For most of its history, cybersecurity has been reactive by design. Spot the bad event, shut it down. But as cyberattacks evolve, this thinking must evolve too. In the past, attackers relied on a single dramatic exploit to access the crown jewels. But the nature of attacks has changed.
Defenders see ordinary events they don’t think are important enough to follow up on, but before they realize it, these events lead to a dramatic breach. A breach can start with a common event like an admin login or an unfamiliar tool being downloaded after office hours. This first step, if left unchallenged, leads to each following step growing more severe, resulting in a security incident.
Lack of Data Sensibility
It’s wrong to assume that attackers have more data than defenders do about their own environment. Defenders know their users, devices, applications, network traffic, and vulnerabilities. Having access to such diverse data volumes, there should be no reason why defenders end up on the losing side, but they do. The reason is data fragmentation, with information sitting across various disconnected tools. There are different tools tracking identity, endpoints, and network flow. The data is visible to defenders as disparate strands with no clear clasp tying them together. These disjointed threads create blind spots that attackers can exploit, and they do this faster than humans can stitch together the moving pieces of the attack.
Therefore, the focus should shift from flagging isolated events to contextual, agentic defense, where security systems look at multiple signals as a whole, catching early signs of an imminent attack forming.
The OODA Loop offers a useful way to structure this process: Observe what is happening. Orient those observations with the right context. Decide on the appropriate response, and act. This should help teams move before a small anomaly turns into a larger incident, without reacting blindly to an isolated event.