate signal from noise and act quickly on your behalf.
Solis MDR for Endpoint provides award-winning 24-7 monitoring, investigation and remediation of cyber security threats across workstations, laptops and servers. By combining real-time threat intelligence with expert-led response, we help organisations like yours significantly reduce attacker dwell time and, ultimately, limit the scale of any damage sustained.
Conclusion
If you’re unsure how quickly your organisation could detect and contain a live threat, now is the time to find out!
Contact our team today at enquiries.uk@solissecurity.com and we’ll be happy to tell you more about how we can strengthen your detection and response capabilities and protect your business.
