Recently, my team received a voicemail, purportedly from me, requesting a transfer of $85,000. The voice perfectly imitated my tone, my rhythm, even my turns of phrase. Disturbing…
It was a fraud on the president, boosted by artificial intelligence. If attackers are able to impersonate an executive using AI, what about what they can accomplish within a company’s ecosystem, especially when CISOs don’t have complete visibility into how their infrastructure is actually functioning?
More tools, less visibility: the strategic blind spot
The trend observed in the sector is confirmed: cybersecurity defenses have been considerably strengthened, but the accumulation of tools does not guarantee complete visibility. Organizations only receive partial signals, without the big picture. Leaders must reassess the critical importance of full visibility into their environments.
Most organizations have dozens of prevention, detection, response and control tools. Each of these tools observes part of the infrastructure, but none offers the whole picture. We are talking here about fragmentation or partial vision.
We have never had so much data, yet we have never had so little clarity. It’s like observing a scene with only one eye: we distinguish the shapes, but we lose the precision, the essential: in short, the overall vision. The attackers know this perfectly and take full advantage of this partial vision.
Gray areas: potential flaws
Very often, it’s the same pattern that repeats itself: the initial intrusion is rarely the most dangerous. The real damage occurs during the long silent phase that follows, when attackers gradually expand their access, blend in with the activity, and quietly prepare their attack.
AI accelerates this progression: thanks to automated recognition, it can map a cloud architecture in minutes. AI is redefining the rules of the game. As organizations entrust AI with their internal data to become more efficient, it offers attackers an unexpected ally: a compromised system becomes their best intelligence agent, able to identify, organize and exfiltrate sensitive information without them having to lift a finger.
Prevention is necessary but insufficient
Prevention is essential. But in a world marked by the proliferation of identities and threats amplified by AI, it cannot prevent all intrusions. The question is no longer “can a violation be prevented?” “, but rather “how quickly can we detect and neutralize an intruder?” “. It is therefore essential to have complete visibility of hybrid environments. Partial visibility forces advocates to act on assumptions rather than hard facts.
Advanced observability: eyes wide open
Telemetry from the network is essential to have a complete picture. Packets, flows, and application metadata provide information about actual behavior, not just interpreted signals. Packages don’t lie.
Combined with metrics, events, logs and traces, network telemetry allows you to achieve advanced observability. This observability makes it possible to visualize east‑west movements (internal movements of an attacker within a network); the principle of least privilege (system limiting the rights strictly necessary to accomplish a task) emerges clearly; encrypted traffic provides actionable information; and finally, endpoint logs (all devices connected to a network) gain relevance thanks to network correlation.
Advanced observability strengthens investments in existing tools by anchoring security decisions on complete, reliable telemetry, not partial vision.
Partial visibility is no longer an option for leaders
AI has put an end to the era when prevention was enough to build a cybersecurity strategy. Attackers now operate with formidable speed and ingenuity and, too often, with better visibility than their targets. The most resilient organizations will be those that have a complete vision, capable of identifying and eliminating these gray areas, real blind spots likely to transform into vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. Because, it must be remembered, we cannot secure what we cannot see. Advanced observability allows you to see with both eyes wide open.
