From Hawkins to Hybrid Cloud: how attack surfaces have evolved since the 80s

As the final season of Stranger Things prepares to hit screens, the show’s legacy extends far beyond simple sci-fi nostalgia. Blending 1980s aesthetics, Cold War tension and Goonies-inspired heroism, it reintroduced audiences to an era of analogue technology and suburban imagination; and in doing so, it helped reignite a broader cultural fascination with that decade.

 

For those unfamiliar, the series follows a group of kids uncovering a secret government experiment that opens a portal to a dangerous parallel world known as the Upside Down. A distorted mirror of their world, filled with unseen dangers that slowly seep into reality. It’s fiction, but the world it evokes is rooted in the very real optimism and uncertainty of the early digital age.

 

Because back then, the 1980s marked the dawn of the digital age, a world of walkie-talkies, radios and flickering CRT screens. A time when a computer performed a single task. Networks were self-contained. Threats, when they came, were physical or obvious. That simplicity offered a kind of safety; you could understand your environment in full.

 

In the decades since those first personal computers and early networks, the world has built an infrastructure of billions of devices, applications and cloud storage, each constantly creating, sharing and replicating data. The result is an attack surface that constantly evolves. Every connection changes the shape of risk. Every new tool adds complexity to a landscape already impossible to fully grasp.

 

And just as Hawkins faced an expanding threat from the Upside Down, modern organisations are simply fighting battles across an attack surface that’s grown faster than their ability to manage it.

 

 

The new digital ‘Upside Down’

The modern world is more connected than ever before. Hospitals, banks, airports and national infrastructure all depend on an intricate web of digital systems. It’s a level of connectivity that’s far beyond the single-purpose technology of the ‘80s.

 

That interconnectedness, however, has a cost. The CrowdStrike IT outage last year demonstrated how one small misconfiguration can ripple across continents in a matter of minutes. More recently, the Amazon Web Services disruption further reinforced that, when much of the global economy depends on a few dominant platforms, a technical fault in one corner of the cloud can bring the digital world to a standstill.

 

Of course, if outages show how fragile that dependency is, cyber-attacks reveal how easily it can be weaponised. The summer of retail attacks earlier this year was a clear reminder that bad actors exploit the smallest gaps in sprawling, interconnected systems to create disproportionate impact. More importantly, it showed that no one is safe. Every organisation now operates within a complex web of third-party vendors, cloud partners and software integrations, meaning an attacker no longer needs to target you directly to reach your data.

 

The rise of AI-driven tools has only accelerated this complexity, introducing new dependencies that evolve faster than defenders can adapt. Security teams are overstretched, fighting alert fatigue while trying to manage environments that grow by the day. Awareness has become the defining issue: the ability to comprehend and anticipate how digital ecosystems behave before they break.

 

And yet, beneath this modern complexity lies an uncomfortable truth: much of our infrastructure is still built on legacy tech, systems built in another era, never designed for this level of connectivity. In fact, some remain embedded in critical operations. They’ve been patched, repurposed, extended, but rarely replaced. The result is a digital ecosystem that’s both advanced and archaic: state-of-the-art on the surface, running on vintage code beneath.

 

It’s almost like the real-world’s Upside Down: a mirror world where attackers only need to find a single crack to slip through. The challenge, therefore, is that organisations need new ways to manage their digital ecosystem and connect the dots, before someone else does.

 

 

Turning the upside down the right side up

Rethinking cyber-exposure management means recognising that defence today depends on understanding context, not just collecting data. The modern enterprise isn’t a static, siloed network but a shifting constellation of systems, devices and connections that expand and contract by the hour. Without knowing how those elements interact – which are critical, which are redundant, which connect where they shouldn’t – organisations are left with blind spots.

 

Cyber-exposure management brings those relationships into focus. It allows security teams to identify, assess and reduce cyber-risk across every corner of their digital footprint – managed or unmanaged, IT, OT or cloud-based. More importantly, it connects the dots between assets and their behaviours, revealing how one compromised element can cascade across an organisation. In that sense, it’s the digital equivalent of mapping Hawkins and the Upside Down together: understanding how two realities overlap, and where hidden passages might exist.

 

This isn’t about building bigger firewalls or adding more alerts. It’s about context, seeing how technology, people and processes intersect so that teams can prioritise what truly matters. In practice, that might mean spotting an outdated router in a hospital network that links directly to critical systems or recognising that a new AI-driven tool is transmitting data far beyond its intended scope. Exposure management helps security leaders anticipate these risks before they become incidents, transforming endless data into actionable insight.

 

As attackers use automation and machine learning to accelerate reconnaissance, defenders need equal sophistication in how they perceive and interpret their environments. AI has effectively levelled the playing field. The same tools now powering autonomous, adaptive attacks can also strengthen defence, but only if organisations pair them with continuous exposure management and intelligence-led context to detect, reason and respond at machine speed. This gives organisations the foresight to predict where vulnerabilities will emerge and the precision to act before they’re exploited.

 

Because in an era where every connection counts, the organisations that understand their digital world in full, and in context, will be the ones that stay ahead of whatever comes out of the upside down.

 

 

Looking forward from the past

Nostalgia has a powerful pull. The 1980s, and the world Stranger Things evokes, remind us of a time when technology felt simpler, more human, easier to grasp. But progress doesn’t move backwards, and neither does risk. In chasing speed, scale and connectivity, we’ve built a world that’s infinitely more capable and infinitely more complex.

 

That complexity is now the Upside Down: a mirror world of systems and connections that can empower or endanger us depending on how well we understand them. The organisations that succeed will be those able to interpret that world, not fear it. Exposure management offers the clearest path forward: a way to transform sprawling, fast-moving systems into something understandable, manageable, and ultimately, defensible.

 

Nostalgia can remind us of where we came from. But foresight decides where we go next. 

 

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Curtis Simpson is CISO and Chief Advocacy Officer at Armis

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and RyanJLane