Something that a lot of cybersecurity professionals will agree on is that breaches often serve as expensive wake up calls. Only after being burned do a lot of companies open their wallets for security. But by then, of course, the damage is already done, customer trust is broken, regulators are circling, and recovery costs are piling up.

It’s practically a cliché at this point:

Company X ignores security, gets hacked, and then suddenly security becomes priority #1. This reactive pattern isn’t just anecdotal, it shows up in post breach behavior and budgets. But waiting until you’re a victim is a terrible strategy. It’s like closing the barn doors after the horse has already bolted: too late to stop the damage, and preventable.

Reactive Security - A Pattern

This whole reactive mindset isn’t a new one.

Historically, companies have treated security as a cost center to be minimized, until they’re hit with a high profile incident.

Perhaps one of the most famous examples is Sony.

Jason Spaltro, a Sony executive, once said, “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss,” effectively calling it a valid business decision to accept the risk of a breach. Sony’s leadership knew their security was subpar but figured paying for cleanup would be cheaper than paying for prevention. But the problem here is that we now know how that turned out.

Sony suffered multiple breaches (from the 2011 PlayStation Network hack to the 2014 Sony Pictures breach) that far exceeded $1M in damages. That earlier attitude was shortsighted; the immediate costs, like customer notification, are only a small part of the fallout. The real hit comes from brand damage, legal penalties, and long-term erosion of trust. Sony learned the hard way that proactive security is an investment, and not an expense. Unfortunately, a lot of other companies learn this the hard way as well.

Why Do Companies Stay Reactive?

If proactive security saves money and headaches, why are organizations often reactive? It generally boils down to a few primary reasons:

• Perceived Expense. To non security executives, cybersecurity looks like a big cost with no immediate ROI. What they miss is that breaches typically cost far more than the narrow notification costs, including fines and business loss, making prevention the smarter financial move in the long run.

• Compliance Theater. Some companies tick the boxes for basic compliance and assume they’re secure enough. They might pass audits while still leaving glaring holes in their attack surface. The historical pattern has been a do-the-minimum approach, until an incident forces them to confront reality.

• “It Won’t Happen to Us”. Optimism bias leads leaders to think their company won’t be targeted, or that they’re too small to attract cybercriminals. However, in reality, automated attacks today indiscriminately target any vulnerability. No one is below the radar.

• Lack of visible payoff. When security works, nothing bad happens, which perversely makes executives question the spend. It’s the absence of events. This can lead to complacency: if breaches haven’t happened recently, they assume controls are fine or threats are exaggerated.

Attackers and Low Hanging Fruit

Something else to factor in is that a lot of breaches are successful without the use of sophisticated methodology. On dark web forums and cybercrime networks, you’ll find cybercriminals trading databases of leaked passwords, canned exploits for old vulnerabilities, and RDP access to servers with weak credentials. It’s not rocket science; they use whatever door is left open.

Consider the 23andMe breach in 2023, which exposed data of ~7 million users. It wasn’t a genius hack. Attackers simply used login credentials stolen from other breaches (because many people reuse passwords) to break into 23andMe accounts.

No malware, no zero day, just reused passwords and lack of MFA.

The irony here is that organizations fear proactive security is a massive expense, yet the actual breach attack vectors are often things that are affordable to fix. As the saying goes, amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people, but both usually exploit the simplest vulnerabilities available.

5 Low Cost Security Measures That Work

The good news is that you don’t need to have an enormous security budget to stop most attacks. Sticking to the basics can make a big difference.

Here are five examples of what we’re talking about:

1. Attack Surface Management

ASM is the practice of identifying and monitoring all your organization’s IT assets, domains, IPs, cloud instances, software, etc., and closing any unintended openings. Attack surface management helps you spot unknown assets, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities before attackers do. A lot of breaches happen because a company simply didn’t realize a database was left open or an old server was still running. Good ASM tools (some are open source or low cost) can map your assets and alert you to new exposures, so you can fix them proactively. This reduces the places an attacker can get in.

