When your sensors go dark, you still have to act

On Christmas Day I woke up deaf in one ear. No warning. No gradual degradation. Just silence. The experience mirrors what happens in cybersecurity when sensors fail. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: when visibility is gone, hesitation is the real threat.

This is exactly how organizations behave when sensors stop reporting. Logs go quiet. Alerts dry up. Dashboards look calm. The system feels stable because nothing is screaming. That calm is fake.

In my case, the next step mattered. I searched for help. Not casually. Aggressively. What is sudden hearing loss. What is the window. What actually works. The answer was consistent and brutal. Treat it as an emergency. Act fast. Cortisone, now. Delay reduces the chance of recovery. Wait-and-see is not a strategy.

And yet, I waited.

Three days passed. Not because I did not understand the risk. Not because information was missing. But because of a familiar, quiet rationalization. It will fix itself. I do not want to bother anyone. It is Christmas. I do not want to overreact.

This is the most dangerous failure mode of all.

In security, blocked sensors create the same fork in the road. You can assume nothing is happening. Or you can assume you are blind. Mature teams assume blindness. They escalate. They verify out-of-band. They switch to secondary telemetry. They involve humans. They do not wait for confirmation from the very systems that are no longer trustworthy.

Cortisone is not magic. It does not guarantee recovery. But timing matters more than certainty. The treatment is based on probability, not comfort. Cyber response works the same way. You isolate. You contain. You investigate. Even if it turns out to be a false alarm, the cost of acting is lower than the cost of waiting.

There is another parallel that is harder to admit. Pride. Social friction. The fear of being “that person.” I did not want to ruin Christmas. Organizations behave the same way. No one wants to pull the incident cord during a holiday. No one wants to wake executives without proof. Meanwhile, the window closes.

Sensors fail. Logs get blocked. EDR agents crash. SIEM pipelines break. This is not hypothetical. The real test of resilience is not how good your detection is on a good day. It is how fast you react when detection disappears.

Silence is not safety. Silence is a symptom.