A cyberattack on CEVA Logistics, the company responsible for shipping Steam hardware in Europe, recently exposed Valve customer names, addresses, contact information, and order details. While Steam credentials and payment information were not compromised, Valve warned customers about potential phishing attempts.
The impact also extends beyond Valve. The CEVA breach affected customers across multiple organizations and industries, demonstrating how quickly a compromise can spread across an interconnected business ecosystem.
Organizations cannot eliminate every point of compromise. Infrastructure strategy can help determine what happens next by isolating workloads, restricting access, protecting critical data, and limiting how far a threat can move.
Why are cyberattacks creating broader infrastructure risk?
Modern organizations depend on interconnected applications, infrastructure, vendors, and service providers. Each dependency expands the environment security teams need to understand and protect.
The trend is significant. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found third-party involvement in 48% of breaches analyzed, a 60% increase from the previous year.
NIST similarly treats cybersecurity supply chain risk management as an organization-wide discipline.
The CEVA incident is also an important reminder that third-party access to data is necessary in most cases. Some of the customer information provided to CEVA most likely was required for the company to fulfill its role as a logistics provider. Businesses cannot eliminate every third-party dependency or control how every partner responds to a threat.
What they can do is understand their external threat footprint: what data vendors need, which systems they can access, and what protections are in place if one of those partners is compromised. Those conversations can help identify where exposure can be reduced and where infrastructure should be designed to contain the impact.
A few principles can help:
- Know your external threat footprint. Understand which vendors process your data, what they need access to, and how that access connects to your broader environment.
- Limit unnecessary access. Users, vendors, and systems should have access only to the resources they need.
- Separate critical environments. Segmentation and workload isolation can help contain a compromise.
- Prepare for compromise. Assume an employee, application, vendor, or system may eventually be breached.
- Plan for recovery. Backups and disaster recovery should provide a path forward if critical systems become unavailable.
The goal is to reduce the potential blast radius when one part of an environment is compromised.
How can infrastructure design limit the impact of a cyberattack?
No infrastructure provider can guarantee that an attack will never happen. Employees can be phished, credentials can be stolen, vulnerabilities can be exploited, and third parties can be breached.
Infrastructure design can influence how far an attacker gets.
Consider the difference between one compromised user and an attacker gaining access across an entire infrastructure environment. A resilient architecture should help prevent the first scenario from escalating into the second.
Three areas are especially important: containment, protection, and recovery.
Contain the threat
Network segmentation, appropriate permission scoping, and workload isolation create boundaries between systems. If one environment is compromised, those boundaries can make lateral movement more difficult.
Single-tenant infrastructure can provide additional isolation. Dedicated bare metal and private cloud give organizations greater control over how workloads and networks are architected.
For gaming companies, HorizonIQ’s gaming infrastructure includes dedicated bare metal and single-tenant private cloud designed for workloads ranging from multiplayer hosting to content distribution and analytics.
Protect critical infrastructure
Access controls help limit which users, applications, APIs, and vendors can reach critical systems. Those permissions should be regularly reviewed as environments and business requirements change.
Network-level protection also matters for internet-facing applications. HorizonIQ DDoS mitigation helps protect availability by detecting and blocking malicious traffic before it disrupts legitimate users.
These controls are most effective when designed together rather than treated as separate security purchases.
Prepare to recover
Containment can reduce the impact of an attack, but organizations still need a plan for restoring critical systems when an incident succeeds.
A recovery strategy should answer:
- How frequently is critical data backed up?
- Are recovery points isolated and protected?
- How quickly can critical workloads be restored?
- Which applications need to come back first?
- Has the recovery process been tested?
Our friends at Summit offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with continuous replication, automated failover and failback, immutable recovery points, and managed recovery planning and testing.
Summit’s Managed Backup adds managed backup scheduling, monitoring, storage, and recovery with capabilities including encrypted backups and immutable storage options.
Together, backup and DR give organizations a clearer path to recovery if prevention and containment controls are not enough.
What should businesses evaluate in their infrastructure strategy?
Security architecture should reflect the workloads, data, users, and operational requirements of the business.
| Area | What to evaluate | Why it matters |
| Access | Who can reach sensitive systems and data? | Limits unnecessary exposure |
| Isolation | How are workloads and networks separated? | Helps contain a compromise |
| DDoS protection | How is malicious traffic mitigated? | Protects availability |
| Backup | Where and how often is data backed up? | Provides recoverable copies |
| Disaster recovery | How quickly can systems be restored? | Reduces disruption |
| Monitoring | What infrastructure visibility is available? | Supports detection and investigation |
| Third parties | What can outside providers access? | Helps manage supply-chain risk |
Compliance can provide another useful baseline when evaluating infrastructure partners. HorizonIQ’s compliance program supports standards and frameworks including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
How can businesses build more resilient infrastructure?
Security decisions are interconnected. Workload isolation affects networking. Backup strategies depend on recovery objectives. Access controls need to reflect how users and applications interact with critical systems.
That is why infrastructure security benefits from a consultative approach.
HorizonIQ works with customers to understand their workloads, security requirements, availability needs, and growth plans before designing the supporting infrastructure. Where additional managed capabilities are required, Summit can extend that strategy with managed backup and DRaaS.
The CEVA breach is another reminder to consider what happens after an attacker finds a way in. Can the threat move between environments? Can critical workloads remain operational? Is clean data available for recovery? How quickly can systems be restored?
Strong infrastructure architecture cannot eliminate cyber risk, but it can help contain an incident, protect critical systems, and provide a clearer path to recovery.
Explore HorizonIQ’s infrastructure solutions to build a comprehensive strategy around security, availability, and long-term resilience.
Summit is HorizonIQ’s parent company and provides complementary managed IT services, including Disaster Recovery as a Service and Managed Backup.
