Posts

Rethinking How Cybersecurity Work Gets Organized

Image
Most cybersecurity organizations are structured the way hospitals organize specialty clinics. Discrete functional teams (SOC, IR, GRC, AppSec, vulnerability management, identity) each with their own leaders, metrics, and budgets. Work flows through routing and handoffs. The model builds deep expertise and clean reporting lines, and it is the structure most CISOs inherited. Its failure mode shows up at the seams. The acquisition integration that needs SOC visibility, IR readiness, GRC sign-off, and AppSec review of inherited code moves through four functions on incompatible timelines. The product launch that needs threat modeling, control implementation, monitoring tuning, and incident response plans gets each piece from a different team. The vendor onboarding becomes a series of parallel reviews that finish weeks apart. By the time anyone sees the whole picture, the picture has changed. The pattern isn't a failure of any individual function. Each function is doing its job. The patt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Other Half Of The Cybersecurity Talent Problem

Image
Eric Cole recently published a piece called  The CyberTalent Lie  that is worth reading. His argument is that the persistent industry narrative about a cybersecurity talent shortage has become a cover story for avoidable strategic failures in how organizations recruit, develop, evaluate, and retain security professionals. He's right. Organizations have systematically eliminated entry-level positions , leaned on certification filters that exclude strong candidates, treated compensation as the lever for retention when exit data points to culture and mission, and excluded security leaders from the strategic conversations where their authority would matter most. His five-step rebuild -- audit credential inflation, restore early-career pathways, conduct honest exit analysis, elevate strategic positioning, protect the learning budget -- is the right prescription for the problem he diagnoses. The problem Eric describes is the 'supply-side' talent problem for the people who do se...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Integrating Your Cybersecurity Team and Cybersecurity Function: A Three-Part Series

Image
Pythia Cyber is uniquely focused on the behavioral and organizational conditions that determine whether cybersecurity investments produce cybersecurity outcomes. We focus on cybersecurity talent at the engineer, manager, and leader levels, and on the culture and talent strategy that surround them. Brendan refers to this as TAU : the systems, processes, and talent implementation strategies that create cybersecurity. You can't hire your way to better cybersecurity if your systems, processes, and talent implementation strategies are inadequate and misaligned. You can't organize your way to cybersecurity through systems and processes that are under-executed by less-talented personnel, managers who can't connect with their teams and stakeholders, or leaders who can't lead. You need talent and you need a talent strategy. And you need the people running cybersecurity to be "bilingual." Cybersecurity leaders are translators by necessity. They face downward into the t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Litany Of The Hacked: April 2026 Round-Up

Image
(p.s. programming note: We're doing the April 2026 Litany of the Hacked today to make room for a multi-part special series starting Monday. Come back next week for our three-part series!) Do April cyber-attack showers bring May cybersecurity flowers? Better hope so! The litany of the hacked is our listing for each known/reported hack in the previous month. The point of the litany is not shame but awareness-raising that, well, these sorts of things happen. And so, the litany of the hacked for April 2026. Our litany this month reflects...I think the word is hubris (or  hýbris ) , to be classical: the  über -hacker-program, Mythos, the One AI To Rule Them All, was -- hacked! “We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorised access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments,” said Anthropic . One implication is that nothing is entirely safe when people start getting involved . Another, to be a little more cheerful, is that the AI arms race to AGI...
Post a Comment
Read more

Internal Candidates

Image
At Pythia Cyber we combine behavioral science with classic cybersecurity because bad behavior so often beats good technology. As part of our behavioral science toolkit we have three different talent assessments: one for Cybersecurity Engineers, one for Cybersecurity Managers and one for Cybersecurity Leaders. A common misconception is that these three assessments are beginner, intermediate and advanced assessments. This misconception is rooted in the widely embraced fantasy of promotion as a reward for performance. In this fantasy all careers have the same trajectory: get a job, work hard, move up the ladder until you cannot rise any further. This fantasy is based on the fallacy that the core talents underlying success are the same at each stage of one's career, or that most people happen to have all three sets of talents. Both of these are fallacies: it is a rare person indeed who can succeed at all levels of the organization. Such a person is a unicorn. Don't count on unicorn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't Bother Me With Details, Part 2

Image
The phrase "don't bother me with details" refers to a particularly annoying dynamic between the cybersecurity people and others. The short version is that saying "don't give me the details" is often not the clever avoidance of wasted time that one might think. The long version is in  this post . This post is part of series about how culture can hamper the delivery of cybersecurity, but it is also about which talents you need to succeed in this field. At Pythia Cyber we add behavior science to classic cybersecurity engineering to take effectiveness to the next level. We lean heavily on our proprietary assessments which allow us to add awareness of  talent  to the question of who you should hire, which employees should be in which roles and how that talent should be developed. Today's example of how cybersecurity people can feel caught between a rock and hard place is why we try to balance a talent for enforcing rules against a talent for finding reasonabl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Achievement Over Effort

Image
Yesterday Ted posted about how to consider talent as you develop your employees. Today we will look at Pythia Cyber's emphasis on talent as well as experience and credentials from a different perspective: what makes cybersecurity different from most of the rest of IT. More "why" than "how." I am not the only one who has noticed an alarming tendency in business (American business at least) to reward effort instead of achievement. When I started managing information technologists--either developers or operations personnel--I was stunned to start to have "I spent X hours/days/weeks on this" as an excuse for new technology or new configurations not working properly. This was a problem for me because part of the reason I was drawn to information technology was the glorious black-and-white nature of it all: it either worked or it didn't. The new one was either better or it wasn't. Upgrades were either smaller and faster and more reliable or they we...
Post a Comment
Read more