The Breach Was Never at the Door

I’ve lost count of how many breach disclosures I’ve read where the first sentence is some version of “no evidence the perimeter was compromised.” It used to strike me as corporate hedging. Now I read it as the whole story, hiding in plain sight. The perimeter wasn’t compromised because, increasingly, nobody bothers attacking it. Why would they, when the back door is propped open by a token nobody’s looked at since the engineer who set it up left the company?

That’s the pattern I want to walk through here — not as a hypothetical, but as something that’s now happened, in public, with named victims and dated timelines, twice in the last eighteen months at a scale too big to wave away.