Every organization faces a threat landscape that evolves as quickly as military battlefields do. By borrowing four core cyber warfare principles—understanding your digital terrain, deploying deception, acting at cyber speed, and thinking ahead—you can strengthen your corporate security posture. These ideas translate directly into actions you can take today, powered by tools like Fidelis Elevate. In this blog, you’ll see why each principle matters, how it breaks down into clear steps, and how to use Fidelis to put them into practice.
Why Adopt Cyber Warfare Principles in Corporate Security?
1. Map Your Digital Terrain Completely
Attackers look for gaps in your defenses and hidden paths into your network. Without a full inventory of assets—servers, workstations, cloud services, and encrypted tunnels—you remain blind to critical exposures. A comprehensive map of your corporate threat landscape lets you spot those gaps and lock them down. Proactive terrain awareness shifts you from reacting to incidents toward preventing them.
Inventory every device, application, and cloud instance in use.
Track all network flows, including encrypted traffic visibility on uncommon ports.
Correlate endpoint logs with network metadata to detect mismatches.
How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate fuses network traffic inspection and endpoint telemetry into a single, dynamic map. Its sensors capture rich metadata—JA3 fingerprints, session timing, byte counts—so you always see every encrypted and plaintext connection in real time.
2. Use Deception to Expose Attackers
In warfare, decoys draw enemy fire and reveal their tactics. Similarly, believable decoys in your network lure attackers into revealing themselves. By placing fake servers, credentials, or documents in strategic locations, you turn stealthy intruders into visible targets. Early detection through deception multiplies your defensive resources.
Deploy decoy servers that mimic real endpoints in configuration and naming.
Seed fake credentials or sensitive-looking documents across file shares.
Treat any interaction with decoys as a high-confidence alert.
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How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate’s built-in deception module automates decoy creation and management. When an attacker engages a decoy, the platform immediately generates a clear alert with full session context, enabling you to isolate and investigate before real assets are touched.
3. Act with Speed: Automate Your Response
Once an adversary gains a foothold, every minute counts. Manual intervention slows response and lets attackers move laterally. Automated playbooks let you quarantine devices, block malicious IPs, or sever suspect encrypted sessions in seconds. Fast action stops threats before they escalate into full breaches.
Define rules that automatically isolate compromised endpoints.
Configure network controls to drop or reroute malicious traffic.
Send immediate notifications so analysts can verify and follow up.
How Fidelis helps: With Fidelis Elevate, you link detection alerts—from network, endpoint, and deception—to pre-built response playbooks. Whether it’s dropping an encrypted session or quarantining a workstation, actions occur instantly and are logged for audit and follow-up.
4. Think Ahead: Predict Attacker Moves
Military planners study enemy tactics to anticipate their next steps. You can do the same by modeling likely cyber warfare attacks—from credential dumping to covert DNS tunneling. Predictive models guide threat hunting and help you harden the most vulnerable areas. This forward-looking stance turns you from a reactive responder into a proactive defender.
Analyze past incidents to identify common intrusion paths.
Monitor for early indicators like unusual login times or high-entropy DNS queries.
Prioritize controls on assets that have been targeted before.
How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate’s efficient metadata store and behavioral analytics let you run ad-hoc hunts across weeks of encrypted traffic and endpoint logs. You can query for specific JA3 fingerprints, certificate anomalies, or DNS patterns—giving you a head start on spotting new attack campaigns.
How to Implement These Principles with Fidelis Elevate
1. Build Your Cyber Terrain Map
A clear terrain map is the starting point for every defense. Start by deploying Fidelis network sensors and endpoint agents to collect metadata everywhere. The goal is to capture enterprise network traffic inspection data—both encrypted and unencrypted—and match it with endpoint events. Once in place, you’ll see your complete digital topology.
Mirror all network segments, including encrypted tunnels on non-standard ports.
Install endpoint agents to report process launches and user authentications.
Use Fidelis dashboards to visualize asset relationships and traffic flows.
How Fidelis helps: Sensors capture over 300 attributes per session, while agents feed host-level details into a unified console. This joint view highlights overlooked assets and hidden connections in real time.
2. Deploy Deception Layers
Effective deception requires believable traps interwoven with real assets. Identify high-value zones—like credential stores or critical servers—and seed them with decoys. The more realistic your decoys appear, the more likely attackers will interact with them—and expose themselves.
