The Detection Blind Spot: When Your Dashboard Lies

Your dashboard says your detections are deployed. But are they still detecting? A quiet SOC can mean your defenses are working, or that the data feeding them has disappeared. In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Tom Findling, Co-Founder and CEO of Conifers AI, and Robert Pace, VP of Information Security and CISO at Invitation Homes, to confront the blind spots hiding behind green dashboards.

Tom unpacks findings from Conifers AI’s research, The Detection Blind Spot, which examined approximately 15,000 detections and found that 47% needed attention. He describes how telemetry gaps, shifting environments, and detection drift can leave teams believing they are protected when the underlying controls are no longer operational. One striking example: an attacker gradually reduced log-reporting servers from roughly 10,000 to just 10 without stopping logging altogether.

Robert challenges security leaders to move past red-yellow-green reporting and the habit of focusing only on critical and high-severity findings. Together, they explore continuous detection validation, AI-assisted tuning and runbook maintenance, the value of understanding the business, and why humans must remain accountable as agentic SOC tools take on more work. They also look ahead to the rise of the “threat operator,” a security practitioner able to connect intelligence, detection, investigation, and response.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
01:53 - The Detection Myth
03:02 - Silence Is Not a Signal
03:24 - Meet Tom & Robert
6:33 - The 47% Blind Spot
08:10 - A CISO Gets Vulnerable
10:13 - The 10,000-to-10 Attack
13:06 - AI for Continuous Checking
16:09 - Cutting 70% of SOC Alerts
17:28 - Learning the Business
21:36 - CISO-Vendor Relationships
23:21 - Four Criteria for New Tech
25:46 - The "Sorry" Moment
27:24 - The Future: Threat Operator
29:03 - Who Gets the Raise
30:47 - What's Watching the AI?
31:28 - Homework Assignment for Viewers

Links
Connect with our guest, Tom Findling, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfindling/
Learn more about Conifers AI: https://conifers.ai
Connect with our guest, Robert Pace, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-pace097/

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