thalios Commentary From The Bit Bucket

Another story from corporate Clown World™.

Earlier today a “Senior Information Security Analyst” dropped an Excel spreadsheet on me.

I opened it up.

25,192 rows.

Twenty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety-two lines of raw, unadulterated vulnerability scanner vomit.

His ask? “Please review these findings and let me know if these vulnerabilities can receive a vulnerability exception.”

That was it. No context. No executive summary. No prioritization. Just twenty-five grand of CSV dump tossed over my virtual fence like a bag of flaming dog shit.

Now, I’ve been around the block long enough to know what he meant by “vulnerability exception.” In corporate speak, it’s just the bureaucratic paper trail for “we know this software is broken or outdated, but fixing it will break the production environment or require three months of actual work”. It’s a liability waiver masquerading as risk governance.

Naturally, the retarded contrarian in me decided to engage. I replied with a few basic, practical questions and some actual guidance based on my considerable real world experience. I mean… the beard is gray for a reason.

Radio silence for an hour. Then a reply that amounted to nothing more than a blank corporate stare. He didn’t know. He couldn’t answer a single question and ignored the guidance (how dare I recommend he do something off script). He just had his ticket, his scanner export, and an SLA clock ticking down somewhere on his second monitor.

This is modern “cybersecurity” in the year of our Lord 2026. It is completely overrun by credentialed charlatans running email jobs.

These guys don’t hunt threats. They don’t analyze architecture. They don’t write exploit mitigations. They don’t even understand the TCP/IP stack half the time. What they do have is a CISSP on their LinkedIn profile, an automated vulnerability scanner license paid for by a Clown World™ budget, and an endless appetite for forwarding nonsense to people who actually do real work.

The scanner spits out a mountain of digital noise, the “analyst” exports it to Excel, dumps it on an engineering team with no triage and zero context, and dusts off his hands. If something goes wrong, he has his audit trail: “Well, I notified engineering on Thursday.” If the system grinds to a halt under 500 hours of useless manual review, that’s an SRE problem, not a security problem.

It’s security theater. A massive, bloated cargo cult designed to give warm fuzzies while generating thousands of billable hours of pure, unadulterated bullshit.

I haven’t replied to him yet. Part of me wants to explain the idiocy of asking one human being to manually evaluate 25,000 arbitrary CVE rows before end of business Friday. But the realist in me knows it’s an NPC conversation. He has a script, he’s going to read the script, and the machine will continue to hum along in all its retarded glory.

I hate Clown World™ so much. Think I’ll just go make a sandwich.