I just got back from a trip to Disney World where my daughter was competing in cheer, and somewhere between the crowds, the rides, and the constant hum of people moving with purpose, I realized something odd. I was in the background of a lot of other people’s vacation photos. Not intentionally, It’s not in a look at me way…I’m just there half framed behind a smiling family or walking through the edge of that must have castle shot or pausing near a parade route while someone else captured a moment they would later frame or post or send to grandparents. Once I noticed it, I could not unsee it and every raised phone became a potential cameo.

Disney World is controlled chaos in the most impressive way, on the surface it feels smooth and magical yet underneath, it is a constant exercise in logistics, movement, timing, and adaptation. Thousands of people are navigating the same space, each with their own plans, priorities, and pressures and everyone is focused on what is directly in front of them, the ride, the schedule, the kids, the photo they want to capture. Almost no one is paying attention to what is just outside the frame. That is how you end up unintentionally present in so many moments without anyone noticing until later, if they notice at all.

What struck me was how normal it felt, everyone was acting reasonably within a complex environment… attention is limited, situational awareness narrows when goals are clear and time feels scarce. Now at Disney or any other tourist place, that leads to harmless photo bombs and funny stories. In other contexts, the consequences are not nearly as lighthearted.

Now to tie it all to what I do, that thought is reinforced by a story that someone I respect shared a story from an incident response situation they had been involved in. I’m going to keep it high level, but it was not a dramatic breach story with flashing alert lights and immediate chaos. It was like most of the ones that happen…it was subtle. The organization had good people, solid tools, and well documented processes. Their normal alerts were firing, but nothing that seemed urgent… normal activity was happening, but nothing that clearly screamed incident, just every day traffic. Everyone was focused on their responsibilities, doing what they were supposed to be doing, responding to what was directly in front of them.

What no one (or even most notice during the early phases of an incident) noticed at first was there was a larger pattern. The same account showing up in slightly different places and systems. The accounts access being used in ways that individually looked normal, but it had the same background activity appearing again and again, just outside the main focus. It was not that visibility was absent, like we all learn after the fact, that the data was there, it was the problem was that no one was looking across it holistically. Everyone was capturing their own picture of the environment, and no one realized who or what was quietly standing in the background of all of them.

When an analyst was poking around, luckily the awareness finally clicked, it was not because of a single alert. It was because someone paused long enough to ask a simple question. Why does this keep showing up? That question changed everything. Once they saw it, they could not unsee it, like the strangers pictures I noticed I was in. The organization was dealing with an active incident that had been present for longer than anyone realized, not because of incompetence or negligence, but because of narrowed focus in a complex system.

That story stuck with me because it mirrored the Disney experience in a way that was uncomfortable. In both cases, nothing felt obviously wrong in the moment and everything appeared normal within context. The environment was busy, attention was divided and people were doing their jobs. The issue was not effort but It was awareness. In cybersecurity, we often talk about visibility as if it is purely a tooling problem. Get better logs. More dashboards. More alerts. But visibility without context is just noise. Situational awareness is what turns information into understanding.

Incident response lives and dies on that awareness and knowing what assets you have or what normal looks like or who should be where and when. Understanding how systems interact and how small deviations can add up to something meaningful. None of that happens automatically, it requires leadership that encourages people to zoom out, to question patterns, and to resist the urge to immediately normalize strange behavior just because it does not look catastrophic.

For most of us in this field the most dangerous incidents are not the loud ones. They are the quiet ones that blend in, accounts that have been there forever, access that was granted during a stressful moment and never revisited. The behavior that technically works but does not quite make sense. Those are the things that end up in the background of your environment, present in more places than they should be, unnoticed until someone finally looks at the whole picture.

As leaders, this is where our responsibility shows up. Not in writing another policy or buying another tool, but in shaping how teams think. Do we reward people for closing tickets quickly, or for asking why something exists? Do we treat anomalies as annoyances, or as opportunities to learn more about our environment? Do we create space for people to step back during an incident, or do we push them to stay heads down and reactive?

The Disney trip ended with great memories, tired feet, and some long nights. Sadly the incident response story did not end as lightly, but it did end with hard lessons learned and improvements made. Both experiences reinforced the same truth…what you do not notice can matter just as much as what you do..sometimes more. Situational awareness is not about seeing everything, that’s impossible. but it is about recognizing when something does not belong, even if it has been there for a while.

In cybersecurity leadership, our job is to help our teams see beyond the frame. To understand not just what they are responsible for, but how their piece fits into the larger environment. Incidents rarely fail because people do not care. They fail because everyone is focused on their own picture. The moment you step back and look at the full scene, the story changes.

And sometimes, you realize the problem has been standing in the background the whole time.