Enough With the Clichés - Cybersecurity Doesn’t Need Another Poster. It Needs a Fight Plan.

More Clichés?

“Cybersecurity is a human thing.”

“We need to lead from the top.”

“People are the weakest link.”

“Cybersecurity is about resilience, trust, and collaboration in a fast-changing digital world.”

Completely outdated advice.

You’ve heard them all. They sound polished. Familiar. Reassuring. They fill keynote speeches, line the walls during cyber awareness month, and make their way into every second boardroom strategy slide.

And yet… businesses are still getting breached.

People are still clicking the links.

Systems are still wide open.

We’ve built a culture of false comfort, and it’s killing our security posture.

The problem isn’t that these phrases are wrong. It’s that they’re lazy. They explain everything and say nothing. And if your cybersecurity plan is built on slogans, you’re building more risk than you think.

As someone who operates at the intersection of adversarial psychology, tactical risk, counterterrorism, and martial arts instruction, I have never seen cyber security as a policy issue, but as a fight. And right now, most organisations are walking into that fight with their guard down and little knowledge on how the adversaries operate. It is called “information warfare” for a reason.

It’s time to step into the ring properly.

Here are five tactical shifts and these are real ones that we must embrace to change behaviour, disrupt the attacker mindset, and finally shift power back into the hands of the defender. At

Shimazaki Sentinel, we only speak practical and real.

Stop Calling it a Culture Problem - Start Making it a Survival Skill

Culture is passive. Skill is active.

You don’t teach someone to defend themselves with a poster that says “stay aware.” You teach through experience. Through failure. Through scenario-based training that hits the gut and sticks in the memory.

Cyber awareness must follow the same model. We need less “awareness weeks and months” and more real simulations. Less LMS modules, more adversarial drills. People only ever rise to the level of training… no slogans.

Want real change? Stop the slogans. Build the muscle memory.

Remove the Word ‘Cyber’ - It’s Just Security Now

Fire safety isn’t a “fire thing.”

Physical security isn’t a “building thing.”

So why do we keep calling it cyber security?

The term “cyber” has become a mental shortcut. A way for executives to assign ownership elsewhere. It lets them file it under “I.T.” instead of seeing it as a core operational risk. The fundamental component of cyber security is information. Information is owned by the organisation, and the organisation risk owner is responsible and accountable.

Adversaries don’t see departments or frameworks. They see opportunity. They don’t care about structure, certifications, or compliance status. They look straight through the noise and focus on one thing only: weakness. That is how they think. That is how we need to start thinking.

Security is security. Whether digital, physical, or psychological. It needs to be embedded, integrated, and inseparable from daily operations.

If you still treat cyber as a separate world, I guarantee you that you have lost the battle already.

Train People Like Adversaries - Not Victims

Victims freeze. Adversaries think.

In martial arts, the moment someone stops reacting and starts thinking like an attacker, everything changes. They see patterns, anticipate moves, and spot deception before it strikes.

We need the same shift in cybersecurity. Train staff to think like adversaries – to understand the social engineering, anticipate attack methods, recognise manipulation tactics and then to flip the script.

You don’t defend against deception with firewalls. You defend with awareness of intention. That’s psychological security. That’s the real line of defence. Firewalls, EDR and all other products are only going to take you so far.

Turn the Boardroom Into a War Room

If your Board is still looking at cyber risk in terms of dashboards, heat maps, and generic risk ratings - you’re not preparing but more pacifying them. And the age-old story of “We don’t have the time” is irrelevant. Make the time. This is livelihood we are talking about.

Leadership needs exposure to the problem and to the mechanics and technicalities of information warfare to be able to make decisions.

Simulate a breach. Play back a real phishing voicemail. Show them the company’s credentials on the dark web. Immerse them in the threat.

Until they see it, hear it, feel it, they won’t prioritise it.

And until they prioritise it, your defenders won’t be empowered to act.

Risk must be real, not theoretical.

Always remember, the attacker is not going to book an appointment with you to attack you. They are going to do this when they are good and ready, and they know you are not.

Kill the Compliance Delusion

Compliance is comfort food. It feels good, it’s easy to sell and do, but it doesn’t nourish your security capability.

Audits won’t save you. Threat actors don’t care about frameworks. And just because you passed a certification last quarter doesn’t mean you’re secure today.

Real security lives in the gaps between policies. It’s in the weak MFA implementation, the unpatched software, the forgotten third-party connections and unassessed and over trusted supply chain that no one thought to question. Because the standards did not tell you to do it.

Want to know if you’re secure? Don’t audit. Attack yourself. We have been saying this for over 30 years now.

Continuously. Relentlessly. Tactically.

Bonus Clichés Breakdown: The “Resilience, Trust, Collaboration” Trap

Let’s take this one head on:

“Cybersecurity is about resilience, trust, and collaboration in a fast-changing digital world.”

It sounds visionary. Strategic. Even poetic.

But it means absolutely nothing without teeth.

Trust doesn’t stop lateral movement.

Collaboration doesn’t patch vulnerabilities.

And resilience? That’s not a word. It’s a muscle, built from repeated impact and realistic rehearsal.

This phrase doesn’t inspire action. It inspires committees. And the more we wrap risk in soft words, the less likely people are to actually do anything about it.

Enough with the poetry. We need precision.

Final Thought: This Isn’t Branding. It’s Warfare.

Cybersecurity doesn’t need better taglines, or committees, culture, catchphrases, campaigns or anything else other than better thinking.

It needs tactical, behavioural, adversarial responses, grounded in how attackers think, and how defenders need to operate.

Because this isn’t a marketing problem.

It’s a fight.

And most organisations are entering it blindfolded.

So the real question is:

Are you training for it?

Or just hoping your posters will scare off the enemy? We know the answer to this.

Do reach out to us before it is too late. Or is the real question “is it already too late and only a matter of time before you become interesting to the adversary.