Nytt DDoS-rekord (Image credit: Shutterstock / ZinetroN)
The worst security breaches rarely begin with fanfare. Rather, the most dangerous attacks are the ones that quietly slip past the perimeter and begin spreading while defenders remain unaware. It’s the time attackers spend under the radar inside the system that turns an intrusion into a disaster.
Yet, despite years of investment in preventative tools, we still see organizations consistently struggle to detect and contain attackers once they are inside.
Vice President of Industry Strategy at Illumio.
Often, the shortfall isn’t a lack of visibility or security alerts, but a lack of clarity. In today’s hybrid environments, resilience depends less on blocking every threat and more on spotting the ones already within reach.
The growing gap between detection and real visibility
It’s no secret that security teams are feeling increasingly overwhelmed, and it’s easy to see why when you start drilling into the numbers.
Our research shows that a typical organization faces more than 2,000 alerts every day, and much of this is noise offering little real value.
Analysts spend more than 14 hours each week chasing false positives, and two-thirds of leaders admit their teams simply cannot keep up. Missed alerts quickly turn into missed opportunities to stop attackers early.
Tooling complexity adds to the problem. While most organizations now use multiple cloud detection and response platforms, we found that almost all (92%) still report significant capability gaps.
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More data does not necessarily equal better detection, and overlapping systems create fragmented visibility and conflicting information. Without meaningful context to tie these signals together, defenders are left piecing together fragments of a story rather than seeing what truly matters.
Why lateral movement remains the attacker’s favorite blind spot
The widespread challenges of separating signal from noise are a massive boon to threat actors, who are increasingly favouring low-and-slow tactics. Once in an organization, rather than act immediately, they often creep through the network, escalating privileges, probing workloads, and searching for sensitive systems.
This lateral movement is where small breaches escalate into major operational crises, and it remains one of the most difficult stages of an attack to detect.