Facts · an honest take
The security industry has a credibility problem — and most of it is self-inflicted. Below are the structural failures we see every week: the ones that drain budgets, burn out talent, and leave organisations compliant but wide open. No vendor spin. Just what's actually broken.
Audits like ISO 27001 are run as paperwork exercises by assessors who never touch the systems. Teams burn weeks generating documents, productivity tanks, and the actual attack surface stays untested. A passed audit is a filing cabinet — not a secure network. It measures whether you can describe a control, not whether it stops anyone.
The field treats certs as proof of skill. They aren't. Exam dumps let anyone memorise their way to a badge without ever finding a real bug, reading real code, or owning a real box. A wall of acronyms tells you someone passed a multiple-choice test — nothing about whether they can do the work.
Junior listings requiring senior experience, a stack of certs, and a degree — for a salary that assumes none of it. Impossible bars that lock capable people out of the field, while the same companies cry “skills shortage” for a gap they manufactured themselves.
ATS keyword filters and trivia interviews decide who gets in. Almost nobody asks a candidate to read code, find a vulnerability, or break something live. The people who can actually do the work get filtered out by processes — and panels — that can't assess it.
Budgets go to brand-name dashboards and a “we ran a scan” checkbox. Automated scanners get treated as the assessment — and miss exactly the logic flaws, chained bugs and custom weaknesses real attackers walk straight through. Spend follows fear and marketing, not outcomes.
Demonstrated ability — shipped tools, real findings, public research — counts for less than a degree and the right alphabet soup. The industry filters for credentials over capability, then wonders why it keeps missing the people who can actually defend it.