Project Zero Trust

Chapter 7Zero Trust SOC

Jefferson sat in front of his workstation bleary-eyed from having worked a double shift overnight. He was sitting in front of two curved monitors that almost wrapped around him. The left screen displayed a live stream of logs, filtered by a long search string that Jefferson had painstakingly spent the whole night creating, narrowing the search terms each time he understood a little more about what was going on. On the right screen, his ticket queue was displayed. The more tickets that came in, the more distracted he became. The day crew would start in a few minutes and would help, but he was a little worried his team lead would just dismiss what he had found.

Beyond his monitors was a wall of twelve eighty-inch screens. They showed the weather, news, views of customer networks with colors indicating when they were having issues, and the all-important queue of tickets coming in.

One of the graveyard-shift crew had called in sick. Jefferson didn't have to take the shift. He wasn't on call or anything. But then that would have meant letting go of what he had found. Someone else might not be able to see the pattern of anomalies he had discovered. It was more than just a pattern. He was sure there was coordination behind it.

The only other person on shift was Nadir. Nadir was wearing headphones, but Jefferson could still hear the hair metal music on his side of the room. Jefferson had made the mistake of referring to the music as glam rock at one point and ...