Gord and Rothütle walked into the trees, the dragon-archer's warning echoing in their minds. The trees here were ancient, the white snow staining the blackness of the forest. Then they found tracks in the mud. There were large footprints, left by heavy boots.
"Looks like we have found Jack after all," Rothütle whispered.
Gord nodded. "We're not yet sure if it's Jack. Stay alert."
They followed the tracks deeper into the forest.
"Who was that dragon-guy?" Rothütle asked after a while.
"A guardian of the Order," Gord replied. "He has been here for centuries."
"Doesn't he then trust you?" Rothütle inquired. "Why did he ask you a question?"
"That's the way it works," Gord explained. "Someone might impersonate me and try to get past him."
They arrived at the edge of a clearing.
"No!" Gord exclaimed suddenly, as they spotted a large white tree. Gord rushed toward it, Rothütle following closely behind. The tree was split in half. Gord kneeled down and examined the trunk.
"This tree was one of our security measures," she said. "It was our eyes and ears above the ground and under it."
"Who did this?" Rothütle asked angrily. "We have one usual suspect."
"Let's move on," Gord said. "We need to find the person with the matching boots."
They followed the tracks, and got closer to the castle Sonnenwacht, called Schattenburg by the locals.
Tip of the day: Controls that fail silently create blind spots. If you don’t detect the failure, you will trust defenses that no longer exist.
Security Tip #17 — Silent Failure & Loss of Visibility
The White Tree didn't block attackers.
It watched.
Its destruction mattered because no one noticed—until it was too late.
In modern systems, this is one of the most dangerous failure modes:
security controls that stop working without alerting you.
Examples in real systems:
- runtime security agents that crash or get disabled,
- eBPF-based tools that stop loading after a kernel update,
- audit logs redirected, truncated, or silently dropped,
- metrics pipelines misconfigured or rate-limited,
- "green dashboards" that are green because data stopped arriving.
This can also happen in CI pipelines, infrastructure-as-code scans, vulnerability scanners, and more.
To mitigate silent failures:
- Health Checks & Heartbeats. Implement regular health checks for security controls. Use heartbeats to verify that agents and services are running as expected.
- Alerting & Monitoring. Set up alerts for anomalies in security control behavior, such as unexpected shutdowns or performance degradation.
- Regular Audits & Testing. Periodically audit and test security controls to verify their effectiveness and functionality.
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