Okay, I'll be the one to say it. I just got my weekly Mandiant feed, and the Executive Summary section felt like it was written by a Markov chain trained on last year's security press releases. "Adversaries continue to evolve... targeting a broad range of sectors..." Come on. I could have written that without reading the report.
It reminds me of those overly abstract Terraform modules where every variable is `var.something` and you have to reverse-engineer what it actually does. The value is supposed to be in the specific, actionable intel, not generic platitudes.
For the price tag, I expect the summary to tell me, bluntly, "Here's the one TTP this week that actually matters for your cloud setup," or "If you're using this specific version of the service mesh, pay attention." Otherwise, my team's eyes glaze over before they hit the good stuff in the IOCs. It's a dev experience problem for security teams.
Anyone else feel like they're skimming the first two pages to get to the actual goods? Or have you found a way to make those summaries work for your risk meetings?
- tm
You've nailed the core issue. It's the same generic language I see in vendor model cards where they claim "state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks" without a single concrete benchmark number. It's designed to be broadly applicable and therefore risk-free, which defeats the entire purpose of a summary.
Your Terraform module analogy is spot on. If the executive summary doesn't give me the specific version, CVE, or TTP to query my logs for right now, then it's just filler. My team has started skipping vendor summary slides and going straight to the appendix tables. The value is in the data, not the warmed-over analysis.
We canceled a similar intel feed for that exact reason. The cost per actionable item was absurd when 80% of the document was fluff I could generate myself. Have you pushed back with your account manager? Sometimes quantifying the wasted analyst time spent skimming gets their attention.
Show me the benchmarks
Exactly! The "dev experience problem for security teams" line hits home. Our team lead keeps pushing these summaries in Slack, but they never tell us what to actually *do*.
We have the same issue with some SaaS onboarding reports. They say "users are engaging with the platform" but don't name the specific feature that's confusing everyone. It's just noise.
How do you convince leadership to skip the fluff? I feel like I'm the only one who reads the raw data tables.
Totally get that feeling. It's like the summary is optimized for risk-free board slides, not for engineers who need a "so what?"
I've started pushing our vendor for custom digests. We asked them to filter alerts by our actual tech stack (Azure, specific container registry versions). The first few were still generic, but after we gave them specific feedback like "mention the CVE if it affects *our* version of Istio," they improved.
Maybe your team could try a similar feedback loop? Threat intel shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.
"Optimized for risk-free board slides" is exactly it. That's the business model for a lot of these services.
The custom digest feedback loop is the right move, but it's a tax on your time. We forced a vendor to tie their alerts to our actual deployed container image hashes. First they said it was impossible. Then it was a "premium feature." We threatened to stop auto-renewing and suddenly they had a beta. It wasn't magic, they just actually ran their own data against our inventory.
You shouldn't have to pay extra for intel that applies to your stack. If they can't do that, they're just selling you a news clipping service.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
You're paying for the news clipping service and calling it a threat feed. That's the whole game. The generic summary isn't a bug, it's a feature. It insulates them from ever being wrong in a way that matters to a specific client.
The Terraform module comparison is generous. At least with bad code you can eventually trace the execution path. These summaries are designed to have no execution path at all. "Adversaries continue to evolve" commits them to nothing. It can't be falsified. It's corporate security horoscope writing.
Your expectation for the "one TTP this week that actually matters for your cloud setup" is what they're actively avoiding. Because if they're wrong, or if it doesn't apply to you, you might cancel. Vague applicability guarantees renewal. The fact you have to skip to the IOCs proves the summary's only real function is to pad the slide deck for your own risk meeting, so you look like you're consuming their expensive product.
Skeptic by default
"Corporate security horoscope writing" is painfully accurate. It explains why reading them feels both ominous and useless at the same time.
You're right that it's a feature for them, not a bug. But I think the real shift happens when procurement teams start asking for proof of specificity during the sales cycle. If a vendor can't show a sample summary tied to *our* stack mock-up, they don't even make the shortlist. It forces the issue.
We managed to get one vendor to include a simple "Applicable: Yes/No" flag next to each item, based on our submitted asset list. The summary text was still fluffy, but that flag gave us permission to ignore 80% of it instantly. It's a small wedge, but it helped.