What is Security Chaos Engineering?
Security Chaos Engineering Definition: Deliberately introducing controlled failures or security stress tests in production systems to identify weaknesses and build resilience.
Understanding Security Chaos Engineering
Security Chaos Engineering adapts the reliability engineering practice of deliberately introducing controlled failures to test system resilience, but focuses specifically on security assumptions and controls. Just as Netflix's famous "Chaos Monkey" randomly terminates production services to ensure their systems can handle unexpected outages, security chaos engineering involves deliberately simulating security failures to identify weaknesses before attackers do. Practitioners might temporarily disable security controls, simulate the compromise of privileged accounts, or introduce unexpected network changes—all in carefully contained experiments. The approach helps organizations move beyond compliance checklists and theoretical security models to understand how their systems actually behave under attack conditions. It reveals hidden dependencies, insufficient fallback mechanisms, and detection blind spots that might otherwise remain undiscovered until exploited. Organizations that implement security chaos engineering typically develop more realistic incident response capabilities and more resilient security architectures.