ByJoshua Goldfarb, Security Week
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Beyond monitoring and compliance, visibility acts as a powerful deterrent, shaping user behavior, improving collaboration, and enabling more accurate, data-driven security decisions.
Unfortunately, we have a problematic and unstable neighbor. Without getting into details, he often yells obscenities, threatens physical harm, threatens property damage, and other such undesirable things. Sadly, involving the police from time to time and getting two restraining orders did not discourage this neighbor from his outbursts and threats.
The police and courts explained to us that a healthy person is afraid of the law. This is logical – most of us don’t commit crimes, and this is partly because we are afraid of the consequences. But when a person is unstable and believes that they can talk their way out of anything as long as it is your word against theirs, there is little recourse. In other words, if a person is careful to behave badly only when there is no record of that behavior, it is very difficult for the police and courts to do much about it.
Even given this, we have, thankfully, had several months of quiet. How so? We found something that the troublesome neighbor did fear – being caught on camera.
We installed home security cameras, and nearly instantly, we had complete quiet. We went from constant unpleasantness to total quiet overnight. In fact, one of the first videos we collected on one of our home security cameras was of our problematic neighbor approaching our door, realizing we had installed a home security camera, and then quietly walking away rather than launching into a tirade. Since then, quiet.
Why am I sharing this story? I believe that there is an important security lesson we can learn from this. Namely, the importance of visibility – not merely for compliance, audit, security monitoring, and other reasons that we are likely all familiar with. But beyond that, like in the case of our troublesome neighbor, visibility keeps people and teams honest, and that can bring huge benefits for the security organization.
Before getting into the benefits for the security organization, it is worth clarifying what I am referring to when I mention visibility. When thinking about visibility, it is important to remember the need to see what is happening at all layers. Beyond just the network, endpoints, and access logs, but also the application layer. This includes detailed insight into both traffic traversing the API infrastructure, as well as traffic leveraging AI capabilities.