Imagine a well-experienced security analyst at a major company going through his normal routine of checking logs at the end of the workday. A quick look at the company’s security solution logs reveal nothing too peculiar or alarming — except for one thing: a higher than normal amount of traffic to the office’s newly introduced third-party chat platform.

He doesn’t give this much thought. After all, the company’s been pushing to have the chat platform as the main office communication tool, so it makes sense that there’d be more traffic than usual.  The security analyst calls it a day and goes home.

One the way home, however, he gets an alert: The security scanner has detected a potential security issue. He returns to the office, and finds what appears to be the cause: A machine was flagged downloading known malicious files, which were then caught by the company’s security solution. Again, nothing too strange, but he decides to investigate just what triggered the malicious behavior.