Vendors keep saying they can end alert fatigue. That they can solve false positives. That their SIEM is smarter, more predictive, less noisy. But let’s be honest. We’ve all sat in rooms, demo after demo, with slick decks and firm handshakes, only to end up with tools that scream louder than the problems they’re supposed to fix.
Every alert. Every dashboard full of red. Every promise that this will finally lower your stress. And when the breach occurs anyway, whether it’s a hiccup in the system or the attacker slips through a blind spot, they don’t ask the vendor why. They ask you.
Why didn’t you catch it?
The pressure’s on the CISO. Not on the sales engineer who assured you the tool would be plug-and-play. Not on the VAR who promised white-glove integration and then ghosted faster than your last budget request. Not on the consultant who swore by the roadmap but failed to show you the last three they missed.
Maybe your team isn’t smart enough, that’s the implication. Or maybe they are, and the problem is somewhere else. Maybe the tool was never meant to solve the problem, or maybe it was just designed to sell hope with a dash of fear. Maybe the integrator never truly integrated anything, unless forwarding invoices counts. Maybe you didn’t buy the “Advanced Plus Quantum-AI Threat Detection” license add-on buried in the fine print of a PDF longer than a Russian novel. Maybe the first vendor lied, and now another vendor wants to make a sale by offering to fix the damage caused by that first lie.
Skepticism isn’t enough. This is deeper. Systemic. Predatory sales tactics dressed up in urgency and spreadsheets. Fear that if you don’t buy this now, the monster under your router will sneak out and strangle your reputation in its sleep. Fear that when the breach happens, you’ll be at the podium, sweating under the lights, while your leadership team melts quietly into the floor behind you.
Let’s talk about IR vendors who smell blood. You’re down. Breached. Your team is exhausted. Leadership is flailing. The GC wants something, anything. And in glide the consultants. Hair perfectly in place. Contracts in hand. They’ve got the solution. Just a quick install of their favorite endpoint tool. Skip procurement. Bypass review. Because apparently nothing says “trustworthy” like a software agent installed at gunpoint.
They know you’re vulnerable. And they exploit it.
Then the bills show up. Massive invoices for services you didn’t authorize and software you didn’t vet. And now it’s part of your stack. You’re stuck with it. You’ve been force-fed a security solution like a goose being prepped for foie gras. And the GC signed off because he was working on his back nine swing and figured the grown-ups had it handled.
When I was sketching this article out I was thinking I’ve worked with just over sixeteen incident response vendors. A few in the trenches of response. A bunch just buying their time maybe some day in the future. A few of my former graduate students work for companies I know quite well. I’ve a deeply held opinion there are no heroes in the incident response world and if there are vendors that think of themselves as heroes they’ve never had to defend against budget haircuts, watch great staff walk out the door, and listen to the tale of woe they spin as just freaking obvious like you hadn’t been trying to get that stuff fixed for three years.
There is nothing quite like holding the signed security exception, signed over your objections by the COO, in one hand and the preliminary findings in the other with a one-to-one match. That doesn’t make it into the “news” stories, does it?
Meanwhile, your external legal team is bonding with the Feds over cappuccinos and strategizing on how to make your job more difficult. Not because they’re malicious, but because they don’t understand operations and are allergic to admitting, “I don’t know.” Their playbook is straightforward: blame the organization, praise the vendor, hire the expensive experts. Yeah. Sign the exclusive retainer. Leave the CISO twisting in the wind.
Let’s not forget the VARs. Value-Added Resellers. Nice name. Sounds helpful. Until you realize the “value” is mostly markup and the “added” part is your blood pressure. They sell you on integration. Then disappear. You follow up. You escalate. You scream into the void. Nothing. It’s like yelling at a ghost that owes you money.
And vendors? They don’t lie, right? Of course not. They simply “clarify” after the fact. They sell you features still in development. They flash roadmaps like tarot cards. You ask for performance metrics, and they hand you a dream journal. You inquire about the last roadmap, and they laugh nervously, then change the subject. You’re expected to make million-dollar decisions based on what they say will work tomorrow, not on what actually works today.
Let’s talk external counsel. Big firm, bigger rates, the biggest opinions. They stroll in, insult half your org, tell the CEO he’s an idiot, and then recommend you tear out your entire environment and replace it with something their buddy at DEFCON just launched. They don’t understand architecture. They don’t understand constraints. But they sure understand how to forward a contract and a lunch invite.
