Cybersecurity industry profits from fears it helps create
The cybersecurity industry has perfected a self-perpetuating business model: create the conditions for insecurity, then sell protection from the chaos they profit from maintaining.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is structural analysis of incentive alignment.
──── The Protection Racket Economics
Traditional protection rackets work simply: create a threat, then sell protection from that threat. The cybersecurity industry operates on the same principle, but with legal legitimacy and technological sophistication.
The difference is scale and abstraction. Instead of breaking windows to sell window repair, they architect systems that are inherently vulnerable, then sell continuous protection services.
Every “zero-day vulnerability” discovered creates market demand. Every breach announcement drives stock prices up for security companies. Every new attack vector justifies expanded security budgets.
The industry doesn’t profit from solving security problems. It profits from managing them indefinitely.
──── Manufactured Complexity as Revenue Driver
Software complexity is not an accident. It is a business strategy.
Simple, secure systems are economically worthless to the cybersecurity industry. They require minimal ongoing protection. Complex, interconnected systems with multiple attack surfaces generate continuous revenue streams.
Consider the architectural decisions that create security vulnerabilities:
- Unnecessary network connectivity in embedded systems
- Over-privileged default configurations
- Complex dependency chains that multiply attack surfaces
- Legacy protocol compatibility that maintains known weaknesses
These are not inevitable technical requirements. They are design choices that happen to benefit security vendors.
The more complex the system, the more security products it requires. Complexity is not a bug—it is the feature that drives the entire business model.
──── The Disclosure Industrial Complex
The vulnerability disclosure process has become an elaborate theater that serves industry interests over actual security.
“Responsible disclosure” creates artificial scarcity. Vulnerabilities are discovered, held secret while vendors develop patches, then announced in coordinated media campaigns that drive security product sales.
This process maximizes both the damage potential of vulnerabilities and the market value of protection services. It is optimized for business impact, not security outcomes.
Consider the timing: vulnerabilities are disclosed after security companies have developed detection signatures and protective measures. The disclosure creates demand for products that are conveniently ready for sale.
Meanwhile, black market exploit trading operates on different timelines entirely. The “responsible” disclosure process serves public relations and marketing more than actual protection.
──── Threat Intelligence as Marketing
“Threat intelligence” has become the industry’s primary content marketing strategy. It creates the perpetual sense of imminent danger that justifies endless security spending.
Most threat intelligence reports follow a predictable formula:
- Identify a new attack campaign (often rebranding existing techniques)
- Attribute it to a sophisticated adversary (usually nation-state actors)
- Emphasize the unique nature of the threat
- Conclude with recommendations for specific security products
The intelligence creates fear of specific, named threats that can only be addressed by purchasing specific solutions. It transforms abstract security concerns into concrete product requirements.
The naming conventions alone reveal the marketing purpose: “APT-X,” “Operation Y,” “Z-Group.” These branded threat actors become characters in an ongoing narrative that keeps security budgets flowing.
──── Compliance Theater Economics
Regulatory compliance has become the cybersecurity industry’s most reliable revenue generator. Compliance frameworks create mandatory market demand that bypasses normal cost-benefit analysis.
The frameworks themselves are often written with industry input, creating requirements that coincidentally align with existing product categories. Compliance becomes a mechanism for mandating specific types of security spending.
But compliance theater produces security theater. Organizations spend enormous resources on checkbox compliance while remaining fundamentally insecure. The focus shifts from actual protection to documentation of protection attempts.
This serves the industry perfectly. Compliance spending is predictable, recurring, and disconnected from security outcomes. It generates revenue regardless of whether actual security improves.
──── The Incident Response Industry
When breaches occur, they trigger massive spending on incident response services. This creates a perverse incentive: the worse the security landscape becomes, the more profitable the cleanup business becomes.
Incident response companies often discover that breaches are more extensive than initially believed. This is not necessarily because they are more thorough—it is because expanded scope justifies expanded billing.
The post-breach recommendations invariably include more security products and services. Every incident becomes a sales opportunity for the next round of protection purchases.
The industry profits more from security failures than from security successes.
──── Platform Dependencies as Control Mechanisms
Security platforms create vendor lock-in that extends far beyond the initial purchase. Once an organization commits to a security ecosystem, migration costs become prohibitive.
The platforms are designed for dependence, not independence. They require continuous updates, ongoing training, and expanding integration with other security tools. Each integration point creates additional switching costs.
Platform strategies transform one-time product sales into permanent revenue relationships. The goal is not to solve security problems but to create inescapable dependency on security solutions.
──── The Artificial Intelligence Acceleration
AI integration is the industry’s current growth strategy. “AI-powered security” promises to solve the complexity problems that the industry itself created.
But AI security tools add new layers of complexity and new categories of vulnerabilities. Machine learning models can be poisoned, adversarial examples can fool detection systems, and algorithmic bias can create systematic blind spots.
Each AI security solution requires additional AI security solutions to secure it. The recursive complexity creates expanding market opportunities while potentially making systems less secure overall.
──── Value Destruction Disguised as Value Creation
The cybersecurity industry extracts enormous economic value while often destroying more value than it creates.
Security measures impose friction costs on every business process. They slow systems, complicate workflows, and require ongoing maintenance overhead. These costs are diffuse and difficult to measure, while security spending is concentrated and easy to quantify.
Organizations often become less efficient and less innovative as they accumulate security tooling. The cure becomes worse than the disease, but the costs are invisible in budget line items labeled “security investment.”
──── The Defense Contractor Parallel
The cybersecurity industry increasingly resembles the military-industrial complex: a self-perpetuating system that profits from the continuation of the problems it claims to solve.
Like defense contractors, cybersecurity companies benefit from threat escalation. More sophisticated attacks justify more sophisticated (and expensive) defenses. The arms race dynamic ensures continuous market growth.
The revolving door between government cybersecurity roles and private industry creates the same regulatory capture effects seen in defense contracting. Former officials become vendors selling solutions to their former colleagues.
──── Systemic Risk Creation
Ironically, the cybersecurity industry may be creating systemic risks while claiming to reduce them.
Concentration of security responsibilities in a few major vendors creates single points of failure. When security platforms themselves are compromised, the damage spreads across their entire customer base.
Standardization of security tools creates standardized attack surfaces. Adversaries can optimize attacks against widely deployed security products, maximizing the impact of their efforts.
The industry’s focus on reactive protection rather than proactive security architecture may be making systems more vulnerable overall.
──── The Value Question
What value does the cybersecurity industry actually create? This question is more complex than it appears.
Certainly, some cybersecurity work provides genuine value. But the industry’s business model incentivizes value extraction over value creation. The optimal outcome for security vendors is not secure systems but permanently insecure systems that require ongoing protection services.
From a value perspective, an industry that solved its core problems would eliminate its own market. This creates a fundamental misalignment between industry success and societal benefit.
The cybersecurity industry represents a clear case where market mechanisms produce outcomes that are economically rational but systemically destructive.
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The cybersecurity industry’s business model is not broken—it is working exactly as designed. It has successfully transformed insecurity from a problem to be solved into a resource to be harvested.
Understanding this dynamic is essential for making rational decisions about security investments. The industry’s recommendations should be evaluated not just for their technical merit but for their alignment with vendor interests.
Real security might require less cybersecurity industry involvement, not more.