The Problem Nobody Talks About
You would not buy a fire alarm and never test it. You would not install a sprinkler system and assume it works because the vendor said so. You would not skip the annual fire drill because the building has extinguishers on every floor.
Yet that is exactly what most organizations do with their cybersecurity tools.
Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on network detection and response (NDR) platforms like Darktrace, endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools like CrowdStrike and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms like Microsoft Sentinel. They deploy them, configure them according to vendor recommendations and then trust the dashboard.
The dashboard says everything is fine. So everything must be fine.
The Trust Gap in Security Tooling
There is a fundamental conflict of interest in relying on a security tool to tell you whether it is working. The tool's vendor has every incentive to show green dashboards and low alert counts. That is what customers want to see. Nobody renews a contract with a product that constantly tells them something is wrong.
This creates a dangerous trust gap. The security team reports to the board that the network is monitored. The board sees green dashboards. Everyone is comfortable. But nobody has actually tested whether the tools detect real adversary behavior.
Not simulated adversary behavior from the vendor's own test suite. Real techniques that real attackers use in production environments.
What Validation Actually Means
Security tool validation is not a vulnerability scan. It is not a compliance checkbox. It is a controlled, methodical process of executing real attack techniques against your environment and measuring whether your tools detect them.
This means:
- Running encrypted tunnels through your network to see if your NDR catches them
- Performing DNS exfiltration at varying throughput levels to find your detection threshold
- Spoofing MAC addresses using legitimate vendor prefixes to test identity tracking
- Moving laterally through your internal network to measure detection latency
- Escalating privileges through Active Directory attack paths to test alert generation
- Exfiltrating data through non-standard protocols to map coverage gaps
Each technique is executed in a controlled manner with the security team's knowledge. The goal is not to break anything. The goal is to measure what your tools see and, more importantly, what they miss.
Why Vendors Cannot Validate Their Own Tools
Darktrace has a self-assessment capability. CrowdStrike offers detection testing through its platform. Sentinel has built-in hunting queries. These are useful for baseline functionality checks, but they are not validation.
Vendor self-testing has three structural limitations:
1. The vendor knows their own detection logic. They build test scenarios that trigger their own rules. That is not a test. That is a demonstration. A real attacker does not read your detection rules before attacking.
2. The vendor tests in isolation. They test their tool against known attack signatures. They do not test how your specific network topology, traffic patterns and configuration decisions affect detection. Every environment creates unique blind spots.
3. The vendor has an incentive to pass. No vendor self-test is going to return a report that says their product failed. Independent validation eliminates this conflict of interest.
The ShadowTap Approach
At Sherlock Forensics, we built ShadowTap specifically for this problem. ShadowTap is a hardware device that we ship to your office. You plug it into your internal network. It creates a secure encrypted tunnel back to our testing environment.
From there, we execute controlled adversary techniques against your internal network while your detection tools run at full capacity. We are not testing in a lab. We are testing in your actual environment, with your actual traffic patterns, your actual configurations and your actual blind spots.
The process is collaborative. We work directly with your security team throughout the engagement. After testing, we deliver a validation report that maps every technique we executed to whether your tools detected it, how long detection took and what the alert quality looked like.
This is not adversarial. This is validation.
What We Typically Find
Based on our validation engagements, here is what organizations commonly discover:
- Encrypted tunnel blind spots: Most NDR tools cannot inspect encrypted traffic without SSL inspection configured. If you are not terminating TLS at a proxy, your NDR is seeing metadata only.
- Baselining gaps: Behavioral detection tools need weeks or months of baseline data to establish normal patterns. New devices, new network segments and guest networks have no baseline. Attackers exploit this window.
- Alert fatigue masking real threats: High alert volumes cause security teams to ignore or auto-close alerts. Critical findings get buried in noise.
- Integration gaps: NDR, EDR and SIEM tools often operate in silos. An attack that spans multiple tools may not trigger a correlated alert in any single platform.
- Configuration drift: Tools that were properly configured at deployment drift over time as networks change, staff turns over and update cycles are missed.
When to Validate
Security tool validation should happen:
- After initial deployment of any new detection tool
- Annually as part of your security program review
- After major infrastructure changes (cloud migration, network redesign, acquisition)
- After a security incident to determine why detection failed
- Before contract renewal with your detection vendor
The last point is worth emphasizing. If you are about to renew a six-figure contract with Darktrace or any other NDR platform, you should have independent evidence that it works before signing. Ask the right questions before renewal.
The Cost of Not Validating
The average cost of a data breach in Canada is $6.94 million CAD (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024). The most expensive breaches are the ones where detection tools were present but failed to alert. The organization had a false sense of security. They believed they were protected because they had invested in protection.
A validation engagement with ShadowTap costs a fraction of a single breach. It tells you exactly where your detection coverage stands and gives you a roadmap to close the gaps.
Your tools might be working perfectly. But you will not know until someone checks.