Five Annoying Cybersecurity Trends We’ve Somehow Accepted as Normal
2025-12-17
Cybersecurity is a serious business. It deals with real threats, real damage, and very real consequences.
Which makes it even more impressive how many absurd habits the industry has collectively decided to normalize.
None of the following trends are catastrophic on their own. That’s almost the problem. They are annoying, inefficient, and quietly harmful — and they keep surviving because everyone pretends they are fine.
Let’s talk about five of them.
1. Everything Is “AI-Powered” Now
At some point, every security product became “AI-powered”.
Firewalls. SIEMs. Log parsers. Regex engines with a neural network sticker on top.
Ask what the AI actually does and the answer usually sounds like:
“It analyzes patterns in real time.”
Which is true.
So does a for loop.
This doesn’t mean machine learning has no place in security. It does. But slapping “AI” onto a rules engine doesn’t make it smarter, and it doesn’t make analysts’ lives easier. It mostly makes slide decks heavier.
The result is a strange situation where buyers feel underqualified to question products, because “the AI knows better”. Meanwhile, the AI is very busy matching strings and thresholds.
2. Security Tools That Require a Small DevOps Team to Run
Security tools love to describe themselves as lightweight.
In practice, “lightweight” often means: - one agent - plus a helper agent - plus a sidecar - plus a kernel module - plus a controller - plus documentation that starts with “Deploy our Helm chart”
By the time the tool is fully operational, it has more moving parts than the system it was supposed to protect.
This creates a wonderful paradox:
security tooling increases the attack surface, the operational burden, and the number of things that can break — all in the name of reducing risk.
At some point, teams stop asking whether a tool improves security and start asking whether removing it would improve uptime.
3. “Just Turn On MFA” as a Universal Solution
Multi-factor authentication is good.
Everyone should use it.
But somewhere along the way, MFA became the answer to every security problem.
Account takeover? MFA.
Bot traffic? MFA.
Phishing? Definitely MFA.
Existential dread? Probably MFA.
This leads to odd conversations where MFA is recommended after credentials have been compromised, sessions hijacked, or automation is already abusing the system.
MFA reduces risk. It does not eliminate it. It does not replace monitoring, detection, or understanding how abuse actually happens. Treating it as a silver bullet mostly delays the next incident.
4. Alerts That Are Always Critical and Rarely Useful
Modern security platforms are extremely good at generating alerts.
They are less good at explaining which ones matter.
Everything is marked as “High” or “Critical”, because admitting uncertainty feels risky. The outcome is predictable: alert fatigue, dashboards full of red, and teams learning to ignore alarms to get actual work done.
Eventually, the most dangerous thing in the system is not the attacker — it’s the alert that looks exactly like the previous 500 false positives.
Security should reduce cognitive load. Too often, it does the opposite.
5. Blocking Things Without Understanding Them
One of the most comforting actions in cybersecurity is blocking something.
An IP address.
A subnet.
An ASN.
Sometimes an entire country, just to be safe.
Blocking feels decisive. It looks good in reports. It gives the impression that something was handled.
The problem is that modern infrastructure is shared, dynamic, and messy. Blocking without context often means blocking CDNs, cloud providers, or legitimate users along with the bad traffic.
Understanding where traffic comes from, how infrastructure is used, and what signals actually indicate abuse is harder than pressing “block”. But it’s also the only approach that scales.
Why These Trends Survive
None of these trends exist because people are incompetent. They exist because they are comfortable.
They produce activity. They generate metrics. They look like progress. And most importantly, they avoid hard questions about context, trade-offs, and uncertainty.
Cybersecurity is not about reacting faster. It’s about reacting better.
Final Thought
The most effective security teams are not the ones with the most tools, the most alerts, or the most buzzwords. They are the ones that understand their systems, their users, and their infrastructure deeply enough to tell signal from noise.
Everything else is just noise with a dashboard.
And yes, it’s probably AI-powered.