When people talk about security breaches, the conversation almost always starts with attackers.
Hackers breaking in.
Malware spreading.
Someone exploiting a vulnerability.
Over time, I’ve come to believe this framing is misleading.
Many of the most serious security failures I’ve seen didn’t begin with attackers at all.
They began with systems that were trusted too much, for too long, and without enough scrutiny.
Trust feels necessary — and that’s the problem
Every organization runs on trust. Without it, nothing would scale.
Internal networks are assumed to be safer.
Authenticated users are treated as legitimate.
Approved tools are considered reliable by default.
I understand why this happens. Teams need to move fast. Constant friction kills productivity.
But in my experience, trust is rarely revisited once it’s granted. It quietly becomes an assumption baked into architecture, workflows, and culture.
And assumptions age badly.
Valid access doesn’t mean safe behavior
One pattern I keep seeing is how often breaches involve perfectly valid credentials.
No brute force.
No obvious exploit.
Just someone logging in the way they’re supposed to.
From the system’s perspective, nothing is wrong:
- authentication succeeds
- permissions are correct
- requests look normal
What bothers me here is how many security tools are simply not built for this scenario. They are excellent at spotting “bad actors,” but far less capable of questioning bad outcomes produced by legitimate access.
The system behaves correctly.
The result is still harmful.
Trusted systems almost always have too much power
Another uncomfortable reality: trusted systems are almost always overprivileged.
I’ve yet to see a real-world environment where service accounts have only the permissions they need. Convenience wins. Future-proofing wins. “We’ll tighten it later” wins.
Later rarely comes.
When one of these systems is compromised, the damage spreads fast — not because defenses failed, but because they were intentionally relaxed in the name of efficiency.
This isn’t negligence. It’s a trade-off that quietly becomes dangerous over time.
Supply chains feel abstract until they aren’t
Supply chain risk is often discussed as a theoretical problem.
In practice, it’s painfully concrete.
Modern systems depend on code written by people you don’t know, maintained by teams you’ve never met, updated on timelines you don’t control.
I don’t think this is inherently bad. Open ecosystems are powerful.
But I do think we underestimate how much trust we’re outsourcing — and how little visibility we retain in return.
When a dependency is compromised, it doesn’t feel like an attack. It feels like normal operation. That’s what makes it so effective.
Monitoring tells you systems are alive, not healthy
Most monitoring answers one question very well:
“Is the system up?”
It rarely answers:
“Is the system behaving responsibly?”
In trusted-system breaches, nothing spikes dramatically. There’s no obvious red flag. Behavior drifts slowly, often staying within allowed boundaries.
I’ve seen cases where everything looked fine on dashboards, while real damage was already unfolding elsewhere — in data exposure, biased decisions, or quiet misuse.
By the time someone noticed, the question wasn’t what happened, but how long has this been happening.
Why zero trust often feels underwhelming
Zero trust is frequently presented as a cure-all.
In reality, I think many organizations adopt the language without fully embracing the mindset. They add layers of authentication, segment networks, deploy more tools — and feel safer.
But trust doesn’t disappear. It just moves.
True zero trust, in my view, isn’t about tools. It’s about continuous doubt:
- questioning whether access still makes sense
- watching how systems are actually used
- accepting that past approval doesn’t guarantee future safety
That kind of skepticism is uncomfortable. It slows things down. Which is probably why it’s so often avoided.
People are always part of the system
It’s tempting to blame breaches on technology.
But trusted systems are built by people, maintained by people, and adjusted under pressure by people.
Shortcuts accumulate.
Documentation falls behind.
Temporary fixes become permanent.
I don’t see this as failure. I see it as reality.
What worries me is how rarely organizations account for this human layer when designing security. We build systems as if people will always behave ideally, even though experience tells us they won’t.
Where I think security failures really begin
At this point, I’m convinced that many security breaches don’t start with attackers.
They start with unchallenged trust.
They begin when systems are treated as safe because they always have been. When internal access stops being questioned. When convenience quietly outruns caution.
Improving security, in my opinion, doesn’t require assuming the worst of everyone. It requires:
- being honest about how systems are actually used
- revisiting trust regularly
- reducing unnecessary power
- paying attention to outcomes, not just permissions
Until we do that, breaches will keep surprising us —
not because they’re clever, but because they come from places we stopped questioning long ago.