The Monte Carlo Effect: Vegas Went Dark in 2023—Is Your Business Still Rolling the Same Dice?

Reader,

Let me tell you something you’ve may have not to heard.

Monte Carlo Casino, August 1913. The wheel spins black 26 times in a row—an astronomical improbability. Gamblers, drunk on the Monte Carlo fallacy, pile fortunes on red, convinced the streak has to break. “It’s due,” they whisper. Millions vanish when black lands again... and again. That fallacy is the quiet lie that past luck guarantees future safety, that each spin is anything but independent, that the house edge won’t eventually grind you to dust.

Now come with me to September 2023. Las Vegas—the new Monte Carlo—goes dark, not from a roulette streak, but from a far more modern rigged game.

A crew of young hackers, some barely out of their teens, didn’t bother with fancy zero-days or firewall exploits. They picked up phones, vished their way in—sweet-talked help desks at MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment into resetting credentials and bumping MFA. Once they had valid logins, they moved sideways fast, hopping server to server on your own internal highways (the east-west traffic no one used to watch), escalating privileges, deploying ransomware.

Slots froze. Hotel doors locked guests out. Reservations evaporated. Weeks of chaos. MGM lost over $100 million in revenue and recovery costs. Caesars wrote a quiet $15 million ransom check to keep the lights on. Clorox took the same hit that month—production lines down, shelves empty.

These weren’t silent data grabs. They were loud, public executions of operations, screaming across every headline. And they finally shattered the comfortable illusion so many of you still cling to: “Nothing bad has happened to us yet, so we’re probably fine.” Or the even worse one: “Those massive hits only happen to big flashy targets, not little old me.”

That’s the gambler’s fallacy wearing a business suit. Every quiet year feels like another safe spin. But the wheel turned in 2023—the house edge slipped inside your walls, and the old perimeter luck ran out. The real carnage now starts after the easy entry. Your firewalls? Blind to internal traffic. Your endpoint agents? Often helpless against movement that looks perfectly legitimate.

If you’re still betting most of your budget on outward-facing defenses, you’re playing yesterday’s losing game. The battlefield moved inside in 2023, the streak broke under the Vegas lights, and the bill is landing in your insurance renewals... and maybe soon in your operations.

The Pre-2023 Roots: Warnings We Ignored for Too Long—Because the Fallacy Felt Comfortable

Sideways movement isn’t new. Hackers have been exploiting flat networks for decades.

Remember 2013 Target? Stolen vendor credentials → instant freeway across internal connections → 40 million cards gone. We all saw how east-west became the highway once someone was inside—then most of us patched the vendor hole, doubled the firewalls, and told ourselves it was a fluke. Past safety bred complacency. The fallacy whispered that another big internal hit wasn’t “due.”

Zero Trust concepts arrived in the 2010s for exactly this reason: trust nothing inside the walls. But adoption crawled. Money poured into perimeter and antivirus. Internal visibility? “Later.” No streak of disasters yet—why rush?

2020–2022 accelerated everything quietly. SolarWinds: months of internal pivoting. Colonial Pipeline: one password → network takeover → fuel shortages. Ransomware crews learned they could live off the land—stolen creds plus your own tools like RDP and PowerShell left no obvious malware traces.

Reports were already screaming: breakout times shrinking to hours, malware-free attacks surging. But they felt distant—big companies, nation-states, “not us.” The fallacy held tight: our luck hadn’t run out yet.

We slept on every warning because believing the streak would continue felt safer than admitting the odds had shifted.

Why 2023 Was Different: The Dam Broke in Vegas and Beyond—The Streak Ended

2023 wasn’t new techniques—it was undeniable proof those techniques had become the default playbook. The wheel finally landed on the number we all feared.

Entry became trivial: vishing, phishing kits, infostealers grabbing logins from personal devices. Then rapid internal spread on valid accounts—minutes to hours.

The Scattered Spider crew (UNC3944/ALPHV BlackCat) made it impossible to ignore:

• MGM Resorts: help desk social-engineered → credentials → sideways explosion → operational lockdown.

• Caesars Entertainment: same entry → $15M ransom to avoid MGM’s nightmare.

