Cybersecurity didn’t collapse overnight. It rotted from the inside, slowly, quietly, professionally.
It started the moment we stopped interrogating the things that “worked“, the moment our controls calcified into ritual. The moment trust models became PowerPoint slides instead of adaptive systems under constant scrutiny.
Recovery Month (January) teached you to survive incidents.
Rethink Month exists because survival without evolution is just expensive theater. If you rebuild the same mental architecture after every breach, you’re not learning, you’re running drills (that’s an odd Starcraft II quote, hail Zerg!).
The real vulnerability is between your ears
After three decades in this field, I can tell you most security failures don’t stem from missing technology.
They come from inherited assumptions that became too sacred to challenge. Internal traffic is safer, automation is objective, and this all means that identity equals authentication.
..and AI will catch what humans miss!
Actually these weren’t always wrong, they started as reasonable optimizations; better: tactical decisions made in specific contexts.
Then time did what it always does: it stripped away the context and left the rule. So, the optimization became orthodoxy. and the shortcut became scripture.
What concerns me isn’t attacker sophistication but our intellectual calcification: we stack every layers, deploy every tools, configure every alerts, build tons of dashboards.. but we rarely stop to ask whether the underlying assumptions still map to how systems and humans actually behave in production.
Frameworks aren’t truths (#truestory)
Rethinking security doesn’t mean burning your frameworks, better, it means treating them as working hypotheses, not revealed truth.
Means: designing systems that expect context to degrade, trust boundaries to blur, and humans to improvise when the playbook doesn’t cover what’s actually happening.
We, the humans behind Baited, we don’t chase “perfect prevention” because perfect prevention is a bullshit cope.
We focus on awareness, judgment, and realistic failure modes; not because humans are the weakest link (that’s lazy thinking) but because they’re the only component capable of adaptation when your assumptions detonate.
Humans are your last line of defense and your attack surface.
Nope, that’s not a bug: that’s the real fundamental architecture of any system involving judgment under uncertainty.
The invitation
This month isn’t about panic – well, maybe just a bit – and it’s not about chasing the next shiny threat intel feed or compliance checkbox.
We’re up for re-examining what you no longer question, the controls you inherited, the “best practices” you enforce because everyone else does, the trust you extend because the diagram says to.
Ask whether they still deserve that trust. Ask whether they ever did.
Systems fail fastest when doubt becomes insubordination.
I would love to say it’s philosophical, but it’s not: that’s observational.
I’ve watched it happen in enterprise environments, critical infrastructure, defense contractors, and startups that thought they were too small to matter.
Those organizations that survive aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most advanced tools.. ay carramba! They’re the ones that institutionalized skepticism before the breach forced it on them.
Don’t wait for the breach.
Chief Marketing Officer • social engineer OSINT/SOC/HUMINT • cyberculture • security analyst • polymath • COBOL programmer • nerd • retrogamer
