Businessweek.com is reporting that during the 3 1/2 month cyberattack on Neiman Marcus, over 60,000 alarms were triggered that were ignored by Neiman Marcus cybersecurity experts.

Ginger Reeder, a spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus, says the hackers were sophisticated, giving their software a name nearly identical to the company’s payment software, so any alerts would go unnoticed amid the deluge of data routinely reviewed by the company’s security team.

“These 60,000 entries, which occurred over a three-and-a-half month period, would have been on average around 1 percent or less of the daily entries on these endpoint protection logs, which have tens of thousands of entries every day,” Reeder says.

While this was not a spearphishing attack, it shares a common feature with spearphishing — the attackers identified a human process and attacked the people.  In spearphishing, the user is deceived to act on a malicious email.  In this attack, the IT staff was deceived into ignoring system alerts.  One more important reminder of the observation of Dr. Frederick Chang, former NSA Director of Research:

… cybersecurity is fundamentally about an adversarial engagement. Humans must defend machines that are attacked by other humans using machines.