Why I Respect Hackers More Than Compliance Officers
Why audit-ready is killing our ability to be attack-ready
Why audit-ready is killing our ability to be attack-ready
There is a sentence I hesitated to type for years. It’s the kind of opinion that gets you strange looks in budget meetings and awkward silences at industry conferences.
But after years in the trenches of cybersecurity, I can’t shake it.
I respect the hacker mindset more than the compliance mindset.
Before you close this tab or head to the comments to defend the importance of governance , hear me out.
This isn’t an attack on the people who keep us compliant. I know they stand between us and regulatory ruin.
This is a reflection on curiosity, stagnation, and the dangerous gap between how we think security works and how it actually works.
The Night I Stopped Trusting the Checklist
My perspective didn’t shift in a classroom or a board meeting. It shifted at 1:00 AM last Monday.
If you’ve ever worked in a Security Operations Center (SOC), you know the vibe.
The coffee is stale, the dashboards are blurring into a neon haze, and your brain is running on autopilot.
I was drowning in audit preparation reviewing password policies, checking retention rules, validating access logs as part of a temporary contracting job for an old client.
It was necessary, responsible work. It was the work that keeps a company legally breathing.
Then my client called urgently and said that they will need to cancel our compliance meeting tomorrow because their SOC team is on call for an urgent matter.
A service account that shouldn’t have been awake for which the token reused in a way that didn’t technically violate policy but felt wrong.
Later during the week, I learned that it wasn’t a brute-force smash-and-grab. It was a lateral movement chain so elegant it was almost beautiful. No threat model had documented it. No policy expressly forbade it because no one imagined it was possible.
In that silent moment, a realization hit me harder than any certification exam ever could:
Compliance shows us how systems should work. Hackers show us how systems actually work.
And in the real world, the should doesn’t matter.
The Suffocation of the SOC Analyst
There is a quiet crisis happening in our industry. We hire brilliant, paranoid, inquisitive minds to staff our SOCs. We train them to think like adversaries.
And then we hand them a checklist.
We bury their instincts under alerts tuned for policy violations rather than behavioral anomalies. We tell them to follow the playbook. We measure their success by ticket closure rates and audit readiness.
SOC analysts don’t burn out because the work is too hard. They burn out because their curiosity is boxed in.
When we treat exploration as risk and innovation as something to be postponed until after the next audit, we stop being investigators. We become data entry clerks with higher stakes.
The Uncomfortable Lesson of the Hacker
Why do I hold such respect for the adversary?
Because the hacker, whether a state-sponsored threat actor or a bug bounty hunter , possesses the one trait that corporate structures work overtime to kill: Radical Curiosity.
A hacker never asks:
“Is this allowed?” They ask, “What happens if I push this?”
They view a system as a living organism, not a static diagram. They look at a locked door and don’t see a barrier; they see a mechanism to be understood and dismantled. They live in the friction between your rules.
Attackers don’t care about your change management board. They don’t wait for Q3 budget approval. They exploit the gap between your bureaucracy and your reality.
The Trap of the Guardian
Compliance officers are not villains. They are guardians. They protect the organization from legal collapse, fines, and operational chaos.
But here is where we go wrong: We have allowed compliance to become the only lens we look through.
When security success is measured by completed checklists instead of prevented incidents, we are failing. When we prioritize being “audit-ready” over being attack-ready, we are confusing the map for the territory.
We are building paper tigers and wondering why they get eaten.
The Industry’s Identity Crisis
Cybersecurity is stuck between two worlds.
The World of Order
Demanding predictability, documentation, and proof (ISO, NIST, SOC 2).
The World of Chaos
Demanding imagination, adaptability, and speed (The Threat Landscape).
Our biggest risk right now isn’t a zero-day exploit. It’s intellectual stagnation. If defenders stop thinking like attackers because they are too busy ticking boxes, the attackers win by default.
A Message to the Defenders
If you are a SOC analyst reading this: Your curiosity is not a liability.
Your what if questions are not distractions. You are not just an alert processor. You are a hunter. Fight for the time to experiment. Learn the tradecraft, not just the tools. Understand why the playbook exists so you know exactly when to throw it away.
And if you are a compliance professional: You can be an enabler.
Ask yourself: “How can this policy support creativity instead of suppressing it?” The strongest compliance programs are not those that freeze an organization in place, but those that build guardrails safe enough to allow for high-speed maneuvering.
The Future is Hybrid
The future of cybersecurity doesn’t belong solely to the hackers, nor does it belong to the auditors.
It belongs to the Hybrid Minds.
It belongs to those who can respect the structure while anticipating the chaos. It belongs to those who understand that while compliance keeps the lights on, it is the hacker mindset that keeps the house from burning down.
So yes, my respect leans toward the hacker. Not because I value chaos, but because creativity is fragile.
And if that makes you uncomfortable?
Good. Growth never happens in the comfort zone.
