A few weeks ago, I found myself in the middle of a marathon meeting day. You know the kind: no time to eat, email inbox piling up, and bio breaks reduced to an absolute Olympic sprint.
During one of these strategic dashes to the restroom, I managed to do what every executive secretly fears: I locked myself out of the office. No badge, no phone. Semi-panicked and running late for my next meeting, I politely flagged down a stranger in the hallway and asked them to call our own customer support line so someone could come bail me out.
What happened next left me temporarily shocked—and entirely proud.
The analyst who answered the call flat-out refused to help.
- My request to send a quick chat to the local team? Denied.
- My attempts to reason, explain the situation, and guarantee I wouldn’t hold it against them? Denied.
- My very professional, slightly desperate executive plea? Hard denied.
Eventually, I made it back inside and got to my meeting, but zero thanks to the analyst on the phone. And in hindsight? I couldn’t be happier. I was the one who forgot my badge. That analyst’s healthy skepticism, strict adherence to protocol, and refusal to bypass security for a smooth-talking “VIP” is exactly what we should all demand from our teams.
That interaction hits close to home right now. Recent headlines around high-profile compromises of security providers serve as a stark reminder: no one is immune.
Threat actors like ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider aren’t breaking through hardened firewalls with complex zero-days—they’re calling helpdesks, tricking employees, and walking right through the front door. Add AI into the mix to automate reconnaissance, scale attack infrastructure, and rapidly write exploit code, and the velocity of these attacks is staggering.
Defense in depth isn’t a buzzword anymore; it’s survival. Beating AI-driven attacks means operating with absolute speed—fast at detecting, and even faster at containing. (I am severely tempted to drop a shameless plug here for our own Active Response capabilities, but I promised myself I’d keep this post educational.)
The takeaway is simple: people remain the most exploited attack surface.
Securing your environment means treating identity—both user and asset—as your primary perimeter. It’s not just who someone claims to be; it’s where they go, what they can access, and how quickly you can verify it.
- Strictly enforce least privilege across the entire account lifecycle.
- Stack robust authentication methods (MFA is the bare minimum, not the ceiling).
- Implement continuous monitoring for anomalous behavior.
In a recent notice to the company, our CISO Chad Cragle reminded us that, “The human layer is still part of the attack surface, not because employees are careless, but because attackers are increasingly skilled at creating urgency, impersonating trusted people, and manipulating normal business processes. That is why identity recovery and access-reset workflows must be treated as security controls, not routine administrative tasks. Independent verification, separation of duties, phishing-resistant MFA, and a willingness to slow down when something feels unusual are essential defenses. Security friction can be inconvenient. But the right friction is often what prevents a single successful social-engineering attempt from becoming a significant incident.”
Chad is right (I’m sure he doesn’t hear that often) your security tools are only as strong as the human processes built around them. Tools don’t stop a social engineering attack; an analyst empowered to say “no” to a VP at the front door does.
Shameless Plug ↓
If you would like to learn more about Active Response
https://www.deepwatch.com/active-response
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