In an era where digital threats evolve faster than most organisations can adapt, the difference between those who merely survive cyberattacks and those who thrive despite them often comes down to strategy, integration, and timing. The cost of getting it wrong continues to climb.
Across industries ranging from global payments to retail discount chains, organisations are discovering that cybersecurity isn’t just about preventing breaches, it’s about enabling growth, building trust, and creating operational advantages that ripple throughout their business.
The following case studies reveal how different companies approach distinct cybersecurity challenges. What emerges from these experiences isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a blueprint for thinking strategically about security, one that views threats not as isolated IT problems, but as business challenges requiring integrated, company-wide responses.
Enovipay: Scaling Fraud Defence Without Stifling Growth
As global payment service provider Enovipay expanded internationally, sophisticated fraudsters followed. The company faced card testing schemes across multiple regions, synthetic identity manipulation, and organised crime groups deploying increasingly complex tactics. The challenge wasn’t just stopping fraud, it was doing so without disrupting legitimate transactions or requiring massive internal team expansion.
“The reality is, whether they’re fraudsters, money launderers or just angry people, it affects the bottom line of chargeback rates,” explains Martyn Przhebelskyy, head of compliance at Enovipay. “We want to identify them before it happens and figure out a solution prior to escalation.”
Working with Seon, Enovipay developed customised rules reflecting their merchant base and transaction patterns, with the flexibility to adjust detection settings in real-time. The solution offered advanced device fingerprinting, behavioural analysis, and the ability to tailor fraud detection to individual merchant profiles and verticals.
“There was a pre-integration with our platform, and the onboarding process was seamless. We were up and running from day one,” says Mohammed Alragom, chief product and technology officer at Enovipay.
The results speak to the power of strategic partnerships in cybersecurity. Enovipay achieved significant increases in early detection of suspicious activity while reducing false positives that disrupt legitimate transactions.
Sofia Specht, head of banking and PSPs at Enovipay, notes that “thanks to the time we’ve saved with Seon, we’ve been able to redirect resources toward onboarding new merchants and growing our client base.”
Perhaps most importantly, the transparent fraud insights enabled by the platform improved relationships with merchants themselves, providing clear, detailed data that demonstrated tangible value.
IDB Bank: Building Security from the Ground Up
When Beatrice Sirchis joined New York-based IDB Bank as vice president and head of application security and vulnerability management, she inherited a familiar set of challenges: misconfigured systems, inconsistent password practices, poor user account management, and limited visibility across the bank’s hybrid IT environment.
Operating in a highly regulated industry, the bank struggled to track whether all assets were running correct security agents and faced difficulties reporting key performance indicators to cross-functional leadership. “We had to scan for vulnerabilities in the code, review how applications were managed, and ensure we covered all environments – production, quality assessment, pre-production,” Sirchis explains.
The transformation began with properly configuring Qualys Cybersecurity Asset Management (CSAM), a tool that had already been installed but remained unused. After consulting Gartner’s recommendations and finding that “Qualys was rated for vulnerability management,” Sirchis made the platform central to the bank’s application security efforts.
The structured approach paid immediate dividends. “We now have 100% visibility into application vulnerabilities,” says Sirchis. “We’ve reduced vulnerabilities across production and non-production environments by about 80%, because we’re catching issues early in the development lifecycle.”
The bank integrated Qualys with its ServiceNow platform, enabling automatic assignment of vulnerabilities to appropriate application or infrastructure owners. This automation reduced mean time to remediation from 30 days to as little as one to two days, while saving “more than 80% of the time previously spent by developers and security teams.”
The platform’s evolution continues, with software composition analysis recently added to detect vulnerabilities in third-party libraries. “We’re now testing that feature and have already found valuable insights that helped us fix issues we didn’t even know existed,” Sirchis notes.
Poundland: Hard Lessons in Human-Centred Security
The London-based Pepco Group, encompassing 850 Poundland stores in the UK plus 4,500 value stores across 20+ European countries, faced significant cybersecurity challenges in 2024. For Jeremy McCourt, IT security officer at the UK value retailer, the year brought hard-earned wisdom about the human element in cybersecurity.
