At the Safaricom CyberSecurity Summit 2025, cybersecurity architects and threat-intelligence specialists delivered a rare, behind-the-scenes demonstration on what it truly takes to secure a modern IT estate. The session, positioned as a pragmatic walk-through rather than a theoretical briefing. It offered a candid look at what organisations often overlook and what attackers never miss.
The demo centred on a “secure-by-design” philosophy. It is a principle experts argue must become the default posture for any organisation undergoing digital transformation. Rather than treating security as an afterthought, panellists showed how most breaches emerge from everyday vulnerabilities that could have been identified early: misconfigurations, unpatched systems, legacy components left running, or outdated endpoints quietly becoming entry points.
A key emphasis in the demo was environment hardening. Engineers illustrated how removing unused services, decommissioning idle components, and applying timely patches dramatically shrink the attack surface. In many of last year’s high-profile incidents. It wasn’t sophisticated zero-days that caused damage it was systems left in default mode or forgotten in production.
Call for Continuous Enforcement & Drills
The session also spotlighted reinforced configuration baselines. It demonstrated how strong configuration standards when uniformly applied prevent privilege escalation and lateral movement within corporate networks. But as panellists noted, many organisations still rely on inconsistent, manually curated settings across environments, creating blind spots attackers exploit.
On the detection layer, the demo walked participants through behavioural analytics as an endpoint safeguard, using machine-learning-driven baselines to flag anomalous activity long before signature-based tools would. Coupled with Database Activity Monitoring. Experts showed how enterprises can not only stop malicious actions but also strengthen compliance reporting for regulators.
To address rising application-layer attacks, the demo highlighted the role of a modern Web Application Firewall [WAF] blocking automated bots, filtering malicious payloads, and mitigating early signs of DDoS attempts before they escalate.
However, the experts stressed that even the strongest tools fail without informed people. The session underscored user awareness training, complete with phishing simulations, structured reporting mechanisms, and real-world attack walk-throughs to build organisational muscle memory.
Finally, Safaricom experts called for continuous internal enforcement sustained newsletters, periodic campaigns, and regular cyber drills noting that awareness decays quickly without reinforcement.
The underlying message was clear: securing an IT estate is not a one-off activity but an ecosystem of disciplined processes, smart tools, and a culture of vigilance.
