Your Company Has a Nervous System. It’s Missing Its Immune System.
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* NOTE: none of the info in this article or ANY article of MacroBytes is investment advice or political opinion, it is solely informational for editorial purposes. All market research in this article is sourced, and the purpose of these articles is solely to synthesize topics out of curiosity while sourcing all relevant sources. Summaries are created via a combination of market research, individual opinion, and AI-Workflows. Numerous aspects of the article are also independent ideas and opinions that I have framed from the research conducted.
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Introduction
There is a strange paradox at the epicenter of modern cybersecurity. While enterprises continue to pour billions of dollars into an ever-growing arsenal of security tools, often numbering around 70 different software platforms per device in a typical enterprise (Security Magazine, Link)- the frequency and cost-basis of data breaches still continue to climb immensely. Security teams and medium and large-sized businesses continue to seem overwhelmed, unable to have clear visibility amidst and ever increasing repository of security SaaS tools, siloed data pipelines, and increasingly stringent GRC (governance, compliance, and regulatory) requirements.
To help understand what current pain points enterprises face from a security standpoint in 2025, and how these impact organizations from an efficiency and monetary standpoint, its first important to understand the key trends impacting cybersecurity in 2025, and the different levels of an organization’s “security stack”.
2025 Key Trends
According to Deloitte’s Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) 2024 annual cyber trends report for 2024, here is a summary of some of the key trends that are disrupting enterprise security as of right now. One of the key insights Deloitte's report draws upon is the increasing sophistication of initial access methods that are causing significant financial and volume strain due to AI-driven threat actors.
Full Deloitte report: Deloitte’s US Annual Cyber Threat Trends Report 2025
2024 Cyber Threat Trends — Simple Takeaways
Plain-English snapshot from Deloitte CTI’s 2024 report to ground a future-facing ontology (2026+).
1) What hit organizations the most
- Ransomware is #1. Biggest source of incidents across 2024.
- How attackers got in: Exploited software flaws, stolen passwords, and phishing.
- Common playbook: Break in through VPNs using real (stolen) usernames + passwords to slip past MFA.
- Third-party risk rose: More breaches began at vendors/partners, including zero-day exploits.
- Most active crew: RansomHub (500+ claimed victims), followed by LockBit and Play.
2) Money & scale (why this matters)
- Average ransomware breach: $4.91M impact.
- Low cost to attack: LLMs can help criminals craft 1,000 phishing emails in <2 hours for ~$6.
- Who attacks most: Cybercriminals > Nation-states > Hacktivists > Unattributed.
3) “First door in” (initial access)
- People are the target: Social engineering stays top because humans make mistakes.
- Combo attacks: Voice phishing (vishing) + business email compromise (BEC) to steal credentials.
- Password shift: Less brute-force, more deliberately stolen logins (dark web, brokers, scams).
- AI supercharges phishing: Personalized lures → +1,265% phishing volume.
- Old flaws still bite: Attackers exploited both new (zero-day) and 5+ year-old vulnerabilities.
4) Who got targeted
- Nation-states: More spying/intelligence ops (e.g., APT29/Midnight Blizzard, Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon).
- Cybercrime “as a business”: More decentralized and specialized, with deepfakes and PaaS (packer-as-a-service).
Quick Glossary (no jargon)
- Ransomware
- Malware that locks or threatens to leak your data unless you pay.
- Phishing / Vishing / BEC
- Tricking people by email (phishing), phone (vishing), or business workflow (BEC) to steal logins or money.
- Zero-day
- A brand-new software hole with no fix yet. Attackers rush to use it.
- Initial Access Broker (IAB)
- Criminals who sell stolen logins or “front-door” access to companies.
- VPN + MFA bypass
- Using real stolen logins on remote access (VPN) to slip past 2-step checks.
Ontology Hooks for 2026+
Use these buckets to structure entities/relationships in your future-facing cybersecurity ontology.
Deloitte’s security landscape and threats report highlights a few important realities that organizations face in 2025.
For one, AI is increasing the likelihood of successful breaches by threat actors, particularly driven by more successful ransomware and phishing attacks that enable hackers to gain access to credentials, abuse VPNs, and exploit vulnerabilities in ecosystems.
Additionally, while organizations have immense infrastructures for cybersecurity via their 60+ SaaS tools in various compartments of enterprise security, these tools often cause the following issues:
Alert fatigue: Organizations, particularly IT teams and CISOs, are crippled with far-too-many alerts. Extracting data across a variety of security SaaS tools that are siloed in for specific cyber use cases (encryption, endpoint security, identity/access management (IAM), cloud, in-transit, security information and event management (SIEM), and GRC) is taxing from a database, human capital, and organizational agility standpoint.
