thoughts on cybersecurity business

• Cybersecurity and drug development are similar in the sense that neither can harbor deep, long-lived productification processes. Problems are dynamical. Enemies eventually evolve protection against productified attacks.

• Cybersecurity and number theory are similar in the sense that they contain the hardest problems of their respective fields and are not built on a generally-agreed-upon core body of knowledge. Nothing meaningful is accessible to beginner-level students since all sorts of techniques from other subfields are utilized to crack problems.

Hence, in its essence, cyber security is an elite services business. Anyone else claiming the opposite (that it is a product company, that it does not necessitate the recruitment of the best minds of the industry) is selling a sense of security, not real security.