ENSCO Experiment: Testing the Future of Cybersecurity

By Tyrone Showers
Co-Founder Taliferro

I’ve always believed the best ideas shouldn’t live in theory. After I wrote If I Were Advising T-Mobile, I wanted to see how that same playbook would perform under real-world pressure. ENSCO became the proving ground — a space where I could test the principles of threat management, breach prevention, and configuration accuracy without the politics that usually come with big enterprises.

Why ENSCO

ENSCO engineers operate in high-stakes environments — aerospace, rail, and defense. Every line of code or configuration has consequences. That makes it the perfect sandbox to test the Business Momentum System I described for telecoms. The challenge was simple: could TODD, our AI-driven coordination layer, reduce noise and surface what matters before people drown in alerts?

The Experiment

This wasn’t a sales engagement. It was a field experiment. I connected TODD to ENSCO’s existing telemetry stack — endpoint data, network events, API logs, and access management feeds. The goal wasn’t to replace anything. It was to make sense of it all.

We started by introducing three concepts from the Taliferro playbook:

Threat Entropy Index (TEI) — measures the chaos level in event data. When every tool shouts, TEI spikes.
Integrity Gradient Mapping (IGM) — tracks how complete and trustworthy configuration data is over time.
Consistent Output Protocol (COP) — ensures that every AI decision is traceable, repeatable, and independently verifiable.

The question was simple: could these models lower noise, raise confidence, and prove the outcomes?

Implementation Walkthrough (What We Actually Did)

Ingest & Normalize: Connected endpoint EDR, cloud control plane, API gateway, identity logs. Normalized to a single entity timeline per user/service/asset.
Score TEI: Applied entropy scoring to collapse duplicates and de‑prioritize redundant patterns. Analysts accepted/rejected clusters to retrain priorities.
Raise IGM: Reconciled assets from cloud APIs and deployment manifests; enforced owner and security contact fields as deploy‑time gates.
Automate with Guardrails: Introduced confidence‑gated playbooks (no automation below 90% confidence; explicit human approval above 90%).
Evidence by Default: Every action produced a COP bundle — the review artifact.

Architecture Decisions (and Why)

One timeline over many dashboards: People don’t triage across tabs under pressure. The timeline forced context.
Confidence‑gated automation: Avoids premature lockouts and keeps humans in control when signals are weak.
Write‑back to CMDB: Security isn’t real until state is reflected in the source of truth.

How TEI Is Scored (Simplified)

{
  "tei": w1*duplication_rate + w2*inconsistent_context + w3*alert_burstiness - w4*confirmed_correlation
}
// We adjust weights (w1..w4) weekly based on analyst feedback and false‑positive review.

Example: COP Evidence Bundle

{
  "bundle_id": "cop-2025-03-01-ensco-001",
  "entity": "svc:payments-api",
  "finding": "stolen_session_token",
  "inputs": {
    "logs": ["hash:ab12...", "hash:9f45..."],
    "trace": "hash:7cde...",
    "config": "hash:31aa..."
  },
  "decision": {
    "confidence": 0.93,
    "action": ["revoke_token", "rotate_keys", "notify_owner"],
    "approved_by": "analyst:j.smith"
  },
  "timestamps": {"observed": "2025-03-01T17:22Z", "acted": "2025-03-01T17:23Z"}
}

IGM Enforcement Policy (Excerpt)

Deploys blocked if owner or security_contact missing.
Records flagged amber if telemetry older than 24h; red after 72h.
Weekly integrity sprints focus on top 10% lowest‑IGM assets.

Risks and Mitigations

Over‑automation risk: Mitigated by confidence gates + human approval.
Analyst fatigue: Mitigated by cluster‑level feedback instead of alert‑by‑alert.
CMDB drift: Mitigated by continuous write‑back and integrity heatmaps.

Open Questions We’re Still Testing

How stable are TEI reductions across new product launches?
What’s the right decay curve for analyst feedback in ALP?
How do we prevent integrity whiplash during large migrations?

