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The Vegas stage lights are bright and you’ve been enjoying the entertainment of jugglers and circus acts. The showman before you now takes his hat off and flips it in the air to demonstrate it’s legitimacy. After this you already know what’s coming but it still doesn’t make any sense. Next his hand reaches into this small hat and pulls out a good sized rabbit, sets it on the ground and it predictably hops off the stage. This sequence is familiar but you know there’s something your eyes must have missed.

Our minds put together the visual reality we perceive based on what we see, hear and feel.. and based on what we believe should be there.  This process of illusion has been quantified very well byDaniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in their invisible gorilla experiment . In this study a big hairy gorilla walks right through the frame of a video and half the people watching it do not recognize that it’s there.

Daniel and Christopher explain that with the right training your mind can avoid making these mistakes in perception. What I wonder is whether technology needs to help us as well, especially when the security of your operation is at stake.

You can’t secure what you can’t see.

… describe the need for an accurate asset inventory, visibility to the conversations happening between those assets, and a clear understanding when those conversations demonstrate security risks or events.

… these visibility tools can be part of your network infrastructure and don’t require a parallel set of tools.

Punchline – build visibility into your infrastructure to be secure.



Authors

Roland Plett

Industry Lead

Oil & Gas and Mining