Reactivity: Because data is often siloed and extracted by security teams individually by SaaS tool, security teams in large companies are often reactive - either handling individual breaches, events, or vulnerabilities one step at a time, or designating a significant amount of technological capital to simply extracting, analyzing, and remediating alerts.
Inadequate Governance: Imagine if you got sick with a virus and your immune system was fighting the disease without your brain knowing, or your brain has identified the virus without sending any signals to the immune system to remediate the issue. The result is a governance failure, and your body’s inability to fight off the virus in one united front. Organizations today, face a similar narrative - security teams remain reactive, owners of critical assets are often unaware of security breaches until it is too late, or blindsided by data due to unstructured security ontologies.
With the advent of agentic AI in 2025 and the further development of quantum algorithms capable of providing threat actors with ever-increasing leverage, it is now, more than ever, that successful measures must be taken by companies to mitigate security threats.
Think Of A Company As A Living Organism
I know that this may seem like a very odd transition and metaphor, but bare with me. Think of an enterprise as nothing but a complex “digital organism”. Every department, system, and platform functions like part of a cohesive system within the body, working together to keep the organization productive and resilient against internal and external threats. Outlined below is a further breakdown of this analogy to aim to explain how organizations currently function.
“Your Company Is a Living Organism” — A Plain-English Map
Every tech piece = a body part. See how it all fits — and why an Immune System layer is missing.
The Big Idea
Your enterprise is a digital organism. Systems, vendors, devices, and data all behave like body parts working together to keep the business alive and productive.
- Understand each “organ” in simple terms
- See how problems spread through the “body”
- Spot the missing Immune System that coordinates defense
Why this matters
Buying more siloed tools ≠ health. Real resilience comes from a coordinated, adaptive defense that detects, responds, and learns across the whole body.
Map of the Digital Body
Each tile explains the role in plain English and gives concrete examples.
Core Business Systems
Vital systems that keep the company alive and functioning.
- What they do: Run email, files, finance, CRM, ERP.
- Examples: M365, Google Workspace, AWS, Azure, SAP, Salesforce.
- Risk if ill: Operations stall; revenue & customers impacted.
Perimeter & Gateways
First line that keeps out obvious threats from the outside world.
- What they do: Filter traffic, block known bad actors.
- Examples: Firewalls, Web Gateways, VPN portals, WAFs.
- Limit: Can’t stop everything, especially stolen logins or new tricks.
Endpoints & Servers
Laptops, phones, servers — the day-to-day workers of the body.
- What they do: Create & process data, run apps.
- Examples: Windows/macOS laptops, Linux servers, mobile devices.
- Risk: One infection can spread fast if not isolated quickly.
Cloud, SaaS & Networks
The bloodstream that moves data and services everywhere.
- What they do: Connect users, apps, partners; scale resources.
- Examples: AWS/Azure/GCP, Okta/Entra, Slack, ServiceNow, APIs.
- Risk: A single misconfig or stolen credential can “flow” problems widely.
Vendors & Third Parties
They supply vital “nutrients” (services/data) — but can bring toxins.
- What they do: Provide software, data feeds, managed services.
- Risk: Third-party breaches can poison your whole body.
- Need: Vetting, contracts, monitoring, swift containment.
Detection & Alerts (SIEM)
Signals “pain” and reflexes when something’s wrong.
- What they do: Collect logs, correlate events, raise alerts.
- Examples: Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Elastic.
- Limit: Alerts ≠ action; without coordination, teams drown in noise.
GRC, Policies & Risk
Long-term memory and strategy; sets rules the body should follow.
- What they do: Policies, control mapping, risk registers, audits.
- Examples: ServiceNow GRC, Archer, OneTrust, custom risk tools.
- Limit: Static memory; needs live feedback to stay relevant.
The Immune System (What’s not there yet)
A coordinating defense layer that sits across the whole body to detect, respond, and remember — turning isolated tools into a unified, adaptive shield.
- Sense (Detect): Merge signals from SIEM, EDR, identity, cloud, vendors.
- Decide (Prioritize): Map to business impact; pick highest-risk issues first.
- Act (Orchestrate): Contain endpoints, revoke access, block IPs, patch flaws.
- Learn (Memory): Feed outcomes back into GRC & controls to prevent repeats.
How Problems Spread — and How an Immune Layer Stops Them
Infection
Phishing steals a real login. Attacker signs in through VPN.
Circulation
Access flows into SaaS and cloud. Data and tokens move with it.
Organ Damage
Core apps misused; files encrypted or exfiltrated.
