EN 
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows an incident.
The systems come back online. The dashboards go green. The postmortem gets filed away. Everyone moves on, except the people who were in the middle of it. The ones who made the call. The ones who felt the pressure. The ones who still replay that moment in their head, wondering how close it came to unraveling everything.
Those are the stories you rarely hear. Until now.
The Work Behind Network Security Doesn’t Always Make the Report
In cybersecurity, we celebrate outcomes. But we rarely talk about what it takes to reach them. The late nights, the decisions made under pressure, the consequences that come without warning.
A lot of the technical people here at FireMon have lived this. They’ve walked into inherited firewalls that shouldn’t exist, environments with no real documentation, and situations where they’re told, “Just fix it,” while dealing with consequences they didn’t create. And they know how fast blame shows up when things go sideways.
A Confession from Leadership: When the Incident Isn’t Yours, But the Fallout Is
I’m not a practitioner of firewall policy management. But I’ve spent more than 20 years in cybersecurity, and I’ve witnessed firsthand how incidents reshape organizations, careers, and leadership teams.
Early in my career, I personally watched the leadership at RSA Security navigate the aftermath of one of the most consequential breaches in the industry—when sophisticated attackers compromised the SecurID system and stole data tied to two-factor authentication tokens used by governments and defense contractors. The technical details were complex, but the human reality was unmistakable: trust had been shaken at a global scale. I won’t discuss all the conspiracy theories that were rampant which made it even harder to navigate as that could be a book in and of itself.
But what I will share was that, as part of the RSA Conference leadership team, I saw the pressure up close. I watched how Art Coviello, then CEO, stood on stage and addressed the breach directly, balancing transparency, responsibility, and confidence in front of an audience that included customers, partners, competitors, and adversaries alike. Some called his speech politically correct with tons of inuendo and no accountability. No matter what anyone thinks, it also had a bigger impact behind the scenes, as the conference team was simultaneously anticipating threats, managing risk, and preparing for scrutiny that few outside the room fully understood.
Since then, my role, as a CMO and executive, has often placed me in a different kind of incident response. Crisis communications. Customer notifications. Legal reviews. Board briefings. Earnings calls shaped by disruptions caused by misconfigurations or outages. The work doesn’t end when the system recovers. In many ways, that’s when it begins.
No matter where you sit—practitioner, architect, leader, or executive—if you work in cybersecurity long enough, you carry these moments with you. We all have our stories from the trenches.
Cyber Confessionals was born from those moments. A place to give voice to what actually happened, and to honor the people who lived it.
Stories from the Front Lines of Firewall and Network Security
This isn’t about polished wins or sanitized reports. Here are a few examples of these unvarnished truths:
- A misconfigured firewall that grounds planes without warning
- Policies that spiral into chaos because no one saw the hidden dependency
- Moments when visibility saves the day, or when the lack of it leaves everything in the dark
Some of these stories are heavy and many are unsettling. That’s intentional. Because the work itself is full of unknowns, and pretending it isn’t only makes the next incident more likely.
You’ll notice that FireMon doesn’t take center stage in these stories. That’s by design. Our role here isn’t to explain or correct. It’s to listen, to make room, and to acknowledge the reality of the work security professionals do every day.
Why This Matters and Why We’re Doing It This Way
As a marketer in cybersecurity, I’ve learned something the hard way: the stories that matter most are rarely the ones we’re trained to tell. They don’t fit neatly into campaigns or product launches. They don’t end with a feature list or a demo request. And they certainly don’t lend themselves to marketing polish.
But they are the stories that make us better.
Cyber Confessionals is my way of embracing that truth. Of making space for the real experiences of practitioners—their decisions, their tradeoffs, their mistakes, and their resilience. Not because they make for good marketing, but because they reflect the reality of the work. And understanding that reality—across roles, perspectives, and moments of pressure—is what ultimately strengthens the entire community.
Too much of cybersecurity marketing today is built on abstraction. On promises of simplicity in a world that isn’t simple. On narratives that center tools, platforms, or founders, while quietly ignoring the people on the front lines who carry the weight when things go wrong. That kind of marketing may generate attention, but it rarely builds trust.
This is different by design.
Cyber Confessionals isn’t about the tech. It’s not about FireMon features or industry buzzwords. It’s about listening. About respecting the lived experience of security professionals. About recognizing that progress in this industry doesn’t come from pretending the work is easy, it comes from acknowledging how hard it really is.
As a marketer, I’m proud of that choice. As a leader, I’m committed to it.
This is my commitment to FireMon, to our customers and firewall practioners: to show up with honesty, humility, and respect for the people doing the work. And this is my commitment to cybersecurity: to elevate real stories, from real practitioners, because those stories—more than any campaign—are what move this industry forward.
Listen to Episode 1 and Subscribe
The first confession, “Visibility Zero,” tells the story of a misconfigured firewall that grounded 1,000 planes. You won’t believe what unfolded behind the scenes. Listen to Episode 1 now.
More confessions are coming as we have over 25 stories that will be shared over the coming months, revealing the hidden stakes, the human cost, and the decisions that haunt practitioners long after the systems recover.
Subscribe to Cyber Confessionals and be part of something that is meaningful. And stay tuned as we will make it easy to share your own stories—anonymously.