{"id":8727,"date":"2026-07-13T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/?p=8727"},"modified":"2026-07-13T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T10:00:00","slug":"jurassic-park-cybersecurity-and-the-dangerous-myth-of-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/?p=8727","title":{"rendered":"Jurassic Park, cybersecurity and the dangerous myth of control"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jurassic Park wasn\u2019t really about dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

It was about arrogant people building systems they believed were controllable.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife finds a way\u201d is probably the most famous line from the entire franchise. Ian Malcolm\u2019s warning that no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, no matter how expensive the fences are, and no matter how confident the operators feel, nature eventually escapes containment.<\/p>\n

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And in every movie, it does.<\/p>\n

The dinosaurs always get out. The systems fail. Eventually, the humans lose control.<\/p>\n

What makes Jurassic Park fascinating is that despite advanced monitoring, complex containment systems and sophisticated operational controls, the outcome never really changes. At its core, the story is about people mistaking visibility for control.<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity has the same problem.<\/p>\n

For years, security teams have operated under the assumption that with enough tooling, governance, process, maturity and spend, we can build environments that are effectively secure. Maybe not perfect, but secure enough that compromise becomes rare and manageable.<\/p>\n

But attackers find a way.<\/p>\n

Given enough time, skill or motivation, they eventually identify the weakness nobody considered. The overlooked privilege. The dependency nobody mapped. The misconfiguration hiding behind layers of dashboards, process, and compliance reporting.<\/p>\n

We are already seeing this play out. Nation-state attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, while AI-driven exploit discovery is beginning to compress vulnerability research from weeks into minutes.<\/p>\n

The raptors are learning faster now.<\/p>\n

Mistaking visibility for control<\/h2>\n

That does not mean prevention no longer matters. The fences in Jurassic Park still slowed the dinosaurs down. They created friction. They reduced exposure. Modern security controls do the same thing.<\/p>\n

But the failure in Jurassic Park was never simply that the fences broke.<\/p>\n

It was that the entire system assumed the fences represented certainty.<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity often makes the same mistake.<\/p>\n

The industry has become incredibly good at demonstrating preparedness in controlled environments. Dashboards. Compliance reports. Tabletop exercises. RTO metrics. Recovery attestations.<\/p>\n

Jurassic Park had dashboards too.<\/p>\n

The problem is that visibility is often mistaken for survivability<\/a>. Organizations can prove they monitored the environment, documented the process, and ran the exercise, while still having very little confidence that the business could continue operating during a genuine systemic failure.<\/p>\n

Most organizations still operate with an implicit belief that compromise is exceptional rather than inevitable. Disaster recovery plans, business continuity workshops, and annual tabletop exercises are treated as evidence of resilience. In reality, many of them are carefully controlled simulations of a world that no longer exists.<\/p>\n

Traditional disaster recovery was designed for an era where infrastructure changed slowly, applications were relatively static, and dependencies were limited enough that recovery assumptions could remain valid for months or even years.<\/p>\n

That world is gone. AI killed it.<\/p>\n

Environments now evolve constantly. Cloud infrastructure changes daily. AI-assisted development accelerates release cycles. Applications rely on sprawling third-party ecosystems. APIs connect systems in ways many organizations do not fully understand. Entire workloads appear and disappear dynamically.<\/p>\n

The environment you tested last quarter may no longer exist today.<\/p>\n

And yet many resilience programs still operate as if annual or quarterly testing provides meaningful confidence.<\/p>\n

Most companies do not really test resilience.<\/p>\n

They test optimism.<\/p>\n

The backup fallacy<\/h2>\n

And nowhere is this overconfidence more obvious than backups<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the way, organizations confused \u201chaving backups\u201d with \u201cbeing resilient.\u201d Those are not remotely the same thing.<\/p>\n

A backup simply proves you stored a copy of something at a specific point in time. It does not prove you can survive.<\/p>\n

Most recovery models were designed in the late 90s and early 2000s for relatively static systems and predictable infrastructure. The core philosophy has barely evolved since then, even as environments have become increasingly distributed, ephemeral, and interconnected.<\/p>\n