Create decoys that mirror real OS versions, patch levels, and common services.
Distribute fake credentials or documents that look sensitive.
Adjust decoy placement based on evolving threat models.
How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate automates decoy rollout, matching real-world configurations. Every decoy interaction generates a high-confidence alert, complete with session metadata for rapid response.
3. Activate Real-Time Detection & Automated Response
Integration is key—alerts from network, endpoint, and deception must feed into the same workflow. Configure Fidelis playbooks to take immediate action on combined signals: isolate an infected machine, block a malicious IP, or drop a suspect encrypted session. This orchestration keeps your defense one step ahead.
Define playbook triggers based on multi-vector alerts.
Set actions for containment, investigation, and notification.
Test and refine playbooks to fit organizational policies.
How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate’s unified alert engine ties together encrypted traffic anomalies, endpoint alerts, and deception triggers. Playbooks execute within seconds, ensuring that threats are contained automatically without manual delays.
4. Establish a Routine of Predictive Threat Hunting
Use Fidelis’s query builder to search weeks of metadata for specific patterns.
Annotate results with MITRE ATT&CK tactics for structured reporting.
Update terrain maps and deception zones based on hunt findings.
How Fidelis helps: Fidelis Elevate’s efficient metadata storage and intuitive search tools let analysts pivot quickly between queries, dashboards, and response actions. This empowers your team to detect and disrupt campaigns that slip past real-time defenses.
Step-by-Step Deployment Blueprint
Bringing these cyber warfare principles to life requires a clear, structured approach that balances planning, execution, and continuous improvement. Before you begin, ensure you have stakeholder buy-in and the necessary permissions to deploy sensors and agents across your network and endpoints. You’ll also want to gather basic network topology information and asset inventories to guide sensor placement and decoy deployment. This blueprint will walk you through each phase—visibility, deception, automation, and hunting—so you can roll out Fidelis Elevate smoothly and with confidence. By following these steps, you’ll transform raw telemetry into actionable insights and automated defenses that operate at the speed of today’s threats.
1. Prepare Your Environment
Confirm you have span or tap access at key network points (perimeter, data center core, east-west segments).
Identify critical asset groups (e.g., servers, workstations, cloud workloads) for prioritized coverage.
Allocate server and storage resources for sensor and metadata storage.
2. Deploy Sensors and Agents
Install Fidelis network sensors on your mirrored network ports to capture encrypted and plaintext traffic.
Roll out lightweight endpoint agents on all Windows, Linux, and macOS devices.
Verify data flows into the Fidelis console and that session metadata (JA3, cert chains, byte counts) is populating.
3. Establish Baselines
Let the system learn normal traffic patterns and endpoint behavior for 7–14 days.
Review “baseline confidence” dashboards and adjust learning windows or exclude highly variable systems if needed.
Document any legitimate high-volume encrypted tunnels or atypical workflows to prevent noise.
4. Activate Deception Layers
Enable the built-in deception module and define decoy assets that mirror key systems (e.g., file shares, admin servers).
Seed realistic breadcrumbs—fake credentials or documents—in strategic network locations.
Confirm that interactions with decoys generate high-confidence alerts in the console.
5. Configure Automated Playbooks
Map combined signals (network anomaly + endpoint alert + decoy trigger) into response playbooks.
Define actions: isolate endpoint, drop encrypted session, block IP, and notify on-call teams.
Test each playbook in a controlled environment to ensure it executes as expected without disrupting normal operations.
6. Establish Continuous Threat Hunting
Schedule weekly hunts for new IoCs (JA3 hashes, cert fingerprints, DNS patterns) across historical metadata.
Use MITRE ATT&CK tags to structure queries and reports.
Feed hunt results back into baselining and playbook refinement.
7. Review, Report & Refine
Track key metrics: mean time to detect/respond, number of automated actions, false-positive rates.
Present findings to stakeholders with clear visuals on risk reduction and compliance improvements.
Iterate on sensor placement, decoy configurations, and playbook thresholds to close gaps continuously.
Applying cyber warfare principles in corporate security isn’t about grand metaphors about clear, actionable steps: map your terrain, set traps, move at cyber speed, and hunt proactively. Fidelis Elevate brings these ideas to life with unified encrypted traffic inspection, built-in deception, real-time responses, and predictive hunting.
Secure your network like a battlefield commander—schedule a Fidelis Elevate demo today.
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