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May 28, 2025

From reactive to proactive: Cyber lessons from Damen’s transformation

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From reactive to proactive: Cyber lessons from Damen’s transformation

For modern manufacturers and maritime innovators, digitization is no longer a long-term goal. In 2025, it’s an immediate imperative. As companies in these sectors invest in digital platforms, customer experience, and interconnected operations, they unlock new efficiencies and business models. But, with every new integration, domain, and microservice, the external attack surface expands in complexity and risk.

That tension was evident for Damen Shipyards Group. As one of the world’s leading shipbuilders, Damen operates across more than 120 countries. Their goal was ambitious: build a global digital experience platform (DXP) that connected internal teams and external customers through a single, unified interface. But in doing so, they encountered a challenge many manufacturers face—how to scale securely without fragmenting visibility or slowing innovation.

Visibility, validation, and volume

When an organization is composed of dozens of regional units, IT decentralization becomes both a necessity and a risk. For security teams, decentralization means fragmented visibility and blindspots. That was the reality Damen found themselves navigating.

Even with legacy tooling in place, Damen struggled with alert fatigue and low-context findings. Many of the flagged risks were theoretical or unexploitable in practice. At the same time, the team lacked complete visibility into their true internet-facing footprint—an issue that escalated when a legacy marketing page was co-opted by attackers for SEO poisoning.

It wasn’t the most sensitive system in the company, but it illustrated the core problem: the difference between what a business thinks it controls and what an attacker can actually reach.

Why shifting security left is essential

For many in the manufacturing and logistics space, security has historically been treated as a final gate in the process or an audit item checked before product launch or vendor deployment. But Damen’s approach evolved to meet a more pressing reality: security needs to move earlier in the development cycle. It needs to shift left.

The term "shift left" originally emerged from software development cycles, where the goal was to integrate testing and quality assurance earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to catch bugs when they were cheaper and easier to fix. In cybersecurity, "shifting left" takes on a different, more critical meaning. It signifies a fundamental pivot from reactive detection and response—acting only after a threat is identified or a breach occurs—to a proactive and continuous preventative approach. This means treating security as an inherent part of building and operating your digital footprint, not just defending it. 

This mindset also acknowledges that exposures aren’t limited to IT-managed systems; they can originate from marketing launches, vendor integrations, M&A activity, and other parts of the business that rarely fall under traditional prevention focus. Investing in preventative solutions upfront ensures that organizations are holistically managing their posture and actively neutralizing threats before they can even manifest into a breach.

For Damen, this mindset shift resulted in embedding security into their DXP development lifecycle. Every change to the attack surface triggered real-time validation. Security became an integrated partner to their innovative roadmap, not a post-launch bottleneck.

The operational benefits of a proactive posture

In adopting a shift-left security strategy, Damen also had to reframe how its security teams collaborated. With a diverse IT structure across global operations, assigning risk ownership wasn’t always straightforward. Who was responsible for a vulnerability on a domain registered years ago by a now-defunct sub-brand?

They found that a role-based access model, combined with centralized oversight, enabled both local action and global visibility. Teams could take ownership of the assets they managed, while the central security team retained the ability to see the full picture.

This structure reduced remediation time and improved accountability. Instead of triaging hundreds of alerts, the team could focus on validated, exploitable risks. That shift in operational maturity empowered the security team to demonstrate tangible outcomes, not just effort.

How Hadrian empowered Damen's approach

Damen’s new strategy was supported by Hadrian’s AI-driven offensive security platform. While not the only tool in their security stack, Hadrian played a critical role in helping Damen move from passive assessment to active validation.

By continuously scanning the internet for assets tied to the organization and replicating real-world adversary behavior, Hadrian surfaced only those findings that mattered. The platform’s event-driven model ensured that changes to infrastructure—whether DNS entries, new services, or expired certs—triggered immediate analysis and validation.

Crucially, Hadrian aligned with Damen’s broader goal: to make security scalable, contextual, and actionable in a distributed enterprise environment.

A blueprint for secure digital transformation

The challenges Damen faced aren’t unique. Many manufacturing and shipping organizations are pushing toward greater digital connectivity, customer-facing platforms, and operational efficiency. But the speed of that transformation often outpaces the ability to secure it.

As new services launch and global infrastructure scales, the traditional security perimeter dissolves. Organizations need to understand not just what they own, but what’s visible, reachable, and exploitable from the outside. That requires real-time discovery, contextual validation, and fast remediation to prioritize effectively.

Damen’s journey offers a compelling blueprint. By shifting security left, embracing continuous validation, and prioritizing security at the beginning of their projects, they secured a complex global digital platform without sacrificing innovation.

Security leaders in manufacturing, logistics, and beyond are increasingly recognizing that resilience isn’t just about detection and response. It starts with knowing your own environment as well as an attacker would. It starts with visibility, validation, and velocity.

Hadrian remains a key partner in that approach. But the broader lesson is mindset: security isn’t something to add after transformation. You have to embed security within your larger innovative vision.

If you’re interested in taking the first step toward a proactive cybersecurity approach, let Hadrian’s offensive cybersecurity experts show you how threat actors see your organization.

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