A Cyber Tale of Change Resistance

Or why why cybersecurity teams struggle with change.

Let’s talk about change—that terrifying thing that haunts the halls of cybersecurity departments everywhere. In cybersecurity, we pride ourselves on staying ahead of the curve. We hunt emerging threats, patch vulnerabilities, and constantly iterate on detection logic. But when it comes to changing how we work, we often meet that challenge with skepticism, resistance—or outright rejection.

The Brain Says “Update” – The Ego Says “Over My Dead Body”

Security teams tend to develop deep expertise in their domains—whether it’s detection engineering, threat intel, or incident response. That expertise is often hard-won, built over years of trial, error, and learning what not to do. So it’s only natural that we become attached to the tools, processes, and workflows that we’ve carefully assembled.

The paradox of cybersecurity is this: we know change is necessary. Our whole field is built around anticipating and mitigating threats that are constantly evolving. And yet… when someone from a neighboring team dares suggest a new logging strategy or a different way to handle alert triage, you’d think they just insulted someone’s cat.

Why?

Because deep down, we believe we know what we’re doing. After all, we’ve read the RFCs. We’ve written the playbooks. We’ve survived three major compliance audits and only cried twice.

But this attachment can quietly morph into rigidity. We start saying things like:

"This is how we've always done it."
"They don’t understand how our environment works."
"We already solved that problem—years ago."

Sounds familiar?

What often gets overlooked is that we may not have solved the right problem. Or that the context has shifted. Or that someone outside our team actually has a fresh perspective that can streamline, improve, or reframe the way we operate.

The Cyber Echo Chamber

A major contributor to this inertia is the siloing of knowledge. Many cybersecurity teams operate in a bubble—sometimes out of necessity (due to confidentiality), sometimes out of culture.

Your neighbor on the threat intel team? Suspicious.
The devops engineer who actually knows how the infrastructure works? Intimidating.
The infrastructure admin with ideas for automation? Probably trying to take your job.

This isolation breeds a kind of internal echo chamber. We reinforce our own assumptions and become skeptical—sometimes even territorial—when “outsiders” try to introduce changes.

Unfortunately, those outsiders are often the very people who can spot the gaps we’ve stopped seeing. We create our own little kingdoms, and when someone walks in with a fresh perspective, our first instinct is to gatekeep. “You don’t understand our environment,” we declare, while simultaneously forgetting that maybe, just maybe, we don’t understand it as well as we think either.

Change Feels Like a Threat – But It’s Usually Just an Update

Another reason for the resistance? Ego. It’s hard to admit that a process you designed—or an architecture you’ve championed—is no longer optimal. Especially if a colleague from a different team is pointing it out.

Let’s face it: it’s hard to admit you’ve been doing something inefficiently. Especially in cyber, where confidence is often worn as armor. When someone suggests a better way, it can feel like an attack on your skills, your decisions, your late nights of debugging why the SIEM isn’t ingesting logs again.

It can feel like a challenge to your competence. But in most cases, it isn’t.

Change isn’t an indictment of past decisions. It’s a reflection of a new context. The environment evolves. Threats evolve. And so must we. Change isn’t a threat. It’s a patch.

You wouldn’t run a server without updates (I hope), so why run a team that way? Why treat new ideas like malware when they might just be the security patch your processes desperately need?

Embrace the “Outsiders”

Here’s a radical idea: talk to people. Not just the folks on your team, but across engineering, threat hunting, even IT and outside of your company. Because yes, they might not know the ins and outs of your Splunk queries. But they might see the giant blind spot you’ve been too close to notice.

Here are a few thoughts:

• Be willing to challenge your own assumptions. Ask yourself: If I were starting this today, would I build it the same way? If the answer is no, maybe it’s time to iterate.
• Create psychological safety. Teams that feel secure in their roles are more likely to welcome feedback and less likely to interpret suggestions as threats.
• Frame change as improvement, not criticism. When introducing new ideas, focus on outcomes—better reliability, faster response times, reduced toil—not flaws in the old system.
• Document decisions and revisit them regularly. Institutional memory fades fast. Revisiting old decisions with fresh eyes can spark new solutions.

TL;DR

Resistance to change isn’t unique to cybersecurity. But it’s particularly ironic in a field that demands constant adaptation. If we want to stay effective—not just at detecting threats but also at building resilient, forward-thinking teams—we need to challenge our internal status quo as often as we challenge our external adversaries.

The confidence in “we know what we’re doing” can become dangerous when it turns into isolation. Sometimes the biggest vulnerability isn’t in our code or infrastructure—it’s in our unwillingness to listen, learn, and evolve.

So the next time someone suggests a change, take a breath. Step outside the echo chamber. And maybe, just maybe, let them help you fix that one process you’ve duct-taped together since 2018.