Every SOC Today Is Answering the Wrong Question

Ask most detection engineers what a SOC does, and they’ll say: it finds compromised machines.

That’s the wrong question. Attackers stopped compromising machines as the primary objective years ago — machines are just where identities and trust relationships happen to execute. A stolen session token, a federated role assumption, an over-scoped service account: none of those are “a machine got popped.” They’re a trust relationship quietly doing exactly what it was configured to do, on behalf of someone who shouldn’t have it.