A huge blind spot may sit inside the decisions that generate your revenue. Growth targets, customer commitments, and operating pressures shape how your people grant access, approve exceptions, and respond to unusual requests. Attackers can exploit those choices. Your biggest cybersecurity blind spot is how you make money.
Look at what your company cannot afford to interrupt, and that is an area where an adversary is likely to apply pressure.
Your revenue engine tells a story. It reveals which customers command exceptions and/or expedient actions, which systems must run as a matter of urgency, and which deadlines override caution. An adversary who understands that story can identify opportunities that a vulnerability scan will never reveal.
Having held engineering, CISO, and CEO roles, I approach this problem from several directions. Growth matters. Customer commitments matter. Cash matters. So does understanding how those priorities influence behavior under pressure.
A security strategy that ignores how the company makes money leaves part of the adversary’s opportunity unexplored.
1. Your Growth Targets Can Reward Dangerous Shortcuts
Growth targets create exposure when employees gain more from completing a transaction than from questioning related risks and/or its legitimacy.
Consider a hypothetical sales team approaching quarter-end. A major prospect requests an urgent integration. The deal requires broad access, while the security review threatens the closing date.
Leadership approves an exception. The integration launches. Everyone celebrates the booking. Meanwhile, nobody owns the related risk, the accountability for security problems, or the deadline for addressing the risk that has been introduced.
That commercial decision has created an opportunity.
An attacker does not need to understand the business opportunity or revenue recognition. They only need to discover that urgency and revenue potential make your organization more accommodating.
Leaders should examine what happens after someone raises a concern. If that person loses recognition while the exception earns praise, the incentive speaks louder than the responsibility to protect the organization.
One interesting question to ask: which business targets and/or processes encourage employees to skip verifications, open up access, or leave exceptions unresolved?
2. Your Largest Customers Can Become Exceptions to Your Rules
Customer concentration creates security pressure when employees fear that enforcing a boundary could damage a critical relationship. And if a business depends heavily on one or a select few customers then this problem grows exponentially. A simple check of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) percentages can paint a very clear picture.
A valuable customer, that represents 51% of your ARR, requests a sensitive data export or an unusual support action. The timing coincides closely with a renewal deadline so there is real pressure. Your team recognizes the organization and the timing at hand, they in turn accelerate the fulfillment of the requests.
Familiarity with an account like this does not establish the legitimacy of every request.
An adversary could impersonate a customer contact or compromise that customer contact’s account. Knowledge of the relationship makes the request more convincing. Commercial pressure makes hesitation more expensive.
This is where identity intelligence and business context intersect. Your team needs to understand who requests the action, what authority they hold, and whether the request fits the relationship.
Organizations need to give employees a fast, independent verification route. Make sure executives on both sides support its use when a customer pushes back. After all, this is for the sake of mutual protection and this cannot be ignored considering the level of fraud that exists today.
One interesting question to ask: which customer names cause our people to stop challenging unusual requests?
3. Your Availability Promise Gives Attackers a Pressure Point
A business that depends on continuous service gives adversaries an opportunity to exploit the cost of interruption.
That pressure extends beyond a complete outage. An attacker could target a narrow function that blocks revenue or delivery. Think about something like order releases, customer authentication, production scheduling, or access to operational data.
The technical footprint may feel small. The business consequence may prove enormous.
Consequently, an asset inventory cannot tell the whole story. Security teams need to understand how disruption travels through the business. This is a systemic approach rather than one focused on a specific node.
Focusing on resilience, teams should aim to map the processes that must continue, their dependencies, and the alternatives that can actually keep a business operational. Then, those alternatives need to be pressure tested under realistic constraints. They may be the saving factor in the face of a negatively impacting event.
One interesting question to ask: which single interruption would place leadership under the greatest pressure to make a bad decision?
4. Your Efficiency Strategy Can Concentrate Failure
Efficiency creates concentrated exposure when several business functions depend on the same provider, integration, or privileged identity. This is similar to many disparate software elements all depending on one library.
Consolidation can simplify operations and improve security management. However, it also deserves a clear examination of shared dependencies.
Consider several departments that rely on one platform. Each department documents its own business continuity plan. Yet every plan assumes the same platform will remain available.
The organization has several plans and one single point of failure.
