MITRE has identified five critical areas that organizations should pursue to elevate their cyber defense strategy to the next level: situation awareness, resiliency, threat-based defense, partnership, and innovation. Taken together, they can enable an organization to up-their-game to more effectively manage the advanced cyber threat.

Situation Awareness
Cyber situation awareness provides leaders with information on the potential impact of cyber attacks, enabling them to take countermeasures to sustain key operations and protect sensitive data.

Resiliency
The goal of security typically is to keep the enemy out. This isn't possible in the cyber world; a determined adversary will get in. The key is to keep critical operations running despite the attack.

Threat-Based Defense
Historically cyber defenses have focused on measures to protect the computer systems being attacked. An emerging approach that is more effective is to better understand an attacker's techniques and implement the right defensive measures.

Partnership
Cyber defense must become a team sport. Collaboratives that share indicators or compromise and threat characteristics are crucial to an effective cyber defense strategy.

Innovation
With threat information in hand, organizations can more quickly adapt to changing techniques of adversaries and deploy tools to counter their attacks.

While the above provides the foundation for a game-changing strategy for cyber defense, an effective overall strategy must also be dynamic—always seeking new and better ways for keeping information systems safe to address the circumstances we face today. Toward this goal, we regularly explore potential breakthroughs in innovative technology, conceptual and organizational approaches, and operational techniques to counter the cyber threat. We nurture an expansive portfolio of cybersecurity capabilities including technology enhancements to achieve missions, security operations improvements, new architectural and engineering approaches, advances in strategy and policy, and emerging areas such as trustworthy computing and crypto integration.