Source: Government Technology Insider | Author: Brian Engle | Publication date: August 14, 2026
The Salt Typhoon cyberattacks sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity community, demonstrating that sophisticated nation-state adversaries can exploit weaknesses in traditional network architectures to gain access and remain undetected for months.
Although the campaign targeted telecommunications networks, it underscored a new reality for both public and private organizations: security tools and monitoring systems long considered the first line of defense are no longer sufficient against today’s threat landscape.
Addressing these risks requires more than adding point security tools. Government agencies and others must adopt updated network designs that limit lateral movement, improve visibility, and reduce opportunities for attackers to blend into legitimate traffic.
Hardening Your Network
Traditional MPLS backbones and perimeter-based security models assume that threats originate outside the network, and that users and devices inside the perimeter can be trusted. Today, however, the ongoing spread of data, applications and users across clouds, data centers and remote environments has eliminated those clear network boundaries. That means no single security tool has a complete view of attacker activity.
Adversaries like Salt Typhoon exploit this fragmented network visibility. After establishing a foothold through compromised credentials, unpatched systems, internet-facing vulnerabilities or trusted third-party connections, they blend into legitimate network activity, moving laterally across the environment without triggering traditional security controls. This makes it difficult to detect coordinated attacks before significant damage has been done.
Security teams can defend against these kinds of attacks in several ways:
1. Eliminate Unsupported Infrastructure
Nation-state actors routinely target routers, switches, firewalls and other internet-facing infrastructure that no longer receives security updates. Often embedded deep within the network, these systems are difficult to replace and provide attractive long-term access points for attackers.
Adopting structured lifecycle management programs allows IT teams to proactively identify, replace and decommission end-of-support assets before they become security liabilities. This shifts organizations from reactive patching to continuous modernization of the network edge and core while also providing an effective way to shrink the attack surface.
2. Implement Micro-Segmentation
Many networks still rely on a single perimeter, enabling an attacker to move relatively freely from system to system after gaining access. Micro-segmentation breaks the network into smaller, isolated zones that create boundaries between users, applications, workloads and sensitive systems, limiting how far an attacker can move if a device, account or application is compromised.
This segmentation model is typically enforced through software-defined networking, identity-aware controls and dynamic policy rules that follow workloads across on-prem and cloud environments, preventing small compromises from escalating into full network breaches.
3. Improve Visibility and Observability
Legacy network environments route traffic through a patchwork of tunnels, overlays and protocols that limit the visibility needed to quickly detect suspicious activity. Upgrading networks to provide a unified, end-to-end view of traffic flows makes it easier to identify unauthorized communications, unexpected route changes, and suspicious lateral movement.
Centralizing and correlating telemetry from on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments enables security teams to connect events that otherwise would be interpreted as isolated signals rather than part of a coordinated attack. This shortens attacker dwell time and improves the ability to contain intrusions before they spread.
4. Simplify Security Policy Enforcement
Government networks often contain years of accumulated exceptions, overlapping tools and ad hoc configurations that create inconsistent security enforcement across today’s distributed network environments. Centralizing security policies and enforcing them consistently wherever workloads run reduces the gaps that attackers can exploit to move undetected across the network.
Modern networking architectures support this by decoupling policy from infrastructure, allowing access controls, segmentation rules and routing policies to be defined once and enforced uniformly across the entire environment. This reduces configuration drift, eliminates conflicting rules between platforms, and ensures that security intent is preserved as traffic moves across domains.
5. Build Security into the Network Fabric
Emerging architectures such as Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) extend these principles by integrating policy, segmentation and traffic engineering directly into the network layer, allowing security policies to travel with the traffic rather than relying on separate enforcement systems.
Instead of allowing traffic to flow opportunistically across multiple network layers where attackers can hide, SRv6 steers traffic along predefined routes that reduce opportunities for attackers to slip between systems or move laterally without detection. The result is a network where routing is no longer a performance issue, but an enforceable control point where deviations are immediately visible, making attacks like Salt Typhoon far more difficult to execute.
A Security Priority
Salt Typhoon demonstrated that an organization’s greatest weakness may not be a missing security tool or an untrained employee, but the architecture of the network itself. Building a more resilient network can limit attacker movement, improve detection and strengthen response capabilities, making network modernization a cybersecurity imperative.
The author, Brian Engle, is Principal Architect Cybersecurity/Field CISO, at GDT.
