How to Build a Threat-Informed Defense: Why You Need to Understand Adversaries

This report advocates a threat-informed defense approach and illustrates it with a focused case study on the Akira ransomware RaaS, describing its initial access vectors (including exploitation of CVE-2023-20269 and phishing/credential theft), lateral movement and credential harvesting techniques, rapid exfiltration and ESXi-targeting encryption, double-extortion operations, reported scale and financial impact, associated IoCs, and prioritized mitigations (patching, MFA, backup isolation, EDR behavioral detection, and incident response playbooks).