Exercise 2: Alerting on a Blocked Anomalous Action — Possible Solution ==================================================================== This event is still worth alerting on immediately, even though the DELETE should fail, because a FAILED attempt is exactly as strong a signal of something wrong as a successful one — arguably a clearer one, since a legitimate, correctly-behaving reporting job should NEVER attempt a write statement at all, successful or not. Two realistic explanations for why this happened, both worth investigating urgently: 1. THE ACCOUNT'S CREDENTIALS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED, and whoever is now using them is testing what they can do — probing for a misconfiguration, or simply unaware this particular account has been scoped to read-only. Chapter 3's least-privilege design is precisely what causes the attempt to fail here — but "the attempt failed" and "there was no attempted attack" are not the same thing; catching it now, while it's still contained, is far better than only noticing after some other, more successful action later. 2. THE APPLICATION CODE ITSELF HAS A BUG that's attempting a write it was never supposed to make — a real defect worth fixing regardless of whether it represents an active attack, since it indicates the application's own logic doesn't match its intended read-only role. Either way, treating this as "no real harm done, since the privilege system caught it" misses the point of anomaly detection: the goal is noticing a deviation from expected, normal behavior AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE — ideally before a misconfiguration or a genuinely successful compromise causes real damage, not only after something actually succeeds.