Cybersecurity Pain Points

Data Overview

1. 1

   Severe hiring market exhaustion

   Career & Recruitment×7

   “After 5 months of mental hell and ghosting, today I finally landed a role. To those struggling: Don't give up”

2. 2

   Low-effort data exposure

   Data Privacy×5

   “Built with vibes, secured by nothing, and somehow surprised when the data walked out the door”

3. 3

   AI inference visibility gap

   Artificial Intelligence×5

   “AI inference is becoming an infrastructure problem, not just an AI problem... That creates a completely new operational surface.”

4. 4

   Geopolitical vendor trust issues

   Vendor & Supply Chain×5

   “I'm looking for a successor for KES for around 20 devices. My superiors don't trust Kaspersky anymore, and we wanna move on.”

5. 5

   AI-generated security debt

   Artificial Intelligence×5

   “AI creates endless slightly different versions of the same insecure patterns across repos, services, and teams.”

6. 6

   High-stakes workplace burnout

   Human Factors×5

   “The constant low-grade paranoia, alerts that don’t stop, being the person who has to say “no” or “that’s risky” all day, plus the feeling that one missed thing could be career-ending.”

7. 7

   Institutional knowledge loss

   Operations×4

   “A lot of the real context disappears with them - why something was prioritized, how edge cases were handled, what was just noise, and what patterns kept showing up across engagements.”

8. 8

   CVE triage fatigue

   Vulnerability Management×3

   “We have a security team of 4 and we're drowning in CVE tickets. I've been pushing to move to minimal base images, cut the noise at the source.”

9. 9

   Cloud visibility blind spots

   Cloud Security×3

   “We finished our SAP migration to AWS... Our cloud footprint basically doubled overnight... Our security tooling was all agent based.”

10. 10

    Tool sprawl consolidation failure

    Pricing & Cost×2

    “we moved to a SASE platform last year expecting to consolidate networking and security... in practice im still managing firewall policies, ZTNA access rules, and SDWAN behavior separately.”

11. 11

    Ineffective security awareness

    Human Factors×2

    “the team is a bit burned out on the same old compliance-style training. Employees just click through to finish it, nobody actually retains anything.”

12. 12

    WAF false sense of security

    Infrastructure Security×2

    “Most WAF setups I've audited give teams a false sense of security. You pay for CloudFlare or Imperva or Akamai, flip it on, and everyone feels protected. Meanwhile the actual attack surface hasn't changed.”

13. 13

    AI authorization blurring

    Artificial Intelligence×2

    “Once a model can reinterpret context dynamically... the distinction between “input” and “authority” starts breaking down.”

14. 14

    Cloud IAM permission graveyards

    Identity & Access Management×2

    “Most cloud IAM programs I walk into are a graveyard of permissions nobody remembers granting.”

15. 15

    Small team SIEM complexity

    Operations×2

    “We have a relatively small security team - essentially one person responsible for security operations, but the environment is not small: several thousand servers.”

16. 16

    Compliance evidence gathering

    Compliance×2

    “NIS2 Article 21 requires organizations to address areas like risk management... In practice, a lot of “evidence” for these areas is manually collected.”

17. 17

    XDR cloud detection failures

    Reliability Issues×1

    “To anyone using Palo Alto's Cortex XDR, how well have you seen it perform... it misses a ton of concerning cloud only events that we'd assume they would catch.”