Quiet work
About hands-on tasks that appear in no report and without which no audit is passed and no recovery succeeds. Each part begins with "To the ones who …" and takes a single, inconspicuous action seriously: what it prevents, why nobody sees it and where it is required.
One part a week, on Fridays, started in October 2026 for European Cybersecurity Month. The passages requiring an action are checked verbatim against the primary source.
Published so far
To the ones who test the restore
Task: Testing the restore
Quiet work, part 1: a backup that reports green every night says nothing about whether anything can be brought back from it. Only someone who tries knows, on a Tuesday afternoon, without cause and without an audience. Why IT-Grundschutz requires exactly that as a basic requirement, and why hardly anyone notices it anyway.
Read this part
To the ones who still report the phishing suspicion at 5:55 pm
Task: Reporting a phishing suspicion
Quiet work, part 2: Friday, shortly before closing time, a click on a link that feels wrong. Two options: close the laptop and hope, or call and say you may have clicked something. Why the second is often the earliest detection an organisation gets, where IT-Grundschutz requires it, and why it is so rarely thanked.
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To the ones who say "we do not know" in the crisis exercise
Task: Marking assumptions in the situation picture
Quiet work, part 3: twenty minutes into the crisis exercise, the head of the crisis team asks whether the backups are affected. Someone at the table says no, because it has always been that way. And then someone else says: "We do not know." Why that sentence makes the exercise a success and where BSI Standard 200-4 calls for it.
Read this partWhat is still to come
The order may shift; the tasks are fixed.
- Part 4: To the ones who justify "not applicable" instead of ticking it
- Part 5: To the ones who maintain the record of processing when nobody asks
- Part 6: To the ones who delete a firewall rule instead of adding the next one
- Part 7: To the ones who keep the phone numbers in the emergency manual up to date
- Part 8: To the ones who actually read the supplier questionnaire
- Part 9: To the ones who do not read email with the admin account
- Part 10: To the ones who accept a risk and sign for it
A task missing?
If you can think of work that nobody sees and that everyone relies on anyway: write to us. The series lives on the tasks that actually happen in everyday work.