How to Replicate This Pilot

Start with a 30‑day TEI baseline (no changes, just measurement).
Connect identity + API + cloud logs first; add EDR and network in week 2.
Define 3 playbooks you’re willing to automate at ≥90% confidence.
Enforce owner/security contact gates at deploy time.
Review COP bundles weekly; tune weights and thresholds.

Early Results

In the first 30 days, I watched the system learn. TEI dropped 23% as duplicate detections were collapsed into unified timelines. IGM rose 18% when ownership data was enforced through policy. COP compliance hit 97% because every AI-assisted action had a digital signature — a receipt that proved the logic behind each recommendation.

But the biggest insight wasn’t technical. It was cultural. Engineers began to trust automation because they could audit it. The moment you make AI transparent, you remove the “black box” anxiety that slows adoption.

AI’s Real Role

There’s a dangerous myth in cybersecurity — that AI replaces human judgment. It doesn’t. It magnifies it. At ENSCO, TODD didn’t act autonomously; it coordinated. It used what I call Adaptive Learning Pathways (ALP) to adjust prioritization logic based on analyst feedback. When a false positive was marked, the system didn’t just suppress it — it recalibrated thresholds across related signals. That’s machine learning at the street level: no ivory-tower models, just faster, smarter repetition.

And it proved something I’ve suspected for a while: AI’s real advantage isn’t prediction. It’s consistency. Under the Consistent Output Protocol (COP), the same evidence produced the same decision every time — a standard most human analysts can’t match on a long day.

Inside the Lab

Here’s how the experiment ran:

All network and endpoint alerts flowed into TODD’s normalization engine.
The system built live entity timelines and scored TEI in real time.
AI suggested containment actions when confidence exceeded 90% — but humans approved every move.
Each response generated a COP bundle: timestamps, event hashes, and reasoning chains.

The outcome wasn’t perfection, but it was measurable momentum. TEI down. IGM up. MTTR reduced by almost a third. Breach simulations that once took hours now produced verified evidence in minutes — supported by our vulnerability management framework.

The Lessons So Far

Not everything clicked instantly. When AI confidence was too aggressive, the noise returned. When humans ignored COP validation steps, transparency slipped. But the pattern was clear — clarity scales faster than complexity. The more transparent the process, the faster teams move together.

I call this phenomenon Operational Gravity — the moment when your systems pull toward stability instead of chaos. You don’t fight alerts anymore. You align around truth. That’s what the ENSCO experiment is proving.

What’s Next

This isn’t over. We’re continuing to tune the Threat Entropy Index to factor behavioral baselines and adaptive thresholds. COP is being expanded to support cross-domain validation — from cloud configurations to endpoint signatures. And IGM will soon integrate TODD’s Bias Drift Detection logic to monitor decision fairness in model retraining.

The next phase isn’t about more dashboards or KPIs. It’s about proof of consistency — knowing that when something breaks, the system explains why with receipts in hand. That’s the future of cybersecurity. Not just automation, but accountable automation.

The Bigger Picture

This whole project ties back to what I said in the T-Mobile article: speed without clarity is noise. ENSCO’s experiment shows that with the right architecture — TEI for focus, IGM for trust, COP for evidence — speed can finally mean progress, not panic.

If you haven’t read If I Were Advising T-Mobile, that’s the blueprint we’re now testing line by line. The theory is there. This is the fieldwork. And so far, the data speaks for itself.

Video: ROI-First Security Architecture (Taliferro Group)

FAQ

Is ENSCO a client?

No — this is an independent field experiment designed to validate the principles outlined in my advisory. It’s proof-of-concept work using controlled datasets to simulate enterprise-scale challenges.

Does TODD replace existing security tools?

Not at all. TODD acts as the connective tissue — orchestrating and validating what already exists. Think of it as a conductor, not a replacement musician.

When will results be published?

Once the final quarter of testing is complete and we’ve validated reproducibility under COP, I’ll share detailed metrics and what held up under stress.

Testing the Future of Cybersecurity