New AI Vendor Successfully Manages to Sell Real Snake Oil to CISO

PALO ALTO - In what industry observers are calling "the most honest vendor interaction in cybersecurity history," startup SecureSnake AI has successfully sold actual snake oil to a Fortune 500 CISO for $3 million, proving that enterprise sales have finally come full circle.

The product, marketed as "AI-Enhanced Threat Intelligence Serum," is literally snake oil; specifically, oil extracted from pythons and packaged in sleek black bottles with LED lights and QR codes that link to white papers about "molecular-level security paradigms."

"This is revolutionary," declared CISO Marcus Thompson while applying the oil to his company's firewall, as instructed by the vendor. "Traditional security solutions just don't have the organic, synergistic properties of bio-enhanced AI security serum." The deal was reportedly closed during a dinner meeting where SecureSnake AI's founder, Chad Brickman, explained that their product works by "harmonizing your infrastructure's natural threat resistance frequencies with AI-optimized serpent-derived molecular chains."

"I was skeptical at first," Thompson admitted while rubbing snake oil on a server rack. "But then Chad showed me a demo where he put some oil on a laptop and the laptop didn't get hacked during the demo. That's a 100% success rate."

The product includes three tiers: Bronze Snake Oil ($50,000/month) made from garden snakes, Silver Snake Oil ($150,000/month) from pythons, and Platinum Enterprise Snake Oil ($300,000/month) which SecureSnake AI claims is extracted from "AI-trained cybersecurity snakes" that have completed machine learning courses. According to the 400-page technical documentation (which costs an additional $100,000), users are instructed to apply the oil directly to network equipment, data centers, and employee keyboards to create an "invisible quantum-resistant security membrane that AI-powered threats cannot penetrate."

"The science is sound," insisted Brickman, who has a bachelor's degree in marketing and no technical background whatsoever. "Snakes are natural predators. Cyber threats are digital. When you combine snake essence with AI, you get digital predator protection. It's basic math."

Thompson's security team reportedly staged multiple interventions, with one senior analyst literally bringing print-outs of the Wikipedia entry for "snake oil salesman" to a meeting, only to be told by Thompson that they "weren't thinking innovatively enough." "He asked us to apply it to our firewalls," recalled security engineer Rebecca Martinez. "I said 'firewalls are software, they don't have physical surfaces.' He told me to apply it to the servers running the firewalls. I asked how oil on a server would stop SQL injection attacks. He told me I was being negative."

The purchase was approved after Brickman presented benchmarks showing that companies using SecureSnake AI experienced "zero successful cyber attacks during the demo period" - a demo period that lasted 45 minutes and consisted of no actual attack attempts. Several board members questioned the purchase, but Thompson successfully defended it by explaining that "if we don't embrace bio-AI security solutions now, we'll be left behind" and pointing out that the product has "AI" in the name, which satisfied all further concerns.

The deal includes 24/7 support, which consists of SecureSnake AI's customer success team sending monthly emails reminding customers to "reapply the serum" and offering to sell additional bottles at a 20% "renewal discount." "We've had zero breaches since implementing SecureSnake AI," Thompson noted, ignoring the fact that his company also had zero breaches in the three years before implementing snake oil.

"The ROI is clear." SecureSnake AI has since closed deals with twelve other Fortune 500 companies and raised a $50 million Series A funding round led by a venture capital firm that admitted they "couldn't explain how it works, but the sales numbers look good." The company plans to expand their product line with "AI-Enhanced Threat Intelligence Cream" (snake oil mixed with hand lotion), "Quantum-Resistant Security Soap" (snake oil mixed with soap), and "Zero-Trust Architecture Cologne" (just really expensive snake oil).

"People say we're just selling snake oil," Brickman said during a keynote at RSA Conference, where his booth featured live snakes and a fog machine. "And to that I say: exactly. That's literally our product. And business is great." At press time, Thompson was defending the purchase to his CFO by explaining that SecureSnake AI had offered him a seat on their advisory board, which comes with stock options and an additional 20 bottles of premium snake oil.