Three cybersecurity lessons from Middle-earth: trust, concentrated power and resilience.
A tower. A silent chamber. A dark stone lights up with armies, cities and distant fires. Whoever watches it has something irresistible: the feeling of seeing what others cannot see.
It looks like an absolute advantage. Then comes the uncomfortable question: are you understanding the world, or is someone deciding which part of it you get to see?
The Palantír is a surprisingly modern temptation. It promises visibility and puts information in front of decision-makers. A security dashboard does something similar, although it usually does not contain the Eye of Sauron. Usually.
The Lord of the Rings is not a cybersecurity manual. But three of its images help us ask better questions: a stone that shows, a ring that concentrates power, and a fellowship that must keep moving when its original plan breaks.
The Palantír: seeing is not understanding
In Tolkien's books, the seeing-stones are not simply screens displaying fabricated footage. Their danger also involves the people using them, other observers and the interpretation of what is seen.
Saruman becomes entangled with Sauron. Denethor is not merely his puppet: he resists Sauron's will, but the partial knowledge obtained through the stone contributes to his despair. Reducing both stories to “they believed a fake video” misses the point.
An authentic scene can still support a wrong conclusion. You do not need to invent an enemy army if showing that army, while leaving other possibilities outside the frame, is enough.
The truth of what you see does not guarantee the completeness of what you know.
Monitoring collects signals. Threat intelligence adds context to threats. Neither makes the final decision infallible. Coverage, source reliability, freshness and missing information still matter.
Consider a hypothetical organisation whose dashboard reports very few unusual login attempts. Excellent news? Perhaps. Or a critical system stopped sending logs three days ago. The number is accurate for the data received; the conclusion “we are safe” is not.
Before celebrating, ask which systems are covered, whether the sensors work and whether the events have been checked against other evidence. A green indicator is not a certificate of invulnerability.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 connects adverse-event analysis with correlating information and understanding impact. The practical lesson is to verify the signal, reconstruct its context and separate observation from interpretation.
GRC decoder: turn the metaphor into a control
- Risk: few alerts appear reassuring, but an important source may have stopped reporting.
- Control practice: inventory expected log sources, check continuity and completeness, and compare findings with other evidence.
- Evidence: source inventory, last-ingestion timestamps, missing-source alerts and documented reviews with an owner and date.
- Operational question: who is notified when a system stops sending logs, and what proves that notification works?
This is an illustrative example. Control selection depends on context; implementing it alone does not establish conformity with a standard.
The One Ring: concentrated power becomes a risk
One Ring to rule them all.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The Ring-verse promises domination, rather than coordination or well-documented delegation.
Part of its appeal is the temptation to use it for a good cause. The problem is not solved by choosing a well-intentioned person. Concentrated power changes the risk, and believing you can master it is part of the trap.
The Ring is not literally an administrator account. The analogy concerns concentration: one identity able to change systems, manage users, access sensitive data and disable controls can cause extensive harm if compromised or misused.
Privileged access is necessary. It needs governance. Least privilege grants only the access needed for a function. Privileged access management governs privileged access; it is not a spell that makes every administrator safe.
Imagine a technician who needs one hour to correct a configuration. Permanent privileges across every environment “just in case” turn a limited need into continuous exposure. Limits on scope and duration, appropriate approvals and activity records reduce that gap.
Separation of duties also helps prevent every sensitive decision depending on the same identity. The requester, approver and reviewer do not always need to be the same person. The practical arrangement depends on risk and organisational structure.
CSF 2.0 outcome PR.AA-05 connects permissions management and review with least privilege and separation of duties. It describes an outcome, without prescribing one specific product.
In language that does not require a council of Elrond: do not hand out little Rings of Power for convenience and hope nobody finds the password.
The Fellowship: continue when the plan breaks
The Fellowship begins with a common objective, not nine interchangeable people. Different skills and responsibilities complement one another. That does not eliminate conflict or guarantee an orderly journey.
At the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, the group separates and Frodo continues with Sam. Cooperation no longer means everyone remaining in the same place. It means acting differently without losing the mission.
This is where the metaphor meets business continuity. The question is not only “do we have a plan?” It is “can we maintain priority activities when people, technology or suppliers become unavailable?”
A plan that works only if one person answers the phone is fragile. So is a service dependent on one supplier without realistic alternatives, or a procedure known only to its author. These can become single points of failure.
In another hypothetical scenario, the service owner cannot be reached during an incident. Without known priorities, delegated authority and contact details, the first response becomes a search for someone who knows what to do. Preparation makes that information and practical substitutes available before the emergency.
NIST contingency-planning guidance connects impact analysis, recovery strategies and exercises with system preparedness. NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3 places preparation, detection, response and recovery within cybersecurity risk management.
Keeping a document is not enough. People and resources must be able to perform the actions, including in degraded conditions. Exercises expose optimistic assumptions before an incident does.
Middle-earth is not an enterprise architecture to copy. Its mission retains decisive dependencies, and its characters are not boxes on an organisation chart. But it offers a useful question: can your organisation change route when the expected road disappears?
Three images, one governance question
The Palantír asks us to examine information in context. The Ring exposes the risk of concentrated power. The Fellowship reminds us that preparation matters when the route stops being straightforward.
Before consulting the stone, ask who controls the view. Before granting the Ring, ask who controls the power. Before setting out, ask what the Fellowship will do when the road disappears.
Which would expose the bigger gap in your environment today: a missing log source, an overpowered account or an unavailable service owner?
English adaptation of my original article on manfredimarrocco.blog, the primary source for my articles and projects. Illustrations are reused from that article. Translation and adaptation assisted by AI.
Literary references: Tolkien's The Two Towers (“The Palantír”), The Return of the King (“The Pyre of Denethor”), The Fellowship of the Ring (“The Breaking of the Fellowship”) and Unfinished Tales (“The Palantíri”). These metaphors refer to the books.
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