Security Lies & Survival: How to Stop Polishing Shrines and Start Building Resilience
Polished binders, green heat maps, and smug compliance badges make executives sleep well. Until something breaks. Then they call you at 3 a.m.
Security Lies & Survival is the book the board never asked for and the CISO wishes the board would read. Equal parts war-room memoir and field manual, it exposes the lies risk managers tell themselves - the "we're compliant" delusion, the vendor renewal bias, the mystical faith in quarterly audits - and replaces them with blunt, executable fixes that work in the messy, human reality of modern business.
This isn't a sanitized textbook. It's first-person, sarcastic, and uncomfortably honest. Chapters pair sharp, novelized openings with hands-on playbooks: how to brief a board so they actually act, how to run crisis comms without doubling the damage, how to prove controls to auditors without building altars to paperwork, and how to fold AI and continuous assurance into real governance without letting automation lie for you.
If you lead security, buy vendors, run ops, or sit on a board, this book gives you:
Scenarios that translate technical risk into dollars and deadlines.
A ruthless 90-day plan to show measurable improvement.
Practical templates for comms, postmortems, vendor verification, and board packs.
Stop polishing shrines. Build muscle. Read this book, then go make your company boring enough to survive.
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