• Brandon Baker

  Brandon is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Omnissa with more than 20 years of global leadership experience in cybersecurity, privacy, risk management, compliance, cloud security, and cloud operations. A former U.S. Army Officer, he combines his decisive leadership, deep technical expertise, and business acumen to align security programs with organizational objectives and enable growth.

Recent incidents make one thing unmistakably clear: attackers are exploiting fundamentals, faster, more efficiently, and increasingly with AI on their side.   Attackers are no longer dependent on rare or exotic zero‑day vulnerabilities. Instead, they are achieving significant impact by chaining together well‑understood weaknesses: unpatched systems, stolen credentials, misconfigurations, and effective social engineering.

AI has now armed bad actors with capabilities that dramatically increase speed and scale, automate reconnaissance, generate highly convincing phishing and social‑engineering campaigns, and rapidly adapt attacks in real time. The result is broader coverage, faster execution, and a lower barrier to entry, while the potential blast radius of a single successful intrusion has grown exponentially.

The basics still matter, more than ever

While attacker tactics continue to evolve, most successful breaches still trace back to failures in consistently implementing basic security best practices. Organizations that are more resilient to modern attacks tend to succeed not through novel or complex defenses, but by executing reliably on foundational controls. Security is not a point‑in‑time effort or a compliance checkbox; it is a continuous operational discipline.

Across many of the most impactful incidents, familiar patterns emerge:

• Initial access via phishing or social engineering
• Weak, stolen, or insufficiently protected credentials
• Exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities or common misconfigurations
• Subsequent privilege escalation and lateral movement

These are not rare or unexpected scenarios. They represent well‑understood, repeatable attack paths that account for a significant portion of real‑world compromises today.

Patch hygiene is non‑negotiable: Patch early. Patch often. Patch everything.

Unpatched vulnerabilities remain one of the most reliable paths to compromise. Attackers actively monitor patch release cycles and prioritize environments that lag.

• Stay current on all Omnissa security advisories
• Apply patches and updates as soon as they are released
• Prioritize vulnerabilities with known or likely exploitation

MFA everywhere, without exception

Credential‑based attacks continue to dominate incident response. Phishing resistant multi‑factor authentication remains the single most effective control for breaking the attack chain, but only when it is enforced universally. MFA must apply to all users, all access paths, and especially all privileged and administrative accounts. Convenience‑based exceptions create high‑confidence targets.

Minimize privilege and limit blast radius

Once attackers gain a foothold, privileged access becomes their primary objective. Reducing standing privileges, enforcing least privilege, and monitoring administrative activity are essential to limiting impact.

Zero Trust principles, assuming breach, continuously verifying trust, and tightly controlling access, are critical to constraining damage. Techniques like microsegmentation further reduce blast radius by preventing a single compromised account or system from cascading into a full‑environment incident.

Security is a shared responsibility

You do not have to navigate this threat landscape alone. Omnissa security teams continuously monitor emerging threats, release product updates, harden defenses, and provide guidance to customers.

 If you have any questions or concerns, please follow up with the Omnissa Support Organization or reach out to your account representative.   Early engagement can mean the difference between a resolved configuration issue and a security incident.