Shared service accounts and administrative integrations can create a similar problem. A compromise in one location may give an adversary influence across multiple workflows.
Teams need to evaluate the scope of access, the ability to isolate affected functions, and the practical cost of operating without some dependency. Treat those findings as inputs to future efficiency decisions.
One interesting question to ask: where have we reduced operating costs by concentrating authority or eliminating a workable alternative?
5. Your Customer Experience Can Weaken Identity Checks
Customer experience goals create exposure when teams remove verification steps without preserving reliable ways to establish identity and authority.
Account recovery makes this tension obvious. A legitimate customer wants immediate access (quite often with a loud voice). A support employee wants to resolve the problem quickly. An adversary wants the same outcome as the customer: control of the account.
If your workflow rewards speed above all else, the attacker can vibe hack (use frustration, create a sense of urgency, utilize personal details, etc) their way to pushing the interaction forward.
Accurate information about someone does not prove that the requester is that person. Likewise, successful authentication does not justify every subsequent action.
These days teams should aim to design additional verification around consequential actions, including recovery, privilege changes, and sensitive exports. Leadership needs to give support teams a clear escalation path that preserves service quality.
One interesting question to ask: can someone use our commitment to customer excellence to obtain access they could not otherwise gain?
6. Your Automation Can Simply Execute the Wrong Business Decision Faster
Automation amplifies exposure when systems act on manipulated inputs with more authority than the task requires.
Imagine a workflow that accepts a supplier change, updates a record, and initiates downstream actions. An attacker who influences the input may redirect the process without exploiting a software vulnerability.
An AI agent with delegated access adds another decision point. Leaders must understand what evidence the agent trusts and which actions it can initiate.
The business objective may sound harmless: resolve requests faster. The implementation may grant authority to change records, release information, or commit resources.
There needs to be a separation of low-impact assistance from consequential execution. Aim to limit authority, verify sensitive changes through independent channels, and preserve a practical way to stop the workflow.
One interesting question to ask: what could an adversary accomplish if our automation accepted a convincing but malicious request?
7. Your Culture Can Hide the Warnings Leadership Needs
A culture that penalizes delay or unwelcome news makes it harder for leadership to recognize exploitable conditions.
Employees learn which concerns leaders welcome. They also learn which concerns threaten a launch, embarrass an executive, or complicate a forecast. Moreover, they learn which actions threaten their livelihood.
Over time, people may soften their language, defer escalation, or handle exceptions quietly. Leadership then makes decisions with an incomplete picture.
An adversary benefits from that gap.
CEOs should examine how their own behavior shapes escalation. When someone challenges a commercially attractive decision, do you investigate the concern? Or do you demand a workaround before understanding the exposure?
Make someone accountable for each exception, including its scope, expiration, and corrective action. Reward employees who surface a problem early enough to address it. Also, reward employees who scrutinize situations to ensure nothing fraudulent is at hand.
One interesting question to ask: what do our people already know that our leadership team makes difficult to say?
Put the Business Model Inside Your Threat Model
Leaders can start addressing some of these risks by testing how an adversary could exploit the company’s most important commercial workflows.
Start with one process that generates revenue or delivers a critical service. Bring its business owner together with security and engineering.
Trace:
- Who requests an action?
- Who authorizes said action?
- What evidence does the authorizer trust?
- Which systems execute the action?
Based on those answers, identify where urgency changes the rules. Then test a plausible abuse scenario. Consider these questions:
- Could a convincing customer request trigger an unauthorized data export or action?
- Could a supplier impersonator redirect a workflow?
- Could one compromised identity interrupt multiple services?
Use the findings to change processes accordingly. The “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach is not applicable here. Assign an owner to be held accountable for scrutinization and adjustments, set a deadline, and test whether the change blocks the abuse. The “test” part is very relevant here as this should be done by a competent entity and with the same rules of engagement that nefarious actors follow … none.
This is how the adversarial mindset becomes a business discipline. It forces leadership to examine how someone could turn the organization’s priorities against it.
This does require that a CISO understand the revenue engine at hand. A CEO needs to understand the exposure that engine creates. Both need the authority to act on what they discover. The CEO usually has this but the CISO may not.
Your business model explains how you intend to win. Study it closely enough to understand how an adversary could use it against you because your biggest cybersecurity blind spot is how you make money.