Immune Response
Unusual access detected → session killed, MFA re-challenged, device isolated, ticket auto-opened, policy updated.
Practical Takeaways (No Jargon)
- Know your organs: List critical apps & who depends on them.
- Protect the skin & cells: Patch, phishing training, MFA, EDR everywhere.
- Watch the bloodstream: Tighten identity & permissions; monitor API use.
- Manage vendors: Verify security, limit data shared, plan for their incidents.
- Add the immune layer: Connect signals, automate containment, feed lessons into policy.
Here are some high level takeaways from this metaphor of an enterprise being similar to the human body and its inherent biology.
Security Teams Are Drowning In “Pain Signals”
SIEM platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, etc. are all effectively a company’s “nervous system”. Similar to our immune system in the human body, they are designed to do one thing exceptionally well: fire off “pain signals” in the form of alerts whenever an anomaly is detected. While this is designed to be helpful, the reality is an unmanageable volume problem that drowns agile decision making. According to Data Bahn, “SOC teams received 11,000 alerts daily, and 55% of cloud security professionals admitted to missing critical alerts” (Databahn, Link).
To put this back into our analogy, the nervous system works, but the body has no immune system to filter pain signals into coherent action and proactive defenses.
In other words, the problem isn’t a lack of data, but is rather the lack of an intelligent, adaptive filter that distinguishes attacks and can utilize adequate measures to alleviate such threats.
Enterprise “Brains” Are Flying Blind
If the SIEM is a company’s nervous system, GRC platforms such as Archer, OneTrust, etc. are essentially an enterprise’s brain and memory. The role of these platforms are to store corporate policy, guide long-term strategy, and ensure that companies follow the rules set by regulators, auditors, and historic events.
GRCs are often handled by CISOs, PMO, or individual asset owners within companies, but here’s the reality: GRC platforms are often times divorced from reality. They are systems that depend on manual evidence uploads, and when security teams are being beaten down by “alert fatigue”, an inevitable disconnect surfaces between “the brain” and the “nervous systems” of enterprises.
The disconnect can be dangerous. GRC dashboards can show “100% compliance” while the reality may suggest a completely different narrative. This blind spot is often filled manually by analysts, however, as threat actors become more agile due to emerging technology, this disconnect will also need to be addressed in modern cyber ontologies.
A Truly Adaptible Cyber Ontology In 2025 Must Start With Identity
Faced with such a complex, systemic problem, companies must be strategic with the ways they go about resolving security siloes. While an initial reaction may be to try and fix every security domain, alert, and problem all at once by purchasing more SaaS tools, infrastructure investments, and security human capital, the solution to a truly successful security ontology lies in a single, high-impact wedge: Identity & Access Management (IAM) - and creating an “immune system foundry” that succeeds in proactive identification and threat resolutions.
The reasoning is simple and compelling. Identity has become the "new perimeter." As the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found, over 80% of breaches involve compromised or misused credentials. Attackers don't hack in anymore; they log in. This makes controlling and monitoring identity—managed by tools like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and privileged access platforms like CyberArk—the most critical control point.
In the context of the immune system analogy, this strategy is akin to focusing the initial immune response on the most common point of entry for infection. Before trying to fight every conceivable pathogen, security infrastructures and systems must first become an expert at verifying who and what is allowed inside the body in the first place.
This approach reveals a crucial takeaway: building a full cyber immune system doesn't require a disruptive big-bang project. The path to systemic resilience can begin with a single, focused effort in a high-impact area, building trust, momentum, and organizational memory over time.
Here is a summary of a modern Cyber ontology below.
From Pain Signals to Defense: A Cyber “Immune System” Ontology
Make alerts actionable. Close the GRC reality gap. Start with Identity as the highest-impact wedge.
Security Teams Are Drowning in “Pain Signals”
SIEMs (Splunk, Sentinel, QRadar) fire nonstop alerts — the nervous system is working, but there’s no immune layer to filter signals into coherent action.
- High volume, low clarity → alert fatigue and missed critical issues.
- More tools ≠ more safety if they aren’t coordinated.
Enterprise “Brains” Are Flying Blind
GRC platforms (Archer, OneTrust, etc.) act as the brain and memory — storing policies and proving compliance — but are often disconnected from live reality.
- Manual evidence, stale dashboards, “100% compliant” while incidents unfold.
- The gap between strategy (GRC) and signals (SIEM) is widening as threats evolve.
The Highest-Impact Wedge: Identity
Attackers don’t just hack in — they log in. Control of identity is the new perimeter. Begin the immune system by mastering Identity & Access Management (IAM).
