The recent call for a "joint defense" among companies with Mythos access is a desperate plea for mediocrity disguised as civic duty. It sounds noble on paper. It looks great in a press release. It is fundamentally broken. When industry leaders urge for a shared wall, they aren't building a fortress; they are building a single point of failure that will hand our adversaries the keys to the kingdom.
The argument is that by pooling resources and data, we can create a collective shield against infrastructure attacks. This is the "lazy consensus" of the modern security age. It assumes that if we all hold hands in the dark, the monster won't bite. I have spent two decades watching companies burn millions on these collaborative fantasies, only to realize that a herd of sheep is just a bigger target for a wolf.
The Myth of Collective Immunity
The fundamental flaw in joint defense is the assumption that security is additive. It isn't. In a networked environment, security is reductive. You are only as strong as the most incompetent participant in your "defense pact." By tethering your infrastructure to a competitor's via shared protocols or real-time data feeds, you are voluntarily importing their vulnerabilities into your stack.
Imagine a scenario where five major utilities share a proprietary threat-detection layer. An attacker doesn't need to breach all five. They need to find the one intern at the smallest firm who forgot to rotate a credential. Once they are inside the "joint" system, the lateral movement isn't just easy—it’s sanctioned by the architecture itself.
Shared defense creates a monoculture. In biology, monocultures are wiped out by a single virus. In cybersecurity, they are wiped out by a single exploit. Diversity in defense—isolated, idiosyncratic, and even chaotic systems—is what actually provides national resilience. When every company defends itself differently, an attacker has to solve a new puzzle for every target. When we "standardize," we do the attacker's homework for them.
The Mythos Access Fallacy
The specific clamor around Mythos access is particularly galling. Mythos was designed for high-performance, low-latency infrastructure management. It was never intended to be a communal campfire. Those urging for joint defense are often the ones whose internal security budgets are lagging. They want to socialise the cost of their own technical debt.
They talk about "threat intelligence sharing" as if it’s a magic elixir. Let’s be honest: by the time a threat is "shared" across a consortium, it’s already stale. The shelf life of a zero-day exploit is measured in minutes, not the weeks it takes for a steering committee to approve a data-sharing memorandum. Real security happens at the edge, in the moment, through aggressive, proprietary automation—not through a neighborhood watch meeting.
The High Cost of Transparency
True security requires a level of secrecy that joint defense programs inherently destroy. When you join a coalition, you have to reveal your architecture. You have to disclose your patch cycles. You have to show your hand.
I’ve seen boardrooms get starry-eyed over the idea of "industry-wide visibility." What they forget is that "visibility" is a two-way street. Every time you increase the number of eyes on a system, you statistically increase the probability of an insider threat or a social engineering breach. You aren't just sharing data with "the good guys." You are creating a massive, centralized repository of metadata that is the ultimate prize for state-sponsored actors.
If I were an operative for a foreign intelligence agency, my first move wouldn't be to attack a single power plant. It would be to join the "Joint Defense Task Force." I would sit in the meetings, download the shared schemas, and wait for the "defenders" to tell me exactly where the connections are most brittle.
The Better Way: Competitive Hardening
Instead of joint defense, we need competitive hardening.
We should be incentivizing companies to out-secure one another. Security shouldn't be a shared utility; it should be a competitive advantage. If Company A has better uptime and better intrusion detection than Company B because they invested more in their proprietary stack, Company A wins. That is how the market solves for resilience.
When you remove the competitive pressure by subsidizing the laggards through "joint" initiatives, you lower the bar for everyone. You create a "race to the middle" where "good enough" becomes the standard because no one wants to be the outlier.
Actionable Brutality: What to Do Instead
If you are a CEO or a CISO being pressured to join a joint defense initiative, here is what you actually do:
- Air-gap your logic. Your defense strategy should be a black box to everyone outside your organization—including your "partners."
- Invest in Offensive Security. Stop buying "shields" and start hiring people to break your own stuff. If you aren't constantly attacking your own infrastructure, someone else is.
- Assume the Breach. The joint defense crowd thinks they can keep the bad guys out. They can't. Build your systems on the assumption that the network is already compromised. Zero-trust isn't a product you buy; it's a philosophy you bake into every line of code.
- Kill the Monoculture. If your industry is all using the same three vendors for security, change yours. Be the weird one. Be the one with the architecture that doesn't make sense to an outsider.
The Truth Nobody Admits
The push for joint defense is often driven by government entities that want a single throat to choke. It’s easier for a regulator to talk to one consortium than to five hundred individual companies. They trade actual security for "manageability."
Don't fall for it.
The moment we align our defenses is the moment we become a stationary target. Real strength lies in fragmentation. The "infrastructure" isn't a single entity that needs a group hug. It is a sprawling, disconnected web that survives precisely because it is difficult to map.
Stop trying to build a collective shield. Build a better sword. Build a thicker skin. And for heaven's sake, keep your data to yourself.
The next major blackout won't be caused by a lack of cooperation. It will be caused by a "joint" system that worked exactly as it was designed—allowing a single failure to cascade through every "protected" member of the pact.
Security is a lonely game. If you aren't playing it that way, you've already lost.
