Rebuilding Trust in Cybersecurity: Why the Industry Needs a Reset
Cybersecurity has always been founded on a promise: to shield organizations from threats outside their walls. However, over time, that promise has become diluted. Today, the industry faces skepticism, with leaders second-guessing vendors, questioning pricing models, and struggling to distinguish genuine security value from clever marketing.
The result is a rising undercurrent of distrust. Not distrust in the need for security—if anything, that need is greater than ever—but distrust in how the industry provides it.
How Did We Get Here?
Several recurring patterns have pushed the industry into this trust deficit:
Complexity Over Clarity: The modern cybersecurity landscape is dominated by complexity, where the constant introduction of new frameworks, dashboards, and integrations has made security management more difficult than necessary. Instead of streamlining defense, this complexity forces organizations to spend excessive time and resources to manage their security tools, often at the expense of actually addressing threats. The overall result is that, rather than simplifying an organization's security posture, the industry has only added to the confusion.
Licensing games: Another major cause of the trust gap is the practice of "licensing games." Security shouldn't feel like navigating a subscription maze, yet vendors often use licensing models that are unclear and unpredictable. This includes hidden fees and marking certain features as "essential" add-ons, which suddenly increase the total cost of ownership. Such practices make it very hard for customers to budget effectively and ultimately damage confidence in the vendor's honesty and pricing transparency.
Unnecessary Intrusion: The demand for excessive access by many security solutions ultimately raises serious security concerns for customers. Many tools require deep, direct access to an organization's most sensitive systems, often requiring credentials, API keys, or specialized connectors. The article argues that instead of reducing exposure, this requirement creates new vulnerabilities, expanding the very attack surface the tools are meant to protect. This trade-off—adding risk with the tools designed to eliminate it—fuels skepticism and distrust.
Instead of simplifying security, we’ve layered on confusion. Instead of reducing exposure, we’ve introduced new vulnerabilities in the very tools meant to guard us.
The Path to Restoring Trust
If cybersecurity is to regain the confidence of the organizations it serves, the path forward must be grounded in transparency and restraint. That means:
Making protection straightforward: This principle means cybersecurity solutions must move away from the current trend of "complexity over clarity." To truly restore trust, tools must be intuitively designed, allowing security teams to quickly understand, deploy, and manage them without needing extensive, ongoing consulting or specialized training. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary frameworks and complicated dashboards, enabling organizations to allocate their valuable time and resources from tool management to addressing the actual threats it is intended to mitigate.
Eliminating the licensing shell game: Restoring trust requires vendors to commit to honest, predictable, and fair pricing that directly counters the current practice of "licensing games." This means abandoning the confusing "subscription maze" filled with hidden fees and forcing customers into unexpected purchases of “essential” add-ons. A trustworthy path involves clear, transparent pricing tiers where the cost is predictable from the outset, allowing customers to budget accurately and feel confident that their vendor is not trying to deceive them into paying more later.
Respecting boundaries: This principle entails a complete shift away from "unnecessary intrusion," characterized by security tools that demand excessive credentials and deep access to sensitive internal systems to function. To restore trust, solutions must be meticulously designed to collect only the minimum amount of data necessary to deliver their promised security value. The method of data collection and deployment must be carefully constrained to ensure that the security tool itself does not introduce new vulnerabilities or unnecessarily expand the organization’s attack surface. This focus on minimal, justified access demonstrates that the vendor prioritizes customer security and data integrity over ease of deployment.
It’s not about reinventing security. It’s about resetting the relationship between security providers and the businesses they protect.
A New Approach
At ThreatNG, we’ve made this philosophy our guiding principle. We’ve eliminated unnecessary complexity, built our platform solely on external data collection, and offer straightforward licensing along with free evaluations. Because trust isn’t earned by asking for more—it’s earned by delivering more with less friction.
Security Without the Games
The industry doesn’t need another buzzword or framework. It needs to return to the core promise: security that is reliable, clear, and trustworthy. Organizations should never feel like they’re negotiating with their own protection.
