Security Brutalism
Security Brutalism is a back to the fundamentals security philosophy focused on clarity, raw effectiveness, and real resilience. It’s a direct response to overly complex, tool-heavy security programs that look convincing in diagrams yet fail under real attack pressure. At its core, Security Brutalism centers on four fundamentals: know what you have, make it hard to break, see trouble fast, and limit and recover. These principles form a durable foundation for defense that can be audited, tested, and trusted.
Security Brutalism draws from the same roots as brutalist architecture: expose the essentials, remove decoration, and build for durability, transparency, and survival. Controls are visible and understandable. Systems are designed to be inspected, stressed, and repaired. Simplicity becomes a strength. Resilience becomes a design requirement.
In practice, this means radically streamlining the security program. Begin with a complete, living inventory of assets, identities, and access paths. Harden systems with strong defaults, least privilege, and breach-assumed design. Deploy detection that shows real failure, not vanity metrics. Build response and recovery processes that contain damage and restore function under pressure. Remove overlapping tools. Reduce policy weight. Enforce fundamentals like access control, patching, monitoring, segmentation, and backup integrity before anything else.
Security Brutalism concentrates effort where it carries the most defensive load. The focus remains on controls that truly reduce risk, protect critical assets, and build systems that endure under pressure. Excess complexity is rejected. Simplicity is treated as a structural advantage, not a compromise.
Start here for a quick introduction to this back-to-basics approach.
The Security Brutalist Blog
You can expand your knowledge of implementing Security Brutalism and its foundational security approach through the articles and insights available in the blog.
From the Blog