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It’s 2:13 a.m. on a Sunday and the SOC teams’ worst nightmares are about to come true.
Attackers on the other side of the planet are launching a full-scale attack on the company’s infrastructure. Thanks to multiple unpatched endpoints that haven’t seen an update since 2022, they blew through its perimeter in less than a minute.
Attackers with the skills of a nation-state team are after Active Directory to lock down the entire network while creating new admin-level privileges that will lock out any attempt to shut them down. Meanwhile, other members of the attack team are unleashing legions of bots designed to harvest gigabytes of customer, employee and financial data through an API that was never disabled after the last major product release.
In the SOC, alerts start lighting up consoles like the latest Grand Theft Auto on a Nintendo Switch. SOC Analysts are getting pinged on their cell phones, trying to sleep off another six-day week during which many clocked nearly 70 hours.
The CISO gets a call around 2:35 a.m. from the company’s MDR provider saying there’s a large-scale breach going down. “It’s not our disgruntled accounting team, is it? The guy who tried an “Office Space” isn’t at it again, is he?” the CISO asks half awake. The MDR team lead says no, this is inbound from Asia, and it’s big.
Cybersecurity’s coming storm: gen AI, insider threats, and rising CISO burnout
Generative AI is creating a digital diaspora of techniques, technologies and tradecraft that everyone, from rogue attackers to nation-state cyber armies trained in the art of cyberwar, is adopting. Insider threats are growing, too, accelerated by job insecurity and growing inflation. All these challenges and more fall on the shoulders of the CISO, and it’s no wonder more are dealing with burnout.
AI’s mete …