• Clorox: identical pattern → production halted, shelves bare.

CrowdStrike measured average breakout times under two hours. Mandiant watched credential theft become the top vector. These weren’t quiet exfiltrations—they were business-killing disruptions everyone watched in real time.

Just like that 1913 roulette run, 2023 forced the confession: past perimeter luck is no predictor of future safety. Bypassing the edge is now easy and routine. The payoff—and the destruction—lives inside. Boards started asking real questions. Insurers rewrote questionnaires. The internal network became the battlefield no one could ignore anymore.

The Data Avalanche Since 2023: The Inside Fight Intensifies—And the Real Numbers Are Scarier

The trend only hardened.

2024 Change Healthcare: one stolen login → nine days of quiet lateral movement → massive data pull → ransomware lockdown. Pharmacies nationwide couldn’t process claims. Ripple effects in the billions.

CrowdStrike’s 2025 report (from thousands of 2024 incidents):

• Average breakout time: 48 minutes. Fastest recorded: 51 seconds.

• Nearly 80% of detections involved zero malware—just stolen creds and native tools.

• Vishing calls spiked 442% in the second half of 2024 alone.

These are only the incidents CrowdStrike saw and stopped. Most companies never admit breaches—reputation, regulators, insurance complications. Black Fog estimates only ~15% ever go public, meaning the true volume could be 6–7× higher.

Mandiant: remote services like RDP/SSH used in over a third of investigations. Hybrid environments make pivoting even smoother.

Ransomware claims keep climbing; business interruption is now over half the total losses (Munich Re). CDK Global, industrial plants—same script every time: easy credential entry, lightning internal spread, crippling pain.

Your internal highways are where attackers live now. They move in minutes. And the full scale is buried deeper than any public report admits. The fallacy still whispers “not me”—but the wheel doesn’t care.

Zero Trust: The Memo That Took a Decade to Land—Your 2026 Reality Check

The industry started whispering “Zero Trust” around 2010. It took until August 11, 2020 for the U.S. government to make it official with NIST Special Publication 800-207: Zero Trust Architecture.

That document defined Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) as a cybersecurity model that assumes no implicit trust—every access request must be explicitly verified, regardless of whether it originates inside or outside the traditional network perimeter.

Core principles:

• Never trust, always verify

• Assume breach

• Least privilege access

Key architectural elements:

• Policy Engine and Policy Administrator

• Continuous data sources (identity, device health, behavior, etc.)

• Deployment models including micro-segmentation and software-defined perimeters

• Scenarios for enterprise networks, remote users, BYOD, and cloud/hybrid assets

The release responded directly to the explosion of remote work, cloud migration, and the dissolution of the traditional perimeter. It heavily influenced Executive Order 14028 (2021), which mandated Zero Trust implementation across federal agencies.

Important nuance: Zero Trust is not a single product—it is a strategic framework. Implementations vary widely and often rely on mature identity management, SDP solutions, and micro-segmentation tools. Legacy systems remain a challenge.

By 2026, if you still haven’t internalized the memo, here it is in plain terms: “Never trust, always verify; assume breach” became the official motto more than five years ago. While many organizations kept betting on north-south perimeter controls, the standard shifted to hardening east-west traffic inside the network.

The writing is on the wall: California insurers are already moving toward requiring proof of internal (east-west) visibility and controls—not just perimeter defenses—or risk policy denial, massive premium hikes, or outright non-renewal. It is only a matter of time before that becomes explicit underwriting criteria.

The Insurance Fallout: Payouts Explode, Your Premiums Follow

Simple insurer math: massive payouts → rate hikes for everyone.

Back in 2015 a California SMB could add cyber coverage for a few thousand bundled into the BOP, tiny deductibles, almost no questions asked. Claims were mostly small data leaks.

Now? The internal-attack wave flipped the board. Losses exploded as weeks of downtime generated monster business-interruption claims. Premiums for SMBs doubled or tripled in single years (CIAB, Marsh). Deductibles soared—$25K–$100K+ SIR is normal.

