Cybersecurity has a marketing problem.

Originally published on LinkedIn, May 7, 2026.

The industry sells $200,000 platforms to detect "advanced persistent threats" while the average enterprise still can't reliably tell you who has admin access to its finance system.

This isn't a knock on the platforms. They do what they say they do.

It's that the gap most organizations actually need to close isn't at the top of the threat sophistication scale — it's at the bottom. Basic hygiene. Knowing what you have. Knowing who can touch it. Knowing when something changes.

The unsexy stuff.

94%

of breaches involved a human element or basic control failure

Not zero-days. Not nation-state attackers. Misconfigured systems, stale credentials, unreviewed access.

Source: Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2025 ↗

You can spend a million dollars on a cutting-edge security stack and still get breached because someone left a misconfigured storage bucket public, or because a former employee's credentials still worked six months after they left.

The most underrated skill in this field isn't deep technical expertise.

It's the patience to keep doing the boring things, well, every quarter, forever.