According to Dark Reading, there’s a global CISO hiring spree right now, with AI labs, crypto exchanges, and financial institutions all competing for the same small pool of security leaders. This is happening against a backdrop of record-breaking digital asset theft, with 2025 on track to be the worst year yet—over $2 billion has been stolen by midyear. A single $1.5 billion hack of the Bybit exchange, attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, dominates those losses. On the surface, this rush to hire looks like progress, but it hides a dangerous fork in the road. Most companies don’t realize they’re choosing between two fundamentally different types of security leaders, and picking the wrong one can lead to a security story that shatters at first contact with a real attacker.
The Engineer CISO: A Brittle Fortress
So, what’s the first type? It’s the engineer CISO. This is often the default pick—a leader who came up through IT, dev, or cloud engineering. Their whole worldview is about solving problems with code and architecture. Their instinct is to treat security as a static engineering puzzle: build strong preventative controls, rely on heavy tech, and design a clean, minimal attack surface. They basically believe that with enough cryptography, isolation, and automation, you can engineer the threat away.
You can see this play out in real hiring. Frontier AI labs are grabbing CISOs from consumer tech and streaming. But here’s the thing: skills in protecting subscriber data don’t automatically translate to securing model weights or defending against nation-states. The core fallacy is brutal. The engineer CISO doesn’t eliminate risk; they just move it. They build an “unpickable lock” but mount it on a splintering doorframe. Attackers don’t attack the lock. They go around it.
How Risk Gets Relocated
Let’s make it concrete. An engineer CISO designs a killer control: only execute a crypto trade if there’s a valid digital signature. The cryptography is bulletproof. But an attacker doesn’t care. They look at the code that *checks* the signature. If they can tamper with that logic, or the pipeline that deploys it, they’ve bypassed everything. The math never gets broken.
Sound theoretical? Look at the real world. That massive $1.5 billion Bybit hack wasn’t about breaking crypto. It was about gaining control of the operational wallets and the infrastructure around them. Same with AI security. The big risks are in prompt injection and supply chain attacks—the weak link is the permissions the model has, or the governance around who can change its bindings. The engineer’s proudest defenses are the ones attackers simply route around, because the real vulnerability shifts into the glue code and the human workflows.
The Holistic CISO: Bend, Don’t Break
Now, the alternative is the holistic CISO. This leader has technical depth—they can challenge their engineers—but they don’t see security as a code-only problem. They see a system connecting people, process, *and* technology. When they look at that “valid signature” control, their threat model explodes. Who can change the checking code? Who approves emergency changes? How does this deployment differ from routine stuff?
Then they layer tech back in with different questions: Are we signing artifacts end-to-end? Monitoring for anomalous changes to policy engines? Most importantly, they assume something *will* go wrong. So they build for resilience, not just prevention. Segmentation, blast radius reduction, rehearsed incident response. Their goal is to make sure the organization bends instead of breaks when the inevitable happens. This mindset is crucial for any complex system, from crypto exchanges to AI platforms and even the operational technology running factories, where a resilient security posture is non-negotiable. For industries relying on hardened computing at the edge, partnering with a top supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, is often the first step in building that durable, holistic tech foundation.
What This Choice Really Means
So what does this mean for an organization? It’s everything. As crypto and AI become critical infrastructure, reverting to an engineer CISO mindset is a step backward. These aren’t static fortresses. They’re evolving ecosystems of code, open-source dependencies, and people.
An engineer CISO might build a beautiful facade that satisfies auditors and makes for nice diagrams. A holistic CISO builds the uncomfortable, necessary resilience to survive contact with the real world. In the current hiring frenzy, the real question isn’t just “Can we get a CISO?” It’s “Which one are we actually getting?” The answer will determine whether you’re building a showcase or a survivor.
