A managed Security Operations Center lives inside a frustrating but unavoidable problem. Proving a negative.

In philosophy, this describes the difficulty of proving something is not happening. Bertrand Russell illustrated it with his famous teapot analogy. If someone claims a teapot is orbiting the sun, you cannot disprove it simply because you do not see it. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Cybersecurity lives in this exact space.

Attackers do not always trigger alerts. They blend into normal behavior. They use legitimate credentials and trusted tools. They turn off logs or avoid creating them in the first place. In that world, “nothing detected” does not automatically mean “nothing is there.” Treating those two ideas as the same is how organizations get surprised.

This is where Zero Trust starts to matter.

Zero Trust is not just about access controls and MFA. At its core is a mindset. Assume breach. Assume the teapot might already be there. The question is not “did an alert fire,” but “what evidence would exist if an attacker were present, and do we have the visibility to see it?”

That is exactly why threat hunting exists.

Threat hunting operationalizes Assume Breach inside the SOC. Analysts form hypotheses based on how attackers behave, then go looking for evidence that would prove or disprove those ideas. For example, “If an attacker had domain admin access, we would expect to see unusual Kerberos activity.” The team then tests that hypothesis across identity logs, endpoint telemetry, and cloud audit data.

When a hunt finds nothing, the result only has value if visibility is strong.

If critical telemetry is missing, lateral movement logs, endpoint event tracing, or cloud control plane logs, then a negative finding is inconclusive. It may mean there is no threat. It may also mean the SOC could not see the threat even if it existed. That uncertainty is the opposite of Zero Trust.

A mature SOC says this clearly.

Not “there is no threat,” but “based on the telemetry we collect, we found no evidence of a threat, and here is what we can and cannot see.” That honesty is what allows leadership to make informed risk decisions instead of false assumptions.

In the end, Zero Trust does not promise certainty. It promises discipline.

The SOC’s job is not to prove the environment is clean. It is to constantly reduce the space where unknown threats could hide. Proving a negative may be impossible, but shrinking the unknown is not.

Zero Trust Takeaway

Russell’s Cyber Teapot reminds us why Zero Trust exists in the first place.

Do not trust silence.

Do not trust the absence of alerts.

Assume breach.