For years, there was an unwritten dogma in the cyber security industry: ‘visibility is everything’. IT departments strove to collect every byte of data, believing that full logs were a guarantee of security. Today, this strategy is becoming our biggest pitfall. With billions of connected devices, the hybrid cloud and the expansion of AI, we are drowning in alerts rather than gaining knowledge. When supply chains are as fragile as ever, the key to survival is no longer the amount of information gathered, but the speed of understanding its context.
If we look back, the 1980s may seem like a technological idyll. Not because the systems were better – they were just finite, tangible and, most importantly, isolated. It was a time when a ‘security incident’ often meant the physical theft of a floppy disk, and fixing a bug required being physically present at the terminal. You could draw a map of your infrastructure on a piece of paper and be sure it reflected reality. You were in control of this environment because we were able to embrace it with our minds.
The end of an era of isolation
However, this idyll is now prehistoric. Nostalgia for the simplicity of those years is understandable, but today’s IT reality no longer resembles an orderly archive – it is a living, chaotic organism that is evolving faster than we can take note.
Modern infrastructure has lost its boundaries. There are no longer moats and fortified walls. Every company has become a node in a global network of dependencies. Every new API connection, every SaaS service deployed by the marketing department without IT’s knowledge(Shadow IT), every IoT device plugged into the production network changes the organisation’s risk profile in real time.
The problem is that the speed at which this landscape is changing has long outstripped the human capacity to manage it manually. We are trying to navigate this storm using maps from a decade ago. In effect, instead of controlling the environment, we are merely reacting to its convulsions.
The digital Upside Down and technology debt
The situation is complicated by the fact that beneath the shiny surface of modern applications, artificial intelligence and the cloud, there is a dark layer of technological ‘legacy’. This is our digital ‘Upside Down’ (referring to pop culture metaphors). We have built digital skyscrapers on foundations that remember a very different technological era.
Many key processes in critical infrastructure, banking or logistics still depend on systems that were developed at a time when the internet was a curiosity rather than the bloodstream of the economy. This creates a dangerous paradox: an ecosystem that is simultaneously ultra-modern and historically ‘polluted’. This reflection of a modern attack surface in an outdated technical base means that it only takes one crack in an old, forgotten component to open wide the gates for attackers to the latest cloud resources.
The butterfly effect in the supply chain
Just how fragile this arrangement is has been amply demonstrated in recent months. Global failures, such as the CrowdStrike incident or the disruption to Amazon Web Services, have proven a brutal truth: in today’s IT, no one is an island. A bug in code at an external supplier can paralyse operations on another continent in a matter of minutes.
A small vulnerability becomes a fuse with a disproportionately large field of fire. Cybercriminals understand this perfectly. They have stopped wasting time pushing through the main gates of the best-guarded companies. Instead, they use automation and machine learning to scan widely branching supply chains for the weakest link.
For security teams, this means fighting an enemy that is faster and more precise. Defenders are suffering from ‘alert fatigue’ (alert fatigue). Security systems generate thousands of alerts a day. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Signals of actual attacks, which – supported by AI – are executed with surgical precision, are lost in this information noise.
Context is the new king
In the face of these challenges, the traditional approach of collecting data and patching every vulnerability found (CVE) is a road to nowhere. It is Sisyphean work. To regain control of the digital chaos, organisations need a paradigm shift: from incident collection to Cyber Exposure Management.
The decisive factor ceases to be the ‘what’ (what vulnerability it is) and begins to be the ‘where’ and ‘how’ (in what context it occurs). Real security in 2024 is about being able to answer the question, “Does this particular vulnerability in an old printer in a warehouse allow an attacker to jump into our cloud database?”.
That’s what context is. It’s understanding the attack pathways and the relationship between IT (information technology), OT (operational technology) and the cloud.
This is where artificial intelligence must enter the game, on the defenders’ side. Not as a marketing add-on, but as a necessity. Only AI can analyse these billions of dependencies in real time, map the paths of potential attacks and point security managers to the 5% of threats that can realistically stop a business.
Resilience is understanding
Technologies from the 1980s can be sentimental, recalling a time when digital systems could be grasped by eye. Today, however, the reality is different – faster, denser and infinitely more complex. Companies that understand this are no longer pursuing the impossible goal of ‘complete security’ based on defensive walls.
Instead, they build resilience through full visibility of their digital ecosystem. Those who can capture their assets in their entirety – from legacy to cloud – and classify risk in the right context, will remain capable. Whether the threat comes from AI, a vendor error or a forgotten server in the basement. In a digital world, the winner is the one who understands the connections instead of panicking.
