Cybersecurity Debt Is Compounding Faster Than Budgets Can Shrink

Cybercrime is accelerating, with global costs projected to hit $13.82 trillion annually by 2028. At the same time, the U.S. is scaling back its defenses. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) cut roughly 1,000 employees, nearly a third of its staff, alongside a $135 million budget reduction. Private companies are making similar moves, freezing hiring and consolidating teams. In the past year alone, the U.S. cyber workforce shrank by nearly 5%, from about 367,000 to 349,000 professionals.

This contraction comes as attackers move faster, exploit AI, and target the same weaknesses that already account for most breaches: misconfigured, unenforced, or drifting controls. The message is clear. Budgets may shrink, but exposures don’t. The only way forward is operational discipline, making every control count, closing gaps continuously, and proving that existing defenses work.

Security Debt Compounds When Controls Go Unchecked

Most of us know from experience that breaches rarely happen because we couldn’t “see” the problem. They happened because the controls we trusted weren’t working. Maybe an endpoint agent wasn’t deployed everywhere, maybe MFA was rolled out but never enforced, or perhaps a firewall rule drifted quietly away from policy. Those minor lapses add up, and attackers quickly find them. Research supports this: 61% of breaches stem from misconfigured or unenforced controls, not from missing patches.

That’s the reality behind today’s budget cuts. When teams shrink, the first things to go are the quiet, often manual, but essential tasks: validating configurations, confirming enforcement, and checking for drift across environments. These aren’t headline-grabbing projects, but they’re what prevent routine gaps from turning into open doors. Without them, organizations accumulate security debt fast.

And security debt doesn’t sit idle. It compounds. Every skipped check, every unplugged gap, every control left untested, every exception that goes unreviewed becomes another opportunity for an attacker to slip through. When resources tighten, the margin for error narrows, and the risk of a preventable breach increase.

Four Steps to Scaling Your Existing Security Strategy

The challenge now is turning that reality into action. Budget cuts and headcount reductions can’t be an excuse for widening exposure. Security leaders need to double down on the fundamentals that reduce risk. Here are the four shifts that matter most.

Optimize the Value of Your Current Security Stack

Before you spend time on another platform, take a hard look at the ones you already own. Map each tool to the threats that matter most to your business: ransomware, credential theft, supply chain compromise, and ask whether those tools are closing the right gaps. Too often, endpoint agents are licensed but not deployed across all devices. MFA is in place but not enforced consistently. Firewall rules look solid on paper, but drift out of policy over time. Those are the weak points attackers exploit.

Every tool in your stack should earn its keep. If it doesn’t actively reduce exposure or make your team faster at doing so, it’s overhead. That’s where automation and integration can help by automating basic configuration checks, validating that controls are enforced, and surfacing drift before it becomes a headline. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is one way to structure this discipline, providing a real-time view of where defenses are working and where they’re failing.

Shift from Reactive Fixes to Proactive Defense

Busy doesn’t equal secure. Chasing alerts, rushing to patch every CVE, or measuring success by tickets closed keeps teams occupied but doesn’t stop breaches. Attackers don’t care how many items you check off; they care whether your defenses hold up against the tactics they’re already using.

The better approach is to make those tactics the starting point. Use frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to map common attack paths: credential theft, lateral movement, and remote access exploitation against your environment. Don’t stop at paper exercises. Run red-team tests or tabletop drills to validate whether the controls you have in place would block those moves. Where they fail, fix those gaps first.

This shift also means rethinking priorities. A critical CVE that takes ten steps to exploit shouldn’t leapfrog an unenforced MFA policy that an attacker could bypass in seconds. Consider Cisco’s critical infrastructure flaw, which was actively exploited for seven years before the FBI even detected it. When resources are limited, the fixes that reduce exposure to real-world attack techniques should come first.

The goal isn’t to predict the next zero-day. It’s to close the exposures adversaries are already exploiting before they reach you.

Simplify Workflows to Strengthen Teams

Leaders need to remove friction from daily operations. Start by mapping the end-to-end workflow of a single incident, from detection to remediation, and identify every duplicate step, tool handoff, or manual task along the way. Then, cut what doesn’t add value. Consolidate overlapping alerts, retire unused dashboards, and standardize playbooks so critical steps aren’t locked in one person’s head.

Automation can shoulder much of the repetitive load: validating control configurations, triggering repeat alerts, and routing fixes to the right owner. What matters is that your limited team energy is spent on exposures that move the needle, not busy work.

Use AI as a Forcing Function to Tighten Defenses

The industry has seen this before. When automation first emerged, low-skilled “script kiddies” could suddenly launch attacks that had previously required expertise. AI is the next wave, except this time, the speed and scale are far greater. Simple gaps such as unenforced MFA, missing EDR coverage, or over-permissioned accounts are now being exploited more quickly and affecting more victims than ever before.

Leaders should treat AI not as a reason to panic, but as a stress test. If your defenses can’t withstand a basic phishing campaign or a misconfigured remote access tool today, they won’t survive when those same attacks are automated and scaled by AI. The answer isn’t another tool. It’s systematically tightening what you already own: validating MFA enforcement, confirming endpoint coverage, and continuously checking for drift.

Staying Ahead, Even with Less

Security teams today face a harsh reality: budgets are shrinking, headcounts are down, and cyber threats are growing more sophisticated by the day.

To avoid falling further behind and putting their organizations at greater risk, security leaders must unlock the full value of existing tools, streamline fragmented workflows, and shift success metrics toward risk reduction and threat prevention. The only path forward is to optimize what you already have, operationalize it effectively, and adopt a proactive, threat-informed approach.

The fastest path to stronger security isn’t expanding the stack; it’s extracting the full value from what you already have.