Last year, our team audited 5,732 firewalls. That’s not a round number I picked for effect—that’s the actual count from our deployment and audit logs. FortiGates, Palo Altos, Sophos, Cisco ASAs, a few niche vendors. Enterprise data centres, bank branches, hospital campuses, manufacturing plants, multi-site retail chains. Every single one had at least one misconfiguration.
January 25, 2003. A Saturday. I was at my desk—because in cybersecurity, Saturdays are just Thursdays with better coffee. I’d been in the industry for about a decade at that point, running network operations. We’d seen worms before. Code Red. Nimda. The usual chaos. Nothing—and I mean nothing—prepared us for SQL Slammer. At 05:30 UTC,
When we tell prospects about the value of 24/7 monitoring, their first question is usually: “What would you actually catch that we wouldn’t?” Fair question. Here’s our answer — real incidents from our SOC, anonymised. All detected during overnight or weekend shifts, by engineers who were watching when nobody else was. Case 1: The 3
For decades, the industry has treated network operations (NOC) and security operations (SOC) as separate disciplines. Separate teams. Separate tools. Separate budgets. Separate reports. That separation made sense 20 years ago when networks were simpler and threats were fewer. It doesn’t make sense today — and it’s costing Indian enterprises significantly more than they realise.
