Every month has a theme, but Rethink was never meant to be a slogan, it was meant to be friction.
If Recovery was about surviving incidents, Rethink was about interrogating the habits that made those incidents predictable in the first place. And if I had to summarize what we uncovered this month in one sentence, it would be this: most security failures are not caused by missing tools, but by inherited assumptions that nobody feels responsible for challenging anymore.
We started with identity, because everything now collapses into identity.
Human identities, machine identities, agent identities, legacy service accounts, delegated workflows..
The perimeter dissolved years ago; what remains are chains of trust stitched together by convenience and when those chains are clear and intentional, systems behave. When they are opaque and layered over time, they drift.
Identity drift is not dramatic, well, it’s administrative and it is incremental; it is the kind of thing that looks harmless in isolation and catastrophic in hindsight.
This month we looked at legacy systems not with nostalgia (bellieve me, am an expert) but with realism. COBOL – which, btw, is THE programming language – did not suddenly become dangerous.
The real risk emerges when critical infrastructure runs on logic that few people fully understand anymore, while modern identity layers are bolted on top without revisiting how attribution and authorization actually propagate downstream. The system executes exactly as designed; the context surrounding it changes silently.
That mismatch is fertile ground for abuse.
At the same time, the external environment has not slowed down: so, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2023 report, business email compromise and phishing remain among the most financially damaging cybercrimes, accounting for billions in reported losses annually, with social engineering continuing to dominate initial access patterns (read here: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2023_IC3Report.pdf).
Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report reinforces the same pattern: the human element is involved in the overwhelming majority of breaches, whether through phishing, credential abuse, or simple misdelivery (here: https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/). These are not abstract statistics; they are confirmation that attackers are not abandoning psychology for technology. They are refining it.
If you pay attention to how modern phishing campaigns evolve, the shift is subtle but significant.
The crude misspellings and implausible inheritance emails are largely gone in serious attacks. Instead, what we see is contextual precision: attackers mirror ongoing projects, reuse legitimate domains compromised upstream, and craft requests that fit into existing cognitive frames. This is classic authority bias and cognitive fluency at work: when something aligns with our expectations and comes wrapped in familiar structure, our brains process it as low risk. Add urgency, a well-known psychological accelerator, and you have a decision made under time pressure that feels responsible in the moment and disastrous later – ta-dah!
This is why the human factor has become the battleground rather than the weakness.
Attackers understand loss aversion, reciprocity, and routine bias better than many internal security programs do.
They know that a finance employee facing quarter-end pressure is more likely to approve a payment that matches an existing narrative than to escalate it for verification.
They know that a developer under delivery constraints will reuse a token “just for testing” because the friction of doing it correctly feels disproportionate.
They know that once an action appears to come from an authorized identity, scrutiny drops sharply. This is not a failure of intelligence; it is a feature of human cognition under load.
Rethink Month forced us to confront something uncomfortable but necessary: awareness is not a soft supplement to technical controls; it is the adaptive layer that compensates for inevitable architectural blind spots. Tools enforce rules; awareness shapes judgment. and when identities are multiplying across humans, agents, service accounts, and automation pipelines, judgment must be distributed, not centralized.
A single informed CISO does not secure an organization any more than a single firewall does. – security maturity becomes visible in the reflexes of the least technical employee, in the hesitation before clicking, in the instinct to question a request that fits too neatly.
Technically, we examined the gap between dynamic actors and static credentials, between autonomous agents and governance models that still assume bounded sessions and singular accountability. We looked at how middleware becomes an implicit perimeter for legacy systems, how shared service accounts erase attribution, and how phishing can exploit identity inheritance without ever deploying malware. None of this required exotic exploits. It required believable access. That is the thread connecting every case we discussed.
The catch, then, is not that technology is failing, is that technology is behaving exactly as configured while the human and organizational context around it evolves faster than governance frameworks can adapt.
When responsibilities are fragmented across security, IT, DevOps, IAM, and business units, identity lifecycle management becomes diffuse.
When audit logs capture events but not intent, investigations become interpretative exercises rather than deterministic reconstructions, and when awareness training is treated as annual compliance rather than continuous conditioning, the cognitive edge belongs to the attacker.
If there is a conclusion worth carrying forward, it is this: modernization without reconsideration is decoration.
You can migrate interfaces to the cloud, deploy zero trust architectures, adopt AI agents (how’s your Molt, btw?), and implement sophisticated IAM tooling, but if you do not rethink how trust is granted, propagated, and reviewed, you are building speed on top of sedimented risk. Legacy code is not inherently fragile; unmanaged identity is.
Phishing is not inherently advanced; it is simply aligned with human nature.
From a personal perspective, having worked on both offensive simulations and post-incident analysis, I have rarely seen breaches that began with technical brilliance, instead I have seen many that began with a plausible request, a trusted identity, and a moment of cognitive ease.
That is where security either lives or quietly erodes.
So, the final consideration is simple but not simplistic: treat identity as infrastructure, treat awareness as an engineering discipline, and treat psychological manipulation as a technical vector.
If we do that consistently, the conversation shifts from reacting to headlines to shaping reflexes.
Bruce approved 🤖
Chief Marketing Officer • social engineer OSINT/SOC/HUMINT • cyberculture • security analyst • polymath • COBOL programmer • nerd • retrogamer
