From the Frontlines to the Future: Why we Built Tonic Security

In today's hyperconnected world, cybersecurity teams are fighting an uphill battle. The modern cyber threat landscape is evolving fast. New tools are flooding the market. Data is spiraling out of control. The result is alert fatigue, burnout, and too many security professionals stuck in the weeds, unable to see the forest for the trees. We built Tonic to fix this reality.

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When More Becomes Less

Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated, executing attacks with increasing volume, velocity and ease. They are increasingly using AI to scale their campaigns, compounding the frequency and impact of breaches.

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At the same time, the attack surface of companies is constantly expanding. New security tools are flooding the market to address these new threats, generating huge undigestible amounts of data. Tool sprawl is so bad, that according to Gartner, the average organization juggles between 60 and 70 security tools and work with 10 to 15 different vendors.‍

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Clearly, more tools do not mean more clarity. In fact, they often introduce more confusion from loads of data that leave security professionals overwhelmed, struggling to discern what matters to the business. Security teams cannot catch-up as they are buried in endless alerts, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and unpatchable weaknesses. Small and medium sized businesses deal with hundreds of thousands of findings daily. Large enterprises face millions!

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Legacy vulnerability and attack surface management tools aren’t keeping up. They leave too much noise and open ends: a tangled mess of false positives, duplicate findings, context-less data, and minor issues that masquerade as major ones.

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Vulnerability Management suffers from significant tech-debt, with catastrophic outcomes:

• No one is outpatching threat actors. Security teams struggle to enhance remediation scope and speed.
• Prioritization is often driven by generic scores (CVE/CVSS),resulting in efforts to address only critical and high scores, that are often less exploited. This shortcoming has been made more painful by the erosion and potential defunding of the CVE project.

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• Vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly unpatchable, as the attack surface expands.Compensating controls and exception handling are ever more important.

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• Collaboration around remediation between Security and IT teams is still broken. It is the latter that do most of the fixing, rather than the security team, who usually bears the responsibility, but not the authority to do so.

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Expected Surprises: The Writing on the Wall

After many years of doing incident response in cyber and physical domains, I learned firsthand that most incidents are predictable and preventable They don’t just appear in hindsight. We could have actually pre-empted or avoided them using the information and capabilities that we had at our disposal.

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The exploitation of preventable exposures continues to rank as one of the top root causes of cyber breaches. Successful preemptive defense or exposure management depends on our ability to read the “writing on the wall” in time: that vulnerability that was mis-prioritized and is now being exploited, or that alert that was not escalated because it was mis-triaged.

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Spotting and diffusing these expected harmful surprises hinges on our ability to cut through complexity and noise and prioritize findings in a timely manner.

#ContextMTTRs, But It’s Missing

The real problem is not lack of visibility. It’s lack of context.

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Security teams are forced to navigate a complex security landscape without easily attainable context that is meaningful and actionable –especially business context.

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This great divide between digital assets and business context highlights something that is fundamentally broken in today’s cyber risk management:

1. Companies are run through business processes that are increasingly dependent on digital assets;
2. These assets come with a myriad of vulnerabilities that threat actors exploit;
3. Companies impose controls to reduce the [R]isk that results from the [P]robability of exploitation and its potential business [I]mpact (RIP, or rather R= I * P), to ensure business continuity and prosperity. 

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So, what’s broken? None of the tools and controls (preventive, detective, corrective, compensating, you name it…) that are used to treat cyber risk, can effectively connect the dots and trace the risk and the control to the business process that needs to be protected. 

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Let’s take an example from vulnerability management.When a vulnerability appears, security teams must be able to quickly understand:

• Which assets are affected?
• Which business process do they enable?
• Who owns them and are they addressing the vulnerability in a timely manner?  
• Can an attacker reach the assets and exploit the vulnerability?
• What will happen if the assets are compromised?

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Unfortunately, fetching the context to answer these questions today requires a slow, manual and frustrating process. And the consequences are real:

• DeficientMean Time to Remediate (MTTR): Results in reputational, financial, and regulatory damage.  
• Siloed, superficial visibility: Prevents organizations from leveraging existing information.
• DashboardFatigue: Resorting to inefficient homegrown solutions due to tools sprawl and mistrust.  
• Boards are Not Onboard: Leadership doesn’t understand cyber risk, inhibiting their willingness to endorse the security program at a time they’re held increasingly liable. 
• Operational Inefficiency: Driven by manual work, mis-prioritized efforts, and underused tools, increasing costs and lowering ROI.
• Burn Out. Security teams are burning out from the grind of false positives, context hunting, alert fatigue, and tool pivoting.

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The Tonic Calling

At Tonic Security, we believe security vendors and tools should make you feel stronger, not more afraid. They should be the calm in the storm, not another layer of confusion. They should super-charge your teams, not slow them down.

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We believe context is king! That meaningful and actionable context is crucial for efficient prioritization, timely remediation, and effective risk reduction.

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Our mission is to empower security teams with unparalleled visibility, context and focus, so that they can quickly and incisively prioritize and remediate business-critical exposures. Our own domain-specificAI agents and proprietary Data Fabric make this mission possible.

If you’re ready to cut through the noise and strengthen your security posture we invite you to explore how Tonic can help. Contact us.