Desperate Much? Buying Cyber Security Software Regularly
September 16, 2025
Bad actors have access to AI, and it is enabling them to increase both speed and volume at an alarming rate. Are cybersecurity teams able to cope? Maybe—if they can implement the latest software quickly enough. VentureBeat reports, “Software Commands 40% of Cybersecurity Budgets ad Gen AI Attacks Execute in Milliseconds.” Citing IBM’s recent Cost of a Data Breach Report, writer Louis Columbus reports 40% of cybersecurity spending now goes to software. Compare that to just 15.8% spent on hardware, 15% on outsourcing, and 29% on personnel. Even so, AI-assisted hacks now attack in milliseconds while the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) is 181 days. That is quite the disparity. Columbus observes:
“Three converging threats are flipping cybersecurity on its head: what once protected organizations is now working against them. Generative AI (gen AI) is enabling attackers to craft 10,000 personalized phishing emails per minute using scraped LinkedIn profiles and corporate communications. NIST’s 2030 quantum deadline threatens retroactive decryption of $425 billion in currently protected data. Deepfake fraud that surged 3,000% in 2024 now bypasses biometric authentication in 97% of attempts, forcing security leaders to reimagine defensive architectures fundamentally.”
Understandable. But all this scrambling for solutions may now be part of the problem. Some teams, we are told, manage 75 or more security tools. No wonder they capture so much of the budget. Simplification, however, is proving elusive. We learn:
“Security Service Edge (SSE) platforms that promised streamlined convergence now add to the complexity they intended to solve. Meanwhile, standalone risk-rating products flood security operations centers with alerts that lack actionable context, leading analysts to spend 67% of their time on false positives, according to IDC’s Security Operations Study. The operational math doesn’t work. Analysts require 90 seconds to evaluate each alert, but they receive 11,000 alerts daily. Each additional security tool deployed reduces visibility by 12% and increases attacker dwell time by 23 days, as reported in Mandiant’s 2024 M-Trends Report. Complexity itself has become the enterprise’s greatest cybersecurity vulnerability.”
See the writeup for more on efforts to improve cybersecurity’s speed and accuracy and the factors that thwart them. Do we have a crisis yet? Of course not. Marketing tells us cyber security just works. Sort of.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2025
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