Opinion: We're Paying Spies to Stay in Business

Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: the cybersecurity industry has quietly built an incentive structure that rewards espionage. Not directly, of course. Nobody's handing out bonuses for breaches. But follow the money and the attention, and you'll see how the current model benefits from a steady stream of sophisticated threats that keep executives terrified and budgets flowing.

Consider how the market actually works. A company gets breached by a nation-state actor using novel techniques. The incident sparks headlines. Suddenly, the security vendor that detected the breach (or claims credit for it) becomes the trusted expert. Their stock rises. Their consulting fees triple. Their recruitment accelerates. The attacked company, meanwhile, buys more products from more vendors, creating a cascading security spending boom.

This isn't an accident. It's the logical endpoint of how we've structured cybersecurity economics.

The recent pattern of in-person data theft operations and traditional espionage tactics should worry us precisely because they're getting attention from law enforcement and private security firms simultaneously. Both entities benefit when espionage threats remain visible, urgent, and somewhat mysterious. Mystery keeps people paying for solutions.

What I'm arguing is this: the industry's incentives are fundamentally misaligned with prevention. We reward detection, not deterrence. We celebrate the company that finds the spy, not the company that makes espionage genuinely difficult and unprofitable. And because detection makes headlines while prevention is invisible, prevention gets underfunded.

Think about how vendors market their products. "We caught the Chinese intelligence unit targeting your sector." That's powerful. That sells. "We made it so expensive and difficult to penetrate your network that spies moved to easier targets" doesn't sell the same way. It's boring. It's preventive. It doesn't come with a dramatic incident response story.

The intelligence community itself operates under similar incentives. An espionage operation that gets discovered and publicized generates bureaucratic activity, budget justification, and career advancement for the officials involved. Prevention? That's invisible. A spy network that never gets built, a recruitment attempt that never happens, a data theft that never occurs because the targets were too hardened to bother with. Those victories produce no metrics, no promotions, no policy papers.

So what happens? We get a system that almost guarantees a continuous supply of newly discovered threats. Not because espionage is increasing necessarily, but because the industry's reward structure incentivizes finding, publicizing, and dramatizing threats rather than eliminating them.

The vendors aren't evil. The intelligence analysts aren't corrupt. But they're all operating within a system that pays them to find problems, not solve them. That's the real issue.

This matters because espionage is supposed to be hard. It's supposed to carry real risk and real cost. But when espionage generates profitable security incidents for thousands of vendors, when it justifies budget requests and career advancement, when it creates consulting opportunities and conference speaking slots, the actual friction that should deter it gets reduced.

What would alignment look like? A security industry paid for resilience, not incident response. Intelligence budgets that explicitly reward prevention over detection. Vendor compensation tied to how long customers go without breaches, not how many breaches they help discover. Corporate incentives that reward unremarkable security, not dramatic threat identification.

Will any of that happen? Probably not. Change would require all the current beneficiaries to accept lower revenue in the name of an invisible good. That's not how incentives work.

So here's what readers should notice: when you see the next espionage alert, ask yourself who benefits from you being afraid. Then ask whether they have any reason to make sure that fear goes away. The answer might surprise you.