Shields Up: Another Fucking Virtual Circle-Jerk of Cybersecurity Promises

Oh look, another goddamn virtual symposium where every snake oil merchant in the security industry simultaneously jizzes their marketing all over my screen. “Shields Up” they call it—more like “Wallets Open, Brains Off.” I sat through this three-hour clusterfuck of PowerPoint poison so you lot can spend that time doing something productive, like testing the structural integrity of server racks with your forehead.

AI and Machine Learning got the usual circle-jerk treatment. Apparently, if you sprinkle enough machine learning fairy dust on a bloated Java app, it becomes a “next-generation threat intelligence platform.” The demos were fucking precious—showing the AI detecting “novel attack patterns” that looked suspiciously like the same SQL injection attempts we’ve been seeing since 1998. But now it highlights them in purple and charges you per detection. One vendor claimed their model had a 99.9% accuracy rate, which is true if you ignore the fact it’s 99.9% accurate at identifying legitimate user behavior as “potentially malicious.” Had to bite my tongue to keep from asking how it handles the CEO’s weekly “accidental” visits to gambling sites.

Then the Zero Trust brigade showed up, wanking themselves raw over microsegmentation and continuous verification. Here’s the reality: Zero Trust means your users now get to enjoy twenty-seven fucking MFA prompts before they can even see the login screen. The vendors show these gorgeous architecture diagrams that look like a circuit board designed by M.C. Escher after a cocaine binge. Implementing it requires a team of twelve engineers and a blood sacrifice to the OAuth gods. And the moment some executive can’t access their golf reservation system because the trust score algorithm is having a stroke, guess who gets to bypass all the security controls with a single firewall rule? That’s right—the very dipshits who approved this disaster in the first place.

XDR—Extended Detection and Response—or as I call it, “Excessively Dumb Reporting.” It’s every SIEM’s promises repackaged with a higher price tag and more acronyms. The platform correlates logs from your network, cloud, endpoints, and probably your smart fridge to tell you that yes, indeed, something bad might be happening somewhere, maybe. During one demo, the system generated 1,200 alerts in five minutes, proudly announcing it had “reduced alert fatigue” by grouping them into 50 “incident narratives.” Fucking brilliant—instead of being tired from reading alerts, now I’m exhausted from reading short stories about how shit my infrastructure is. The “automated response” feature is particularly hilarious; it’s like giving a toddler a loaded gun and telling them to guard the candy.

Cloud security was a special kind of wankfest. Vendors practically orgasmed on camera about their “cloud-native” platforms, which apparently means they took their on-prem garbage, shoved it in a Docker container, and tripled the licensing cost. They all agreed misconfigurations are the top cloud threat, which is rich coming from companies whose own setup wizards require 47 clicks and produce configurations that would make a freshman CS student weep. But don’t worry—they’ll sell you another tool to monitor the first tool’s misconfigurations. It’s tools all the way down, and they’re all billing you by the microsecond.

Identity and Access Management peddlers promised to end credential stuffing and password sharing forever. Their solution? Every user gets a hardware key, facial recognition, behavioral biometrics, and a retinal scan. Simple, right? The VP of Sales nearly brained me with his laptop when I suggested we implement this for the entire company. Turns out, when you tell the board they need to look into a camera and hold perfectly still for 15 seconds just to check their email, they suddenly remember they have “budget concerns.” The compromise, as always, is that the plebs get maximum security theater while the C-suite gets their “Password123” and a permanent IP whitelist.

Finally, the automation and orchestration cult preached their gospel of “SOAR without human intervention.” Because nothing says “reliable security” like letting a Python script written by a contractor decide whether to nuke a production server. They showed a workflow that automatically isolates, investigates, and remediates threats in under 60 seconds. What they didn’t show is the 40 hours you’ll spend tuning it to stop it from locking out the entire finance department every time someone runs a macro-enabled Excel sheet. Or the three weeks it’ll take to get it to actually respond to a real threat because the API documentation was written by a drunk squirrel.

The bottom line? Same shit, shinier packaging. CISOs get to tick boxes, vendors get their quarterly bonuses, and us actual engineers get another layer of bloated software to keep the fuck alive while users scream and executives click “Allow” on every dialog box they see. But hey, at least the virtual event platform tracked my engagement metrics.

https://www.darkreading.com/events/shields-up-key-technologies-reshaping-cybersecurity-defenses

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Speaking of automation fuckery, I once set up a SOAR playbook that would detect when the CIO was about to join a video call and would preemptively mute his microphone and disable his camera. The official reason was “security hardening against unauthorized video access.” In reality, it was to spare the rest of us from his “thought leadership” and the view of his home office that looks like a hoarder’s paradise. It ran flawlessly for three months until the board meeting where he couldn’t get his video working and threw a tantrum that would put a toddler to shame. They made me “fix” it, but not before I extorted three extra vacation days and a promise that he’d stop pronouncing “SQL” as “sequel” in meetings. Sometimes the best security controls are the ones that protect you from management.

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