Nation State attacks are on the rise. Is the best defense a good offense?

In football, defense wins games. In cybersecurity, a strong offense builds the strongest defense by identifying gaps in the security perimeter before the opposition exploits them. In today’s digital threat landscape, adversaries with virtually unlimited resources, patience, and sophistication are working incessantly to compromise organizations. Nation-state actors, often classified as advanced persistent threats (APTs), represent some of the most formidable challenges to enterprise security. Nation-state actors are backed by extensive resources, advanced tooling, and long-term strategic objectives, often tied to espionage, sabotage, or geopolitical influence. Their campaigns are marked by persistence, stealth, and the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities, making them far harder to detect and defend against than conventional threats. For security leaders, this means that the traditional once-a-year penetration test is no longer enough. To effectively reduce risk, organizations are increasingly moving towards a continuous offensive security model as a core security practice.

Unlike static assessments, continuous offensive security provides an always-on approach to identifying vulnerabilities across an organization’s attack surface. As businesses accelerate cloud adoption, expand remote workforces, and integrate third-party vendors, their digital footprints grow larger and more dynamic. This constantly shifting attack surface becomes an attractive target for APTs, who excel at exploiting overlooked misconfigurations, unpatched software, and weak identity management practices. A continuous testing regimen ensures that exposures are discovered and remediated before adversaries have the chance to exploit them.

Current trends show that APTs are increasingly targeting critical infrastructure, supply chains, and cloud environments. Groups like APT29 (Russia), APT41 (China), and Lazarus Group (North Korea) have demonstrated the ability to compromise widely used software, exploit trusted vendor relationships, and maintain access for months or even years. APTs are also leveraging living-off-the-land techniques, abusing legitimate tools and processes to evade detection, and expanding their operations to include disruptive attacks such as ransomware with political motives.

Nation-state campaigns have made clear that adversaries are willing to play the long game. Incidents like SolarWinds and the Microsoft Exchange Server hacks showed how patient attackers can weaponize trusted software supply chains or exploit zero-days for months before discovery. These operations often go unnoticed until the damage is extensive. By maintaining a cycle of real-world attack simulations, organizations can better prepare for the stealthy and persistent tactics these adversaries use, closing gaps that might otherwise linger undetected.

Moreover, continuous offensive security supports adaptive defense. A single penetration test provides a snapshot in time, but attackers don’t operate on a schedule. Vulnerabilities appear daily, and the speed of exploitation continues to accelerate. According to Mandiant, the median global dwell time for intrusions decreased to just 10 days in 2023, compared to 21 days in 2022—evidence that attackers are moving faster than ever. To keep pace, organizations need proactive and iterative testing that evolves alongside their threat environment.

For defenders, the benefits extend beyond technical findings. Continuous penetration testing fosters a culture of readiness across security and operations teams. It forces organizations to think like adversaries and strengthens collaboration between red teams and blue teams. By adopting this mindset, enterprises can move from reactive patching toward strategic resilience—reducing not only their technical attack surface but also their operational risk.

Ultimately, the rise of nation-state threats should serve as a wake-up call: cybersecurity cannot be a compliance exercise, but rather, must be a dynamic and adaptive discipline. Organizations that embed continuous penetration testing into their defense strategy will be best positioned to anticipate, detect, and withstand the sophisticated campaigns of tomorrow’s adversaries.