What Security Leaders Must Now Demand from Cybersecurity Vendors

We all know there is no silver bullet in cybersecurity. No magic platform. No dashboard that “does it all”. Yet vendors continue pushing this tired narrative.

Let’s be brutally honest. Most of what’s being sold as cutting-edge security today is just old thinking in a new wrapper. And it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

The All-in-One Illusion

We’ve heard it for years: “Our platform provides complete protection across your entire environment. ”It sounds great. Especially to a boardroom or a non-technical executive. One contract. One vendor. One solution.

But here’s the truth: these “holistic” platforms are rarely holistic. They are bloated, average-at-everything tools locked inside proprietary ecosystems that:

• Fail to provide true depth in any one area

• Limit visibility to what the vendor stack allows

• Create blind spots in detection and response

• Give the illusion of control, but deliver complexity and mediocrity

When the breach happens, and it will, the platform will say it flagged something. You’ll be left with a broken timeline and an even more broken trust.

Enter XDR: The New Fantasy

Now the same vendors have a new story. This one is called Extended Detection and Response (XDR).

XDR claims to unify endpoint, network, cloud, and identity telemetry. It promises cross-layer visibility, machine learning-driven detection, and automated response.

On paper, it sounds like the holy grail. In reality, it has serious limitations:

• XDR is only as good as the telemetry it sees. If it’s tied to a single vendor, that visibility is inherently restricted

• “Extended” is often a stretch. Most XDR offerings still struggle with meaningful cloud, identity, and application context

• Response automation can do real damage. Without human oversight and deep tuning, an automated response might contain a threat – or cripple your operations

• True integration is rare. Native usually means “our other products.” Open APIs, third-party connectors, and deep context sharing remain limited

XDR can help with triage. It can reduce noise. But it will not solve your security challenges on its own.

And Then There’s AI

Just when the market started getting suspicious of XDR, vendors added a new promise:“ Our platform uses AI to detect threats in real time and respond automatically.”

Let’s be clear. AI is a tool, not a strategy.

Used properly, it can accelerate detection, highlight anomalies, and support analysts. But most cybersecurity AI today is:

• Narrowly trained

• Lacking real-world context

• Prone to false positives and blind spots

• Easy to confuse or evade with the right manipulation

AI will not stop a complex, multi-stage attack on its own. It will not replace your team. And it will not deliver strategic thinking.

If you hand your risk posture to a model you don’t understand, you are not securing your business, you are gambling with it!

The Open-Source Blind Spot

And underneath it all, there’s something else the industry prefers not to mention. A quiet dependency that powers many of the platforms being sold as “enterprise-grade” -

Open-source software.

Don't get me wrong, I’m a strong supporter of open-source security - when it’s transparent, validated, and maintained. But let’s not pretend open-source dependencies are always safe. The industry’s silence on this is a blind spot that has already bitten us, and it will again.

Vendors must be honest about what’s under the hood. Supply chain risk doesn’t begin and end with SolarWinds. It’s embedded in the CI/CD pipelines of almost every “secure” product on the market.

Security vendors are increasingly building their products on open-source libraries, tools, and dependencies. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, open source has driven innovation and collaboration for decades. But here’s the risk:

• Many open-source components are poorly maintained or updated

• Critical libraries are often supported by one or two unpaid developers

• Vulnerabilities are inherited silently across complex dependency chains

• Transparency is minimal. Vendors rarely disclose exactly what they rely on

Case in point: Log4Shell. A single flaw in a widely used Java logging library impacted thousands of vendors and millions of customers. The industry scrambled, but the root issue was obvious - no one really knew what was under the hood.

Now multiply that by every open-source component inside modern XDR, SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and cloud security platforms.

You are not just trusting the vendor. You are trusting the unpaid hobbyist whose repo they never validated.

What Actually Works

Effective cybersecurity is engineered, not acquired. It requires integration, validation, and continuous refinement - not just another platform license.

What works is:

• Best-in-class tooling for each domain, not “one ring to rule them all”

• Real interoperability, with open standards and deep integrations

• Human-led investigation, backed by AI, not replaced by it

• Continuous validation, red-teaming, and testing

• Architecture designed for resilience, not ease of procurement

• Full visibility into software components, including third-party and open-source dependencies

Security is not about ticking boxes or reducing dashboards. It is about staying ahead of attackers who are evolving faster than your sales deck.

A Final Word to Vendors

If you're selling cybersecurity, please do better.

This is a wake-up call - not just for vendors, but for the entire industry. Your job isn’t to tell customers what they want to hear. It’s to tell them what they need to hear, even if it costs you the sale. Because the future won’t belong to those who chase Gartner quadrants with half-baked platforms and polished narratives. It will belong to those who:

• Build with openness

• Prioritise true interoperability

• Empower human defenders, not replace them

• Audit and secure every inherited line of code

• Design for reality, not marketing slides

Stop selling illusions. Start delivering solutions that hold up under pressure, when the alerts are real and the stakes are high.

Because at the end of the day, cybersecurity isn’t a product. It’s a discipline. A commitment. A constant practice.

Karl DiMascio

IntroSecurity ASEAN