What keeps me up at night the most is a situation that could happen in the very near future, something like this...
It was a dark and stormy night. The skeleton crew was tired after along evening spent in their SIEM dismissing false alarms and legitimate alerts from attempted intrusions. Suddenly a voice from a junior tech muttered, "We have a live one. We gotta deal with it now."
The tired crew gathered around his screen, looking almost ghostly in the dim light. A new malware variant, similar to the dozens of attempted attacks had apparently infiltrated their network this time and only was detected after admin settings started changing.
Before the team could even begin working past the first step in their incident response plan, their phones began ringing. Family, friends, co-workers. "Help me, there's smoke" one cried while coughing, sounding like a young child in danger. Another call was from a spouse, "Please help, I'm being followed!" The team leader, sweating, brow furrowed, was was able to note that something was off. The voice from their boss didn't quite sound right. It was a deepfake — maybe related somehow to the malware that was so quickly adapting even as variants were launched at their systems over and over.
"Stop! These are not real phone calls. Turn off your phones. Focus on the plan, follow the plan, now!" Her voice tried to sound controlled, shaking slightly still.
Struggling mightily, they shook off the alarm and confusion and got to work. the malware had used their minutes of confusion to rapidly spread through their network, starting to corrupt files, encrypting data, and disabling defenses. But, isolating the infected systems, they flooded the network with decoy data, drawing the malware's attention away from critical assets. With quick thinking and relentless effort, they used advanced threat intelligence to identify the malware's patterns and vulnerabilities.
As dawn approached, the storm outside began to wane, and so did the digital tempest within the office. The skeleton crew successfully quarantined the malware, restoring essential systems from clean backups and reinforcing their defenses. Exhausted but triumphant, they knew they had saved — even if just barely — the company from a potentially devastating attack, even as they themselves still felt vulnerable from the many questions yet to be answered.
