CISO Discovers Entire Security Data Lake Can Be Summarized with Three Checkboxes

In a breakthrough poised to redefine enterprise security, a Fortune 500 CISO has uncovered that their 2.3 petabyte “cyber threat intelligence lake” is actually just a glorified SQL table filterable by three fields: “Internet-facing,” “Is Critical,” and “Contains PII.”

“We thought we were building the Google of cyber risk,” said the CISO, while disabling 47 dashboards he hadn’t opened since 2021. “Turns out we just needed a pivot table.”

The revelation came during a quarterly board meeting when an intern, accidentally clicking the wrong tab, generated a list of vulnerabilities by applying the three filters.

“Suddenly, the room went silent,” recalled one witness. “Years of machine learning, graph-based enrichment, and context-aware behavioral scoring… reduced to: ‘is it exposed,’ ‘is it important,’ and ‘do we go to jail if it leaks.’”

Industry analysts hailed the finding as “a triumph of reductionism,” noting that while the method ignores nuance, business context, and exploitability, it does produce the comforting illusion that cybersecurity is finally solvable with a spreadsheet.

The CISO has since retired to a monastery to meditate on which came first: the data lake, or the illusion of control.