Organizations across industries face a familiar dilemma: while cyber threats continue to evolve, their assurance frameworks often do not. Security assessments are typically performed once a year, based on control libraries that were written years ago and updated infrequently—if at all. Frameworks such as HIPAA, ISO, and even some NIST standards can lag behind current attack trends by five to ten years. As a result, assessments often fail to reflect the true nature of today’s risks.
Even organizations investing in compliance find themselves unable to answer critical questions in the boardroom:
Are we protected against this month’s top ransomware technique?
How do our current controls align with emerging phishing tactics or AI-driven threats?
Can we confidently share our posture with business partners and regulators?
The need is clear: a more responsive, intelligence-driven model of cybersecurity assurance that evolves in sync with the threat landscape—and one that reduces the operational burden of trying to do this alone.
The Solution: Threat-Adaptive Security Assurance
To meet this need, a threat-adaptive approach has emerged—an assurance methodology that integrates real-time threat intelligence, breach data, and advanced frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE ATLAS into the foundation of cybersecurity assessments.
This model centers around dynamic assessment baselines (such as the E1 and I1 assessments) that evolve quarterly—and soon, monthly—based on current indicators of attack frequency and impact. By continuously analyzing and mapping active threat campaigns to corresponding mitigations, and linking those mitigations to specific controls, the system ensures that what’s being tested is not just compliant—but relevant.
Rather than relying solely on human effort, AI is used to parse thousands of threat articles, breach reports, and claims data, correlating them with MITRE-defined techniques and mapping them to security requirements. This allows organizations to benefit from collective threat intelligence without having to invest in complex internal analysis pipelines.
The Benefits: Agility, Clarity, and Confidence
Better Alignment With Current Risk
Organizations can be confident that their assessments reflect the latest threat landscape, improving protection against real-world attacks like AI-powered phishing or misconfigured agentic AI systems.
Streamlined Internal Operations
Security teams gain adaptive requirements without additional work. The updates are embedded in the framework itself, reducing the need for manual control reviews or external gap analyses.
Stronger Board and Executive Conversations
Reporting includes data-backed justifications for each control, helping leaders understand not just what is being done—but why it matters. This leads to better investment decisions and clearer risk discussions.
Enhanced Third-Party Assurance
Organizations can provide stakeholders with validated assessments that demonstrate relevance to today’s threats, not just historical compliance checkboxes. A planned enhancement will even include threat alignment context in each validated report.
Support for Future-Looking Compliance
With visibility into how legacy frameworks compare against modern threats, teams can identify gaps in regulatory alignment and justify the adoption of more comprehensive, responsive controls.
Conclusion
Static frameworks no longer meet the needs of a dynamic threat environment. By shifting to a threat-adaptive model, organizations can maintain continuous alignment between their controls and the risks they face, reducing exposure while gaining operational and strategic clarity. Whether starting with a foundational assessment or expanding an enterprise-wide program, this approach empowers security teams to turn real-time threat intelligence into actionable assurance—at speed and at scale.
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Guest: Michael Moore, Senior Manager, Digital Innovation at HITRUST | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhmoore04/
