Remember the old story of the elephant and the six blind men? Each man felt a different part of the same elephant and described the elephant completely differently. One touched the leg and declared it was like a tree. Another felt the trunk and insisted it was like a snake. Each man was convinced that he was right, and wondered why the others described the creature completely differently. Nobody could have been farther than the truth.
This story captures what it’s like in cybersecurity today. Security technologies are like those blind men, and today’s modern cyberattacks are like the elephant they’re trying to understand. Each examines their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. It’s like having detectives investigate a bank robbery, but each detective can examine only one piece of evidence and can’t talk to the others.
Today’s Modern Security Stack: A Collection of Blind Men
If you look at any SOC today, you’ll find more tools than a construction site. Some reports say the average number of tools is 45, while some say it is 83. Either way, that’s a lot of information gathered in a siloed manner.
That is because each tool is designed to excel at detecting specific types of threats. For example, there are email security gateways (the “mail sniffer”), EDR tools monitoring suspicious processes (the “surveillance camera”), ITDR systems watching for lateral movement (the “vault security guard”), DLP solutions tracking data exfiltration (the “your bag looks heavy”), and SASE and proxy tools monitoring network traffic (the “speeding ticket giving traffic cop”) – all operating and reporting independently.
Each cybersecurity tool is incredibly sophisticated at what it does, like expert detectives who are masters of their own trade. On their own, each alert might look like a low- or medium-severity event. But putting all the data and context together is where the story gets very interesting.
When a High-Severity Story is Told by Low-Severity Alerts
Imagine this timeline of an attack through the eyes of an isolated group of Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts:
9:15 AM – Email security: “Spear-phishing email flagged as ‘Low severity. Just another wannabe scammer.”
9:47 AM – EDR: “PowerShell execution detected. ‘Low severity – probably just Bob from IT doing his usual wizardry.”
11:23 AM – ITDR: “User accessing unusual servers. ‘Low-Medium’ severity – weird timing, but they have legitimate access.”
1:15 PM – DLP and SASE: “Large file transfers and outbound connections to a suspicious C2 server detected.”
To each individual tool, these events seem low-severity and entirely unrelated. But stepping back and looking at the complete timeline, our elephant-sized cyber heist becomes crystal clear.
Revealing the Elephant
Despite what the individual tools say, this isn’t a collection of unrelated events. This is a sophisticated cyber bank robber executing a flawless theft across the entire cyber kill chain.
Looking at the entire picture and collection of security tool data, we can see the following actions took place:
- Reconnaissance – cyber thieves researched your finance team (they cased the joint)
- Weaponization – attackers crafted a targeted spear-phishing email (a perfect disguise)
- Delivery – email was delivered (they walked through front door)
- Exploitation – an unsuspecting user clicked the link (resulting in a disabled alarm system)
- Installation – the scheme loaded PowerShell to establish persistence (the heist tools were planted)
- Command and Control – the system initiated C2 communication (getaway driver was called)
- Actions on Objectives – the result is exfiltrated data (took the money and ran)
Each SOC technology was correct about their singular observations, but all were wrong about the bigger picture and had no way to know of the attack in its entirety. They were touching different parts of the same attack elephant, unable to see they were dealing with the cybersecurity equivalent of Danny Ocean’s crew.
The Cost of Cybersecurity Silos
This cybersecurity fragmentation costs organizations more than a losing streak on the strip in Las Vegas. By the time security teams understand that these “medium-severity” alerts are actually coordinating attacks, the cyber criminals have swiped the equivalent of a digital Fort Knox because average dwell times stretch into weeks or months. Security analysts drown in mostly meaningless alerts, while fragmented responses let attackers adapt and persist like digital cockroaches. Teams waste countless hours manually correlating alerts that when coordinated ultimately tell a comprehensive, coherent story.
AI Lets You Spot Patterns
Today, AI-powered security operations tools can provide a better approach, adding a chief detective who can finally see the entire crime scene, correlating events across security layers to reveal complete attack narratives. They are able to transform security operations from a comedy of errors into well-orchestrated response teams. Individual tools keep doing what they do well in their silos, while AI-powered tools work across those silos and data sets to understand what is really happening. Along the way many manual tasks and low-priority alerts get eliminated, making every member of the security team a security expert.
Modern cyber criminals count on today’s cybersecurity tools operating in silos, and SOC responses being as coordinated as cats at a dog show. The next time you see low- and medium-severity alerts cascading across your tools, ask yourself: Could these be different parts of the same elephant-sized heist happening right under your nose? AI-powered tools help bring the bigger picture into focus to best protect organizations and their crown jewels.
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