55 Cybersecurity Analyst Jokes
It's 2 a.m. The alert says "suspicious PowerShell activity." The user is in marketing.
"Did you check the logs?" The logs are in three systems, two formats, and one of them is the printer.
I do not chase alerts. I triage trauma.
The threat intel feed said APT activity in the region. The alert was the CEO logging in from a hotel.
"Why did the analyst close the ticket as benign?" Because it was the 4,000th instance and the runbook says benign.
Our SIEM has 412 rules. Four of them have ever produced a true positive.
"Mean time to detect." The metric is 11 minutes. The breach was 14 months.
I came in Monday to 7,200 alerts. I closed them in 40 minutes. The runbook was Ctrl-A, Delete.
The user clicked the link. The user entered the credentials. The user approved the push. The user is now a senior director.
"It's probably a false positive." Famous last words of every incident retrospective.
An analyst's superpower is recognizing what "normal" looks like. Normal looks like 600 logon failures a minute.
"We need to lower our noise floor." The noise floor is the rules nobody wants to be the one to turn off.
The IR plan is a Confluence page from 2019. The author has left the company.
I joined the bridge. There were 47 people on the bridge. Nobody knew who declared the incident.
"Severity 2." Severity is whatever the loudest VP says it is.
EDR alert: unknown binary executed by elevated process. The binary is the EDR's own updater.
I asked the user to send me the email. They forwarded the phishing link, no headers, screenshot only. The screenshot was a photo of the screen taken with a phone.
"We have full visibility." The Linux fleet is not logging.
An analyst's morning coffee: black, two sugars, and a sip of dread when the queue loads.
The detection engineer built a beautiful rule. The rule fires 200 times a day. The rule is on snooze.
"What does this alert mean?" "It means we paid for the EDR."
The breach started two weeks ago. The alert fired two weeks ago. It was in the queue under the rule we deprioritized last quarter.
I love the smell of fresh logs in the morning. It smells like 14 GB of DNS queries.
"Tabletop exercise." The IR director plays the attacker. The CISO plays the press. The interns play themselves and panic accurately.
Threat hunting is mostly reading other people's bash history.
"We're moving to a unified platform." We now have four platforms.
The on-call analyst at 3 a.m. is just a person and a query language having a long, sad conversation.
"It can't be a real incident, the dashboard is green." The dashboard pulls from the system that's down.
I have closed the same false positive 311 times. It has a name now. We send it a holiday card.
The SOAR playbook ran end-to-end. It enriched the alert, queried the asset, paged the user, opened a ticket, closed the ticket, and forgot to actually contain the host.
"User behavior analytics." The user behavior is logging in to do their job. The analytics flags it as anomalous.
Tier 1 escalates to Tier 2. Tier 2 escalates to Tier 3. Tier 3 escalates to a Slack thread with one engineer who hasn't been on the team for six months.
"What was the root cause?" "A misconfigured S3 bucket." "And before that?" "A misconfigured S3 bucket."
I do not write detection rules. I write therapy notes for the SIEM.
The alert was suppressed because it was too noisy. The alert was the only one that mattered. We found out three weeks later.
"Our coverage is 97%." The 3% is everything that has ever been breached.
An analyst's playlist: lofi beats, the keyboard, and a small voice in their head saying "that probably isn't a service account."
I get a chill when the user-agent string says "python-requests/2.28.1."
"We've never had a breach." We've never detected one.
The vulnerability scanner found 18,000 findings. The report is 2,400 pages. The remediation team has 2 people.
"This is just informational." The informational alert is mimikatz.
Lateral movement detection: perfect. Lateral movement prevention: still being procured.
I asked for last quarter's incident metrics. They gave me ticket counts. A ticket count is not an incident metric.
"Why did you alert on that?" "I didn't. The rule did. The rule was written in 2017. The rule's author is in legal now."
The IR runbook says: "Step 1: contain." Step 2 is blank.
An analyst's three core skills: regex, patience, and remembering that 192.168 is RFC 1918.
"We have a 24/7 SOC." The overnight shift is one person and a coffee maker.
The threat actor used legitimate admin tools. The legitimate admin tools are on every host. The detection is "unusual use of legitimate admin tools."
I love a clean kill chain. I rarely see one.
"Post-incident review." The review concluded that the analyst on shift did everything right and the rule should have fired sooner and the procurement of the better tool will be revisited in Q4.
Our compliance posture is excellent. Our security posture is whatever's left after compliance.
Vendor demo: "Our platform reduces analyst fatigue by 80%." Vendor platform in production: fatigue at 110%, console at 40 tabs.
"Why didn't we catch this earlier?" We did. It was in the daily digest email that gets auto-archived.
I do not need a war room. I need someone to fix the syslog forwarder.
The job is mostly explaining why the alert that fired is not the alert that mattered, to people who only see the alert that fired.
Why the analyst joke writes itself
The cybersecurity analyst sits at the intersection of two systems that do not talk to each other: the system that generates the logs, and the system that decides what matters. The first one is loud and indiscriminate. The second one is quiet and political. The job is translating between them, and the translation always loses something. The joke writes itself because everyone in the role has had the same Tuesday: 8,000 alerts in the queue, one of them real, and a meeting at 3 p.m. to discuss why coverage feels low.
What separates analyst humor from the broader infosec genre is the time signature. Pentesters get to leave on Friday. Analysts are on shift. The alerts do not stop firing because the engagement is over; the alerts fire because Tuesday turned into Wednesday. So the comedy lives in the small daily indignities: the rule nobody dares disable, the runbook that ends at step one, the dashboard that is green because the system feeding it is down. It is the comedy of staring at a screen long enough to start seeing patterns in the noise, and then having to explain the patterns to someone who is staring at a slide.
The deeper note in this kind of humor is that the work is mostly invisible when it succeeds. A clean shift is a quiet shift. A quiet shift looks, from the outside, like nobody is doing anything. Analysts make jokes about this because the alternative is bitterness, and because the people in the role recognize each other instantly when the punchline lands. The job is hard, the tools are imperfect, the metrics measure the wrong things, and the people doing it are mostly funny about it.
See also
- 50 Sysadmin Jokes That Hit Too Close to Home: the on-call siblings on the infrastructure side of the same outage.
- 70 Slack Jokes Every Channel Member Recognizes: the #sec-incidents channel where the bridge gets stood up.
- 60 Zoom Meeting Jokes Everyone on Mute Knows: the IR bridge with 47 attendees.
- 45 Password Manager Jokes for People Who Forgot the Master Password: the credential layer the alert is usually about.
- 55 Email Chain Jokes for People Stuck on the Thread: the disclosure thread two weeks after the alert fired.
- 60 Executive Leadership Jokes for People Who Have Sat Through the Keynote: the executives asking why the dashboard is green and the incident is severity 1.
- 55 HR Jokes Only Employees Who Have Met With HR Get: the security awareness training that the phished user definitely completed.
Sources
Authoritative references this article was fact-checked against.