They also love sweetheart deals. They swear by their preferred vendors. And surprise, those vendors aren’t covered by your cyber insurance. But don’t worry. That’s your fault. Because when the GC approved them without checking coverage or alignment, it was “your job” to magically anticipate that disconnect and fix it before it became a problem. Then, watch the vendor hand over the darkest secrets of your network to a government employee because of ‘sharing’ after you signed an NDA with them. All because of “government.” It doesn’t take 60 days for a regulator to arrive with a report and start asking questions.
And when everything goes wrong, when the tools break down and the breach becomes messy, the message from leadership is “just handle it.” Which means: fall on your sword while we get the severance paperwork ready. Meanwhile, your GC is checking tee times and wondering why everyone seems so tense.
In a strange, logical perversion and a not-so-surprising nod to insanity. This entire pass-the-buck, blame-the-guy-you-wouldn’t-empower approach, and moving on to the next scapegoat, works. For business. It is an entirely logical way to handle the mess, and it’s much cheaper to burn CISOs at the stake than to actually fix the problem. This is what they really mean by being a business executive. This entire mess only scales up.
As CISOs move into larger organizations, the challenges increase accordingly. Your team becomes a small army. Leadership requests slide decks with large fonts and green arrows. You spend more time turning reality into marketing talk than actually securing systems. And the bigger the company, the more fear-driven sales become. The vendors understand it. The lawyers understand it. You understand it.
And yet, somehow, success for the CISO is linked to maintaining a cheerful attitude. You see it on LinkedIn and other platforms. CISOs claiming that it’s all roses and wine in their organization and that it couldn’t be better. They’re either lying, not smart enough to realize the truth, or their NDA is tighter than a tick on a dog. Smile during the QBR. Keep morale high. Don’t question the strategy. Be a team player. Meanwhile, your soul slowly turns into a bitter puddle of sarcasm and black coffee. The tone in your requests for information (RFIs) tells me more than you could ever admit.
Never fear, before the breach, the vendors are ready to sell you a solution based on terror and doubt.
Let’s not forget Terrence, the notorious tailor of incident response. He has a brand-new wardrobe for your team that’s AI-infused, cloud-native, and blockchain-compliant. If you sign this multi-year contract, which will outlast your tenure by a full 18 months, you’ll get an IR tool that does one-third of what you’ve already built but looks better in a demo. Don’t worry, you’ll be fired long before, so you can be blamed for any issues with the integration.
Ask what it actually improves. He’ll pivot. Ask what doesn’t work. He’ll talk about the next release. Ask about integration. He’ll reference an engineering team currently touring the vendor conference circuit. Ask for specifics, and he’ll hand you a pilot agreement with a 48-hour expiration and a quote that somehow includes both “machine learning” and “magic.”
The threat is unspoken but obvious. If you don’t buy this and something bad occurs, it’ll be your fault. You’ll be the one who ignored the solution. You’ll be the one who failed to act.
Fear isn’t just a side effect. It’s the cause. Fear of the government. Fear of the board. Fear of public disclosure. Fear of jail time. Fear that the one time you say no, the breach will happen, and you’ll be left standing there with a folder full of budget rejections and a resume in your hand.
Even the IR vendors you trust have a switch they flip. They’ll be your friend right up until the moment things get serious. Then suddenly, it’s your fault. You didn’t escalate quickly enough. You didn’t give them the proper access. You didn’t inform them about the data center with the strange smell and the blinking red light.
And while all this theater unfolds, the real work of security is ignored. Threat modeling, patching, logging, testing, hardening, and response planning are the boring tasks that truly keep attackers out. But nobody wants to hear about that. They prefer dashboards, heat maps, and a ten-slide presentation explaining why the SOC didn’t stop the attacker who tunneled in over port 443 during lunch.
Imagine firefighters having to submit a proposal before they can use a hose. Picture asking them for a 20-page action plan as a building burns behind you. That’s what this feels like. Security theater on a shoestring budget. Drama with no real defense. A Greek tragedy nobody is willing to pay to see.
You didn’t sign up for this. You wanted to create. To defend. To do meaningful work. But now you’re stuck writing performance reports for tools you never wanted, reviewing contracts you never approved, and explaining breaches you couldn’t prevent because the decision-makers bought the wrong tools from the wrong people at the wrong time.
We don’t need another tool. We need honesty. We need contracts that favor the buyer. We need procurement processes that can’t be bypassed just because someone shouted “emergency.” We need GCs who show up for tabletop exercises and understand the difference between a firewall and a spreadsheet.
Mostly, we need to remember that the CISO’s job is to protect. And sometimes, that means saying no. Loudly. Repeatedly. Even when everyone else is screaming yes. Because the fear isn’t going anywhere. But we don’t have to let it run the place like a drunk CEO with a company credit card and a weakness for buzzwords.
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