BLACK ARROWS

Technology Company: From Complex Tools to Strong Fundamentals

A growing technology company had accumulated multiple security monitoring tools over five years, each purchased to address audit findings or compliance requirements. The tools generated thousands of alerts daily. The security team spent all their time triaging alerts while basic vulnerabilities persisted because nobody had time for systematic patching. Alert fatigue had trained the team to ignore most warnings.

Our Security Posture Analysis revealed that monitoring tools provided minimal value because fundamental visibility gaps prevented effective investigation. The company lacked complete asset inventory, making threat detection nearly useless. Resources spent maintaining monitoring systems could fund the staff time needed to address root causes.

We helped them eliminate three redundant monitoring tools and redirect those resources toward establishing asset inventory, systematic patch management, and access control enforcement. Within six months, they reduced security incidents by 60 percent while decreasing their security tool spending by 40 percent. The security team shifted from reactive alert triage to proactive vulnerability management.

Financial Services Firm: Building AI Security from First Principles

A financial services firm deployed large language models to assist analysts with research and report generation. The models had broad access to internal documents and customer data. They ran with minimal logging and few restrictions on what tools they could invoke. The firm recognized their AI security posture needed assessment before expanding deployment.

After performing an AI Security Gap Assessment, we identified critical gaps in logging, access control, and segmentation. The models operated with implicit trust, excessive permissions, and insufficient monitoring. A prompt injection attack could extract sensitive information without detection. The firm lacked the fundamentals necessary to safely operate AI systems at scale.

We helped them establish strict identity and access controls for all AI components, implement immutable logging for every AI action, enforce input and output validation at every boundary, and create hard segmentation between AI systems and sensitive data. The firm gained confidence to expand AI deployment safely, with clear visibility into AI operations and rapid containment capabilities when anomalies occur.

Venture Capital Fund: Security Program for Portfolio Companies

A venture capital fund wanted to help portfolio companies establish strong security foundations early, avoiding the costly security debt that typically accumulates during rapid growth. They needed a framework their portfolio companies could implement without enterprise security budgets or dedicated security staff.

We designed a tailored foundational security program grounded in Security Brutalism principles, focused on essentials that startups could implement and maintain. The program established core capabilities like asset inventory, access controls, patch management, and incident response without the overhead of enterprise frameworks. We created practical documentation, implementation guides, and training materials the fund could provide to portfolio companies.

Portfolio companies were able to implement the program successfully within a two to three quarters, establishing security foundations that scaled with their growth. One of those portfolio companies cited their strong security posture as a factor in successful acquisitions, with the buyer recognizing they would not need to remediate years of security debt.