When parent company Pepco disclosed that a phishing attack on one of its European branches resulted in a loss of €15.5 million, it underscored the reality that even well-intentioned employees can become vectors for sophisticated attacks.
“It wasn’t a BEC attack,” McCourt clarifies, “but ultimately, there were elements of phishing and communication through nonstandard company protocols, which resulted in quite a loss overall.”
The incident prompted fundamental changes in how the organisation approaches verification and communication. Working with KnowBe4’s security awareness training platform, Poundland expanded from small-scale phishing exercises to 1,600 users, with plans to roll out training to 10,000 users across the broader Pepco Group.
“Most exercises can be reduced to empowering staff to say no to something and ensuring they verify requests,” explains Javvad Malik, KnowBe4’s lead security awareness advocate. He points to three core components of work-based social engineering attacks: asserting authoritative identity, making unusual requests, and creating time pressure.
The solution, Malik argues, lies in Daniel Kahneman’s concept of “thinking fast and slow,” encouraging employees to step back from reactive decision-making and engage more rational, consultative thinking processes.
“When you get an email or a video call asking for something unusual, take a moment, or better still, pass it on to someone else to have another pair of eyes on it,” says Malik.
Deliveroo: Integrating Intelligence Across the Business
While most organisations treat threat intelligence as a narrow cybersecurity tool, Deliveroo’s head of threat intelligence sees a different path. Boobeshwaran Sengodagoundar Kandasamy argues for “integrated intelligence,” an approach that connects cyber insights with operations, finance, marketing, supply chain, and human resources functions.
“Most typical enterprise threat intelligence programmes just stick with security,” Kandasamy observes. “They miss out on the broader business risks.”
The problem, he identifies, lies in four structural challenges: limited scope, data silos, poor cross-functional collaboration, and lack of business context. Cybersecurity analysts often suffer from “tunnel vision,” focusing only on IT risks without understanding how those risks intersect with financial performance, customer experience, or supply chain continuity.
“If you say, ‘this is a vulnerability, you have to patch it’, the business is not going to understand,” Kandasamy explains. “They are going to understand in business terms: what is the impact, what is the loss?” The solution requires building relationships across departments and translating technical threats into business language.
The integrated approach offers concrete benefits across functions: marketing teams could detect brand impersonation before it escalates, procurement could factor cyber hygiene into supplier selection, and HR could assess risks associated with hiring from high-risk regions or approving remote work requests.
“It’s not just about preventing data theft anymore,” Kandasamy concludes. “Threats are becoming destructive. They can stop operations altogether.”
The ultimate goal is helping businesses move from reactive security models toward proactive, strategic approaches that view threat intelligence as a competitive advantage rather than merely a cost centre.
Operation 911: When Healthcare Becomes the Battlefield
In a Mandalay Bay suite overlooking Vegas, cybersecurity experts gathered for Operation 911; a tabletop exercise that dissects healthcare ransomware from both sides of the battlefield. The simulation targets Sunshine Healthcare, a fictitious $9bn hospital chain with 2,500 beds and the region’s only trauma center.
Split into opposing forces, The Red Raccoons launch their assault while the Purple Knights defend. “Universities are notorious for having weak security,” notes one red team member, exploiting exactly that connection to breach the network. They target VIP executives through social engineering, buying password dumps from the dark web to gain initial access.
Healthcare’s vulnerability lies in its complexity. “If the EMR goes down, all your sites will go down,” explains Semperis’ Marty Momdjian, highlighting how centralized medical records create single points of failure. The Red Raccoons understand this perfectly, their mission is clear: “get to the EMR, get the data, exfiltrate and then extortion.”
Once inside, the attackers move laterally through soft targets, setting up service accounts and orchestrating disinformation campaigns to maximize chaos. Going for the jugular, they employ partial encryption tactics, “just enough to damage it so you can’t use the whole file.”
The Purple Knights fight back with network segmentation, isolating IoT devices and medical equipment. But tough decisions loom: pull the plug on connected life-saving machines? Former negotiator Jeff Wichman stresses that “someone’s life is on the line” in healthcare attacks.
The harsh reality emerges: 66% of healthcare companies pay ransoms, with 16% citing life-or-death situations. Yet more than a third never receive working decryption keys.
