What’s strange but quickly starting to set in is that season five was the final season of the beloved Stranger Things series on Netflix. The show has captivated audiences by pitting its plucky protagonists against an “Upside Down” world of the Demogorgon, Mind Flayers and more. Every time I watch, my mind immediately turns to my day job in cybersecurity because there are so many relevant, albeit scary, connections. In our world of cyber, there is a shadowy underbelly of enterprise networking and evolving threats. These dark corners make the upside down less a work of fiction and more a premonition of stranger things to come.
I’ve spent my career helping organizations solve their toughest cybersecurity challenges and identify emerging risks before they become disruptive threats to businesses. When I look at the hurdles the Hawkins crew from the show had to overcome – from unseen threats creeping through invisible portals to the sheer complexity of their interconnected world – I see a powerful parallel to the work of today’s security teams.
The Hidden Threat: Connected Assets as Portals
The Upside Down and our daily realities are all too familiar. The Upside Down’s danger lies in the unseen portals – the gates and rifts – that allow its monstrous inhabitants, like the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer, to cross over and wreak havoc in the seemingly safe, familiar world of Hawkins. Today, nearly every business’s hidden reality is its extended attack surface. It’s the sprawling, complex, and often unmanaged network of IT, OT, IoT, medical, cloud systems and beyond that modern organizations rely on.
Every new sensor, smart device, or third-party cloud connection is a potential opening or portal that a cyber adversary can use to slip from their shadowy domain (the deep web, dark net, etc.) into your critical network. The biggest threats, the “Mind Flayers” of our time, often leverage these forgotten or invisible assets to establish a beachhead and expand their influence, seeking to take control of the entire environment.
Real-time Insights and Continuous Intelligence: The Lightbulbs
The first and most critical step for the Hawkins group is always achieving visibility. One of the most iconic scenes from Stranger Things was when Joyce Byers used Christmas lights to communicate with her son Will while he was trapped in the Upside Down, creating a crude but effective system to map and understand what was taking place around them.
Later, the group relies on maps, compasses going haywire, and Eleven’s unique ability to perceive the threats. In essence, they were establishing asset intelligence and an early warning system to detect behavioral anomalies.
For the CISO and security team, this translates directly to the need for full, continuous visibility across every single connected device and system to protect the entire attack surface and manage their organization’s cyber risk exposure in real time.
Like the Dungeons and Dragons analogies the kids use to understand the creatures and their tactics, security teams rely on context and intelligence – risk scoring, vulnerability prioritization, and threat analysis – to understand how an asset is connected, why it is vulnerable, and what the most effective countermeasure is. Knowing a Demogorgon is weak to fire is useful; knowing its current location in the tunnel system is essential.
The Battle for Control: From Reactive to Proactive
Throughout the show, the heroes gradually become proactive defenders, learning to anticipate the Mind Flayer’s moves. Luckily, we’re starting to see more enterprises shift to a proactive mindset with cybersecurity, and it’s fueled by three primary best practices (and show parallels)!
- Remediation Prioritization: Not all vulnerabilities are equal. Businesses are focusing their limited resources on the assets and exposures that provide the clearest, most exploitable path to the “Mind Flayer’s” control center – our critical business systems.
- IT/OT Segmentation: When a legacy system (like a fragile OT device) can’t be taken offline or patched, businesses isolate it through network controls, much like they had to lock down parts of Hawkins Lab.
- Continuous Risk Management: The Upside Down is constantly adapting and searching for new fissures. Businesses are acutely aware that management of their enterprise security posture must be an iterative program that continuously monitors for new threats and manages risk exposure across the attack surface.
The Ultimate Lesson: Teamwork and Persistence
The most enduring lesson of Stranger Things is that no single hero – not even the powerful Eleven – can defeat the enemy alone. The fight requires a collective effort: the ingenuity of the kids, the protective instinct of the adults and the dedication of the police. Cybersecurity is no different. It’s a multi-business functional endeavor.
First and foremost, cybersecurity requires teamwork, particularly through the fusion of IT, OT, security and business leadership so that they work from a unified view of any risks at hand. It also demands persistence from the dedicated security professionals protecting our digital infrastructure. Most of all, cybersecurity needs to be a proactive and preemptive effort where risk exposures are continuously monitored and threats can be stopped before they ever fully manifest.
To all those who watch, enjoy season five of Stranger Things, and to all those who are fighting the good fight in the world of cyber, keep collaborating to ensure our world never succumbs to the chaos of the Upside Down.