Restoring data is not the same as restoring operations.<\/p>\n

Restoring infrastructure is not the same as restoring business functionality. Modern application are complex and rely on ephemeral elements, third party components and applications as well as complex data flows not just data sets.<\/p>\n

Very few organizations continuously validate whether they can recover full feature-function applications, maintain operational workflows, preserve data integrity, reconnect dependencies, restore permissions correctly, or continue operating under active attack conditions.<\/p>\n

We built incredibly sophisticated telemetry for understanding how we die.<\/p>\n

We built almost none for proving we can survive.<\/p>\n

That gap is becoming impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n

The recent rise of continuous resilience testing and recovery validation is not accidental. It reflects a growing realization that recovery assumptions themselves may no longer be trustworthy.<\/p>\n

Static resilience models are struggling to survive dynamic infrastructure.<\/p>\n

This is where resilience starts becoming an engineering problem rather than a compliance exercise.<\/p>\n

When restoration assumptions fail<\/h2>\n

Because the real question is no longer, \u201cHow quickly can we restore the application?\u201d<\/p>\n

The real question is, \u201cWhat happens if we cannot restore it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jurassic Park repeatedly explored exactly this scenario. The real panic never started when the fences failed. It started when the operators realized they could not regain control quickly enough.<\/p>\n

Businesses now face the same risk.<\/p>\n

What happens if AWS experiences a prolonged outage? What happens if Azure Identity Services fail<\/a> globally? What happens if Stripe, Salesforce, Slack, or Microsoft 365 disappear for days rather than hours?<\/p>\n

Many organizations do not actually have business continuity strategies for those situations.<\/p>\n

They have restoration assumptions.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago, most organizations directly owned large portions of their operational stack. Today, companies increasingly rent critical business capability from a relatively small number of providers.<\/p>\n

Identity. Infrastructure. Communications. Payments. Collaboration. Customer operations.<\/p>\n

The efficiency gains are enormous.<\/p>\n

So is the concentration risk.<\/p>\n

Resilience as an engineering discipline<\/h2>\n

Historically, business continuity planning assumed localized disruption. A building burned down. A regional data center failed. A storm impacted an office. The internet itself was not the dependency.<\/p>\n

Today, entire businesses are built on tightly interconnected SaaS and cloud ecosystems where operational survivability depends on third parties remaining continuously available.<\/p>\n

We optimized organizations for efficiency, automation, integration, and scale.<\/p>\n

Not necessarily survivability.<\/p>\n

That is why resilience needs to evolve beyond annual tabletop exercises and static recovery plans.<\/p>\n

True resilience is not a binder sitting on a shelf. It is not a workshop performed once a year. It is not a recovery document written against an environment that changed six months ago.<\/p>\n

It is a continuous understanding of the environment itself.<\/p>\n

It requires live telemetry, operational visibility, dependency awareness, continuous validation, and the ability to adapt under changing conditions.<\/p>\n

Adapting to chaos<\/h2>\n

The survivors in Jurassic Park only succeeded once they stopped pretending the environment was fully controllable and instead adapted to the reality in front of them.<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity needs to make the same shift.<\/p>\n

Attackers will keep adapting.<\/p>\n

AI will accelerate faster than most governance models can handle.<\/p>\n

Complexity will continue to outpace our assumptions about control.<\/p>\n

The organizations that survive will not necessarily be the ones with the tallest fences. They will be the ones who understand their environments deeply enough to continue operating when control is lost.<\/p>\n

The goal was never to eliminate chaos.<\/p>\n

It was to survive long enough to adapt to it.<\/p>\n

Because resilience is not about preventing chaos.<\/p>\n

It is about operating through it.<\/p>\n

Because eventually, one way or another, life finds a way.<\/p>\n

This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.<\/strong>
Want to join?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jurassic Park wasn\u2019t really about dinosaurs. It was about arrogant people building systems they believed were controllable. \u201cLife finds a way\u201d is probably the most famous line from the entire franchise. Ian Malcolm\u2019s warning that no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, no matter how expensive the fences are, and no matter how confident the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8727"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8727\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}