The Silent Hour After a Breach: Your Data's Slow Leak
The breach alert arrives at 2:14 a.m. Your phone buzzes, and for a minute you think it's a false alarm. But there it's: an anomaly in the logs, a file transfer you didn't schedule, a remote session from an IP you've never seen. So you do what most people do. You shut down the server, change the passwords, maybe call the boss. And then you wait. The waiting isn't the problem. The problem is that your data is still moving—through tunnels you didn't know existed, on schedules you never set, to destinations you never approved. This isn't the dramatic exfiltration you see in movies. It's the slow leak. The one that doesn't set off alarms given it looks like normal traffic. The one that keeps flowing for days after you think you've contained the breach. It can be weeks or months ahead of anyone notices.