The stress on cyberdefense teams can be accurately described as a form of chronic occupational trauma stemming from several unique pressures. Compliance offices, increasingly tasked with responsibilities related to cybersecurity, may experience these symptoms as well. But there are ways to build a culture that combats these pressures.
The core issue is the asymmetrical, high-stakes, and relentless nature of the cybersecurity battlefield. This creates a profound and often overlooked paradox: While cybersecurity professionals are the guardians of our digital infrastructure, the very act of guarding it is eroding their own well-being.
About the Author
Dr. Timothy Miller is the Lead Compliance Officer for the consulting firm MorganFranklin, serving as the organization’s lead for industry standards and privacy compliance. His career spans over 30 years in information technology management and regulatory compliance.
This is not merely “work stress.” It is a systemic crisis rooted in the specific psychological mechanics of cyber warfare.
In a previous column titled “The Invisible Cost of Digital Defense,” I reviewed the complexities that world security teams face and the impacts these environments can cause. To build a resilient cyber defense team, CISOs must shift from a blame-heavy, hyper-vigilant culture to one that prioritizes sustainable vigilance and psychological safety.
By operationalizing recovery, quantifying the impacts of mental health, and modeling healthy boundaries, leadership can transform the impacts on the security teams. In this column, I will describe the “secret sauce” of the process for change.
When presenting this topic to a group of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), the focus must shift from describing the problem to actionable leadership takeaways that address the operational and cultural aspects of stress.
Key Takeaways for CISOs: Building Resilient Teams
The goal is to move from hyper-vigilance to sustainable vigilance. Shift from a blame culture to a learning culture.
| Area | Traditional (Problematic) Approach | Recommended (Actionable) Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
|
Post-Incident Review |
Focuses on who made the mistake (The “But For” Analysis). |
Implement Blameless Postmortems: Focus exclusively on why the process failed and how to harden controls. De-identify individual operators in the report to promote honest discussion. |
|
Team Performance |
Expect security to be an impenetrable wall ($100\%$ success). |
Acknowledge and Reward “Saves”: Publicly recognize when the team successfully defends against an attack or proactively patches a critical vulnerability. Security should not only be visible when it fails. |
|
Budgeting |
Treated as a “cost center” until a major breach. |
Quantify the ROI of Resilience: Frame mental health support (e.g., peer support programs, mandatory time-off) as a critical investment that reduces turnover and increases focus/accuracy during an incident. |
Operationalize recovery and mandatory rest, treating recovery time as a critical control. Add these controls to your policies and procedures for handling cyberattacks and other disruptions:
- Mandatory cooldown periods: Following a Severity 1 or Severity 2 incident that required over 48 hours of continuous work, mandate a minimum 3-day recovery period for all core incident responders. This is non-negotiable, and treated like vacation policy.
- Rotate Incident Response (IR) leadership: Avoid having the same key leaders (and yourself) on every major IR effort. Build a deeper bench and establish a clear “hand-off” protocol to distribute the psychological load and prevent single points of failure due to exhaustion.
- Stress as a metric: Integrate a simple, anonymous well-being check-in into your quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Use metrics like sick days, turnover rates, and voluntary peer-support participation as proxies for team stress levels.
Lead by example by establishing psychological safety. You set the tone for vulnerability and boundaries. Establish a culture of empathy for employees working under stressful conditions. Do so by:
- Modeling healthy boundaries: As CISO, consciously and publicly take your vacation time. When you are out, ensure your autoreply states a clear escalation path that does not lead back to your personal devices unless it is a global catastrophic event.
- Establish a “no-shaming” policy: Openly discuss stress and mental health in team meetings. The CISO should be the one to initiate the conversation: “This week was tough. We need to reset. Here is the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) contact for anyone who needs it.”
- Provide dedicated, specialized support: General EAPs often lack the context to deal with security-specific trauma. Partner with an EAP or consulting firm that has counselors experienced in crisis management, incident response, or first responder stress who understand concepts like threat actors and zero-day exploits.
Optimize the “on-call” experience. Stop treating on-call as a 24/7/365 prison sentence. Do so by:
- Compensating fairly: Ensure dedicated on-call time is compensated properly (financially or with compensatory time off). Stress is lower when people feel their sacrifice is recognized.
- Reduce “noise”: Implement stringent alert tuning and prioritization protocols to drastically reduce false positives. Every unnecessary late-night page is a deposit into the Burnout Bank.
- “Follow the sun” rotation: Where possible, leverage global teams or managed security services to move away from painful overnight shifts and utilize a “follow the sun” model for coverage, ensuring no single team is perpetually losing sleep.
To mitigate the mental health crisis in cyberdefense programs, organizations must shift their perspective from a blame-based, reactive model to a supportive, proactive one.
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