Block WeTransfer and People Just Use Their Hotspot Instead

Lock something down hard enough and people will simply route around it. Block WeTransfer at a bigger corporate, and someone will just use their personal hotspot instead. The control didn’t stop the behavior. It just moved it somewhere you can’t see it.

That’s the case for detective controls over preventive ones. Instead of trying to prevent everything upfront, pull the data into one place, monitor what people are actually doing, and change the behavior you find. If the control works, you’ll see it in the data. And because you’re not blocking anything, nobody has a reason to find a workaround. You’re not disrupting the business — you’re just watching it closely enough to know where the actual problem is, and going straight to the source to fix it.

This maps onto something we do at Cyberjuice, too, just without the technical infrastructure. Our habit surveys measure people’s behavior by asking them directly — not by monitoring firewalls or other detection equipment. That’s partly a practical choice: a lot of smaller companies don’t have that kind of detection setup in place. Asking people what they actually do is a legitimate substitute when you don’t have the equipment to detect it for yourself.

Either way, the principle holds: you learn more by watching or asking what people actually do than by assuming a blanket rule will hold. Prevention guesses. Detection finds out.