2. Timely Patch Management

Keeping software up-to-date isn’t fun, but it’s incredibly important. When security professionals patch your stuff, it’s because unpatched known vulnerabilities remain one of the easiest ways cybercriminals get in. For example, the Citrix Bleed flaw was publicly disclosed and rated 9.4 severity, yet a month later thousands of Citrix servers remained unpatched, leading to widespread ransomware attacks. Don’t let that be you. Implement a patch management routine. Scan for known vulnerabilities and promptly apply updates.

3. Enable 2FA/MFA Everywhere

Stolen or weak passwords are the cause of an absurd number of breaches. Passwords leak all the time, and tools for credential stuffing are trivial to run. The solution is simple: multi-factor authentication on all accounts and systems. MFA forces an extra verification (like a code or key) beyond just the password. It’s hard to overstate how effective this is. It’s one of the cheapest, simplest ways to shut down the credential theft -> breach pipeline. Yes, there’s a bit of user friction, but app based authenticators or hardware keys are pretty user friendly. The 23andMe breach mentioned earlier? Wouldn’t have worked if those accounts had required a second factor.

4. Leaked Credential Monitoring

Given the deluge of data breaches out there, chances are some of your employees’ (or customers’) usernames/passwords are floating around on the dark web right now. A credential leak monitoring tool keeps an eye on these dumping grounds and alerts you if your organization’s emails or accounts show up in credential dumps. There are free services (like Have I Been Pwned for basic email checks) and affordable commercial services that do monitoring. This lets you react quickly. e.g. force password resets or lock accounts the moment you learn they’ve been compromised.

5. Bug Bounty Program Creation

You don’t need a huge internal security team to find vulnerabilities, you can crowdsource it. A bug bounty program invites independent security researchers (ethical hackers) to test your applications and report bugs in exchange for a reward (bounty). Even a modest bounty program can uncover issues that traditional assessments miss. The beauty is you pay only for results. If no one finds anything, you pay nothing; if they do, you get the vulnerability details to fix. This makes it very cost effective. Plus, it demonstrates a commitment to security and encourages researchers to report problems to you (instead of selling them on the black market).

Agentic AI - Automating Proactive Security

One final reason companies shy away from proactive security is the perceived effort and manpower required to implement it effectively.

This is where agentic AI can actually help quite a lot.

Agentic AI refers to AI systems or agents that can autonomously perform tasks, learn, and adapt, essentially functioning as intelligent co-workers for your team. With the ability to automate labor-intensive security tasks, agentic AI can help improve how vulnerabilities are identified, systems are monitored, and security incidents are managed.

Imagine an AI agent capable of scanning your entire attack surface, monitoring the dark web for stolen data, applying security patches, and even initiating incident response protocols, all without human intervention. These AI agents can analyze vast amounts of data, make informed decisions, and act autonomously to enforce security policies.

To give you an example, let’s revisit the fourth point in the section above.

Suppose you want to create a workflow where agentic AI queries databases like DeHashed, Have I Been Pwned, and LeakBase to search for leaked credentials across massive datasets. With an agentic platform like Kindo, you could easily set up this workflow by writing instructions in plain English. From there on out, you would have a repeatable workflow that can be run on demand.

Traditionally, this would require a security engineer to dig through API documentation, implement API calls, and stitch together various scripts. With agentic AI, this process becomes simple and efficient, eliminating the need for time consuming manual efforts. This shift is an obvious game changer for cybersecurity.

Agentic AI challenges the old excuse of "we can't afford proactive security" by providing autonomous, AI driven solutions that empower even small teams to identify vulnerabilities and respond to threats quickly. It’s about working smarter, not harder, by leveraging AI to handle the heavy lifting of scale and speed, ensuring your organization doesn’t fall into the reactive security trap.

If you want to try this out for yourself, sign up for a free trial here.

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