As 2025 draws to a close, the cybersecurity conversation on LinkedIn is revealing a nuanced shift in how leaders think about the role of the CISO. Over the past week, several thoughtful posts from security leaders and community voices have highlighted strategic evolution, accountability, threat‑centric thinking, and community collaboration, far beyond mere defensive posture or technical checklists.
Here are the voices that stood out this week, and what they signal about the state of cyber leadership.
The Business of Security: CISOs Must Translate Tech Into Value
On LinkedIn, Alan R. laid out a candid reflection on where the role of the CISO must go in 2026.
“Our technical expertise is becoming our limitation… Boards now expect risk to be quantified in financial and operational terms, not just technical severity… The winners next year will show up in product and platform meetings, not just audit and compliance reviews.”
This post captures a profound shift: the CISO is increasingly a business partner, not a technical silo. Instead of tallying vulnerabilities and incident counts, leaders are being measured on how security contributes to business outcomes, revenue protection, customer trust, operational continuity, and strategic enablement. This reflects a larger trend where security must be expressed in the language of the boardroom to secure investment and influence strategic decisions.
Reflecting on 2025: Fragility, Assumptions, and Resilience
Anand Jha’s year‑end reflection frames 2025 not as a litany of breaches but as a lesson in fragility and misplaced assumptions.
“We assumed the software we bought from partners was safe.… We assumed AI would fix our problems for us… Being able to recover > Being perfect.”
What makes this post thoughtful isn’t just the summary of events, but the interpretation: it reframes cybersecurity success in terms of resilience rather than invincibility. Jha’s post urges CISOs and leaders to focus on recovery capabilities and assumption testing, understanding that threats will bypass defenses and that plans must be tested against realistic adversity.
Accountability and the Boardroom: Who Really Owns Cybersecurity?
Beata Kaminski’s post adds a sobering strategic lens to where cybersecurity often goes wrong: at the intersection of governance and accountability.
“Boards confuse delegation with accountability.… They equate compliance with control… True accountability begins when leadership refrains from outsourcing common sense.”
This commentary challenges both boards and CISOs to rethink ownership. Too often, governance gets reduced to quarterly reports and slide decks, a practice that can lull leadership into a false sense of security. Kaminski’s message is a call for leaders to define decision rights clearly and understand who will act when systems fail.
Community Over Isolation: CISOs Need Each Other
At the CISO:CLUB annual event during Cyber Week TLV 2025, Menny Barzilay brought the conversation back to community and collaboration.
“Isolated defense is a losing strategy… Real collaboration, open information sharing, and trust between peers are the ultimate defense.”
This gratitude post may seem simple, but its message is profound. In a world of rapidly evolving threats, no single leader or organization can maintain visibility into all risks. Community intelligence, trust networks, and peer‑to‑peer support are increasingly vital.
Threat Behavior Over Tools: A Tactical Reminder
Finally, David Stelzl’s post brings attention back to the core of security thinking.
“CISOs don’t wake up thinking about SKUs — they’re thinking about how attackers actually move…”
This reflection moves away from vendor noise and checkbox compliance toward adversary‑centric strategies: understand how threats move, prioritize controls where they matter most, and align detection strategy with attacker behavior.
Why These Posts Matter
Taken together, this week’s LinkedIn conversations reveal four evolving themes in CISO leadership:
- Strategic alignment with the business: Technical metrics alone no longer suffice; CISOs must articulate business value and risk in business terms.
- Resilience over perfection: Security success is about recovery readiness and assumption testing.
- Meaningful accountability: Boards and CISOs must clarify decision rights and crisis responsibilities.
- Collaborative intelligence and behavior focus: Security leadership is both community‑centric and attacker‑aware.
These themes reflect a year in cybersecurity marked not just by threats, but by leadership lessons, where strategy, governance, and peer learning matter as much as patching vulnerabilities.
Leadership Beyond the SOC
The most thoughtful CISOs on LinkedIn this week are those pushing the conversation in uncomfortable but necessary directions: translating security into business outcomes, reclaiming resilience as a strategic priority, demanding accountability, fostering community, and defining strategy around behavioral threat patterns rather than vendor checklists.
In 2026, the leaders who thrive will be those who balance innovation with governance, technical execution with business fluency, and defense with shared human insight.