Article Author: Rick Norgate.
I’ve been mildly obsessed with Geoff Manaugh’s book, A Burglar’s Guide to the City for a while. It’s one of those rare reads that permanently shifts your perspective. This book is not about cyber crime, it’s not even really about traditional crime. It’s about how we understand and navigate the systems we inhabit every day. And it’s a book, I think every CISO should read.
At its core the book argues that burglars are the ultimate super-users of urban environments. They don’t merely move through cities, they manipulate them. Walls become doors, rooftops turn into pathways and manholes become secret entrances. The criminals Manaugh describes don’t smash through front doors with guns – they meticulously uncover hidden routes that others miss.
One of the most compelling stories in the book focusses on the infamous Hole in the Ground Gang. In the mid-1980s, employees at a First Interstate Bank in Hollywood began hearing unsettling noises including what sounded like metallic scraping and muffled drilling from beneath the vault floor. The power flickered unexpectedly, telephones disconnected randomly, and at one point the alarm system spontaneously kicked in late at night, terrifying a lone bank manager. Authorities, when notified, investigated and dismissed it as rats.
But rats don’t drive Suzuki 4×4’s through sewer tunnels beneath the streets of West Hollywood.
The Hole in the Ground Gang were no ordinary thieves. They understood LA at an almost geological level. They had intricate knowledge of the city’s hidden infrastructure including storm drains, underground rivers, sewer lines, and forgotten passageways. They accessed maps that showed subterranean routes leading directly under the bank vault. Slowly, quietly, and meticulously, they excavated their tunnels, exploiting unseen pathways until they reached their target, slipping away with over $2.5 million worth of cash and valuables, undetected.
They weren’t caught, and now the statute of limitations has expired. Reflecting on their audacity decades later, even the lead investigator confessed to Manaugh he’d love to meet them over a beer, purely to learn exactly how they’d done it.
The gang’s secret? Deep knowledge. They treated the urban landscape not as obstacles but as opportunities, uncovering vulnerabilities everyone else overlooked.
That’s exactly how today’s most sophisticated cybercriminals operate.
Digital attackers don’t typically hammer against your firewall, they quietly navigate forgotten tunnels in your IT landscape. They leverage misconfigured backup systems, exploit outdated login credentials and silently traverse hidden, neglected digital infrastructure. Their advantage lies in their superior understanding of systems sometimes better than the businesses that own them.
To fight back effectively, defenders need similar insight. This is exactly why we developed Predatar’s Recovery Risk Report. Much like uncovering the Hole in the Ground Gang’s subterranean maps, the Recovery Risk Report exposes hidden risks in your backup and recovery estate. It helps you visualise the hidden pathways and blind spots cybercriminals are likely to exploit.
By illuminating these overlooked entry points such as forgotten servers, unpatched backup servers, and vulnerable data copies, it empowers your team to proactively seal them off, dramatically reducing your cyber risk exposure. It also identifies opportunities to strengthen your recovery processes, giving you clarity and control over the infrastructure you depend on most during a recovery.
Think of the Recovery Risk Report as your digital equivalent of those storm-drain maps, empowering you to spot vulnerabilities before attackers do. Because when it comes to protecting your business, understanding the hidden logic of your backup estate isn’t just helpful, it’s essential.
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