Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

When you acquire a company, you acquire its servers, and every configuration decision made on them over the last decade. Most of those decisions were never documented, never reviewed and never aligned to the standards your organisation is held to. Financial, legal and commercial due diligence are well understood. Configuration due diligence rarely happens at all.

Every major security regulation now asks the same question: can you prove your systems are securely configured? Few of them define what “secure” means. CIS Benchmarks fill that gap. Misconfiguration remains one of the easiest ways into an organisation. Default accounts, legacy protocols and inconsistent settings across thousands of servers hand attackers a foothold. Regulators have noticed.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has sent a clear message to organisations within the Defence supply chain. By 31 December 2026, all Defence industry partners are expected to achieve Defence Cyber Certification (DCC) Level 0, including Cyber Essentials for all applicable business-critical systems within scope. This represents a significant step in strengthening cyber resilience across the Defence ecosystem and raising the baseline for cyber security throughout the UK’s supply chain.

Summer is a good time to catch up on hardening work that gets postponed the rest of the year. Change freezes ease up, project calendars thin out, and the servers that quietly drifted out of spec during Q1 and Q2 finally get some attention. Over the next eight weeks, we’re publishing one practical hardening review each week. None of these require a project plan or a change advisory board meeting.

The UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is moving through Parliament and is expected to receive Royal Assent in the 2026–27 session. If you work in IT or security, you’ve likely already heard about it. If your organisation isn’t a hospital, utility, or bank, you may assume it doesn’t apply to you. However, no matter what field you are in, its worth taking a second look and closely evaluating how the legislation may affect you.

Walking the floor at Infosecurity Europe this week, it was impossible to avoid the subject of AI. Every conversation seemed to touch on it in some way. Vendors were demonstrating AI-powered detection capabilities, security teams were discussing governance frameworks, and practitioners were debating how best to secure the models, agents and data pipelines that are rapidly becoming part of everyday enterprise operations.

You know your servers need hardening. Getting leadership to prioritise, fund, and support the effort is the harder challenge. Here’s our experts’ best advice for how to talk to the C-suite and board about the need for automated server hardening. You already know the servers are drifting. Configurations change. Exceptions pile up. Standards slip over time. The hard part is not identifying the problem.

Before the AI spectacle of RSA arrives, let’s talk about what actually keeps regulated organizations secure RSA is only weeks away. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the pre-conference buzz, or if you work in technology generally, you already know what it’s going to feel like walking that floor: artificial intelligence, everywhere, in everything. AI-powered detection. Autonomous response. Agentic security copilots in everything from threat monitoring to your morning coffee.

Your systems are fully patched. Your vulnerability scanner comes back clean. But are they actually secure?

A multinational financial institution walks into its annual PCI DSS review confident it has “checked the boxes.” Firewalls are segmented, logs are retained, access controls are documented, and the audit report is clean. Months later, the same organization is reprimanded by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The controls were properly implemented.