The 2023 Vegas hits and 2024 Change Healthcare catastrophe lit the fuse. California’s strict privacy laws and dense SMB ecosystem make us especially tasty targets. What used to cost low thousands bundled now runs $10K–$50K+ standalone, with long questionnaires and demands for proof of MFA, backups, and—finally—internal network monitoring.

The claims rolled in, so the pain spreads to every renewal. The fallacy tempts you to just buy more insurance and hope—like doubling down after every loss in Monte Carlo.

The Real SMB Question: Insurance Alone—or Prevention That Pays for Itself?

Here’s where it gets personal.

You’re staring at that renewal quote and wondering if it’s cheaper to max out insurance and skip the extra tools—let them pay if the worst happens. (Remember Ford’s Pinto math? Cheaper to pay lawsuits than fix every car.)

Insurers think that way on the macro level—that’s why your rates climb to cover everyone else’s disasters.

But for you individually, that logic collapses fast.

Cyber insurance is not a blank check:

• High SIR means you eat the first $25K–$100K+ yourself—often more than a year of Blackbox.

• BI coverage has caps—weeks offline can blow right past them.

• Exclusions rising: weak internal controls → reduced or denied claims.

• Reputation hits, customer loss, CCPA fines—often uncovered.

• One claim → next renewal spikes 50–200% or non-renewal.

Prevention changes the game. Blackbox NDR stops sideways spread before it becomes a claim event.

Coalition offers up to $12,500–$15,000 credits for MDR usage. At-Bay gives $15,000+ discounts on qualifying network detection. Real deployments of comparable NDR and MDR tools have documented $20K–$50K annual savings simply by proving internal visibility—savings that can deliver ROI on Blackbox in under a year, depending on your underwriter’s evaluation.

The smarter play is stopping the explosion before it starts—changing the odds instead of betting against them.

The Roots of Blackbox: Decades Hunting Hidden Threats—and Turning Costs into ROI

Blackbox didn’t appear from thin air. It’s the distilled essence of 35 years in IT and operations, beginning with a business called Decision Zero—chasing true root causes through decades of data, refusing to accept surface noise or normalcy bias.

Word-of-mouth only, no begging. Small businesses weren’t ready then; large corporates were gridlocked. Focus shifted to consulting for companies over a century old—still clients today—who mastered spotting creeping threats early and attaching real dollars to every decision.

That wisdom became the book Hand-To-Hand Sales: The Secrets of Negotiation Grandmasters—millennia-old practices of enduring operations: defuse threats, master relationships, turn ops into sustainable engines.

Everything must monetize or it’s gone. No busywork.

Blackbox fuses it all: predictive anomaly hunting + decades of IT scar tissue → on-prem NDR that sees the modern internal war, proves visibility for savings, flips security from cost center to ROI machine.

Patterned after survivors who never fell for complacency.

Blackbox: Built for the Real Battlefield—With Built-In Peace of Mind

We built Blackbox exactly for this inside fight: on-prem, agentless, passive mirror of your traffic, seeing every internal conversation in real time.

Suricata and Zeek catch the tells—51-second hops, odd RDP, data staging. No cloud telemetry risk. No endpoint overhead.

Unlike cloud-managed services that ship your metadata offsite (making their portals the juiciest supply-chain targets), Blackbox stays entirely on your premises.

It stores nothing sensitive—no creds, no PII, no full packets—just anonymized flows and alerts. Custom-hardened OS, no default web interfaces, passive mirroring: zero pivot path into production.

Attack the box? They waste time on a fortress holding nothing valuable. Recent cloud-portal and agent breaches prove the alternative: your security tool becoming the front door.

Real peace of mind for California SMBs—minimal attack surface, CCPA-friendly (no data leaves), protection without exposing you further.

It hands insurers the east-west proof they now reward—thousands in annual savings, risks kept in your control, operations uninterrupted.

Reader, 2023 moved the fight inside and killed the illusion of endless lucky spins. 2026 is the year you finally stop betting on yesterday’s fallacy... or keep feeding the house.

Ready to run your own renewal numbers against Blackbox ROI? No pressure—just facts. Reach out.

—St. Paul @ SmiteByte