DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
The CFO stares at models. Charts. Predictive curves. If the line goes up, it’s good. If it doesn’t, it’s a problem.
The CISO stares at silence. No alerts. No breaches. No headlines. If nothing happens, it means everything’s working.
Now read that again.
If nothing happens, the CISO did their job.
But to the CFO? That looks like money burned on nothing.
The CFO Seeks Outcome.
Cybersecurity Offers Prevention.
Let’s break the illusion:
A CFO expects ROI – a return on investment. Tangible. Visible. Something they can point to and say, “This made us money.”
But cyber defense? It’s like building walls before the war starts. If you do it right, no one notices. If you fail, everyone bleeds.
To many CFOs, that’s an unacceptable paradox.
They fund what they see.
They reward what they measure.
But in security, what you don’t see is the victory.
The Cost of Misalignment
Let me show you the real math:
- A ransomware attack can cost $5M+ in downtime, recovery, and reputation loss.
- A data breach can trigger regulatory hell, lawsuits, and executive fallout.
- A supply chain compromise can cripple operations for weeks.
These aren’t predictions. They’re post-mortems from companies that thought “cyber” was a budget line, not a survival line.
Security Isn’t a Profit Center. It’s a Collapse Preventer.
That’s where the problem lives:
CFOs are trained to optimize capital.
CISOs are trained to minimize existential risk.
Different codes.
Different missions.
Same company.
The CISO can’t prove success in dollars. Only in the absence of chaos.
But try pitching “absence” to a room full of financial hawks hungry for KPIs.
The Fix: Translate the Silence
CISOs, hear this:
You must become bilingual – speak the language of risk in financial terms.
Map breach costs to downtime.
Translate attack surfaces into dollars.
Model consequences, not just controls.
And CFOs?
Start recognizing that cybersecurity is not a sunk cost. It’s insurance against annihilation.
A dollar spent now is a million not lost later.
And in the silence you ignore today… there may be a breach waiting to scream.
Final Words
When the switch flips and the breach hits, the CFO won’t be asking about ROI.
They’ll be asking:
“Why weren’t we protected?”
The answer was in the silence all along.
But they didn’t know how to hear it.
DeadSwitch out.
Tom's IT Cafe 