Why Identity First
- Most breaches involve compromised or misused credentials.
- Every action ties back to who (user, workload, device) and what they’re allowed to do.
Key Systems
- IdP/IAM: Okta, Microsoft Entra ID
- PAM: CyberArk, Delinea
- MFA/SSO: Platform-native
Immediate Wins
- Kill risky sessions in real time
- Step-up MFA on anomalies
- Auto-revoke excess privileges
What a Successful Cyber Immune System Looks Like
A coordinating layer that sits across identity, endpoints, cloud, data, and vendors to Sense → Decide → Act → Learn.
- Unify signals: SIEM, EDR/XDR, Identity, Cloud, Network, DLP, Email, Vendor telemetry
- Normalize & enrich: identity context, asset criticality, data sensitivity
- Detect high-risk patterns: impossible travel, token replay, mass file encryption, data exfil
- Map to business impact (crown-jewel apps, sectors, compliance scope)
- Score attack paths (identity + privilege + exposure)
- Choose playbook: contain, challenge, investigate, notify
- Identity: terminate sessions, reset tokens, force MFA, disable accounts
- Endpoint: EDR isolate device, kill process, roll back
- Cloud/SaaS: block API keys, quarantine mailboxes, lock buckets
- Network: block indicators, rate-limit, geo-fence
- Write-back to GRC: evidence, control status, policy gaps
- Improve detections: new rules, allow/deny lists, model retraining
- Record memory: attack narratives, responders, mean-time metrics
Ontology: Entities & Relationships (Plain English)
- Identity (user, service, device posture)
- Asset (app, data store, endpoint, vendor)
- Privilege (role, policy, entitlements)
- Signal (alert, event, anomaly)
- Playbook (automated action set)
- Control (prevent/detect/correct)
- Obligation (policy, standard, compliance)
- Identity has Privilege
- Privilege grants Access to Asset
- Signal targets Identity/Asset
- Playbook acts-on Identity/Asset
- Control satisfies Obligation
- Outcome updates Memory (GRC)
- Containment in minutes, not hours
- Fewer false positives, higher critical-hit rate
- Evidence auto-linked to controls
- Continuous least-privilege & policy tuning
Rollout Path — No Big-Bang Required
Identity Guardrail
- Integrate IdP, PAM, SIEM; unify identity risk signals
- Ship playbooks: kill session, step-up MFA, disable risky users
- KPIs: mean-time-to-contain identity incidents; % high-risk sessions blocked
Endpoint & SaaS Containment
- Extend playbooks to EDR, email, storage, collaboration apps
- Map attack paths across identity → device → data
- KPIs: dwell time, lateral movement stops, auto-quarantine rate
Closed-Loop GRC
- Auto-evidence outcomes to controls; update policies from lessons
- Risk-based access reviews, continuous least-privilege
- KPIs: control effectiveness, audit readiness, residual risk trend
What Leaders See at a Glance
Illustrative metrics — tailor to your environment.
How This Article Was Curated - Workflow
How This Article Was Curated
Transparent, step-by-step workflow from research to final visuals.
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1
Market Research
Reviewed primary & secondary cybersecurity sources (SMEs, SaaS docs, security articles, AI-assisted workflows) to map current trends and pain points.
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2
Opinion & Ideation
Framed a future-facing security model using the “enterprise as a living organism” analogy and identified the identity-first wedge.
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3
Synthesis
Compiled notes into a holistic PDF, then summarized and structured using NotebookLM / ChatGPT to clarify themes and sections.
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4
Visualization
Built accessible HTML/CSS visual components and refined UI/UX via Cursor, Copilot, and GPT-5.
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5
Final Product
Published the article and visuals, preserving sources and methodology for transparency and reproducibility.
Sources:
Deloitte 2025 Threat Report: https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-zone3/us/en/docs/services/risk-advisory/2024/us-annual-cyber-threat-trends-report-2025.pdf
Alert Fatigue: https://www.databahn.ai/blog/siem-alert-fatigue-false-positive
SOC: https://cymulate.com/cybersecurity-glossary/alert-fatigue/
SaaS Tool Usage: https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99248-enterprise-devices-have-an-average-of-67-applications-installed
Verizon Security Report: https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/
IAM Importance: https://www.beyondidentity.com/resource/verizon-dbir-2025-access-is-still-the-point-of-failure
Tools Referred To (Links Included):
* All visualizations were created by MacroBytes itself utilizing independent and AI-driven workflows - data is sourced as needed when collected from external sources but visualized by MacroBytes
* NOTE: none of the info in this article or ANY article of MacroBytes is investment advice, it is solely an opinion for editorial purposes
