When a cyber incident occurs, organizations often default to a familiar pattern: identify the most visible issue, remediate it, and close the case. But that approach favors speed over understanding. In an environment defined by complex architectures and intentional attack paths, treating the obvious as sufficient leaves deeper failures unexamined and increases the likelihood of recurrence.

Vincent Romney, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at Nuskin & Pharmanex, a global personal care and wellness enterprise, challenges that reflexive approach. Drawing on 23 years in U.S. Air Force cyber warfare and his work as Founder of Digital Defense Security, Romney argues that resilient security depends on disciplined reasoning, not faster reactions. He says that real failures are rarely technical alone, and they're almost never resolved by stopping at the first answer.

"When an incident happens, teams tend to stop as soon as they find something that looks like an answer. But that stopping point is almost never the real cause. You only get to the real problem if you keep breaking it down and keep asking why," says Romney. His approach requires moving beyond traditional root cause analysis to embrace what he calls a forensic mindset. The goal is to follow a core tenet of the discipline of incident response: break an incident down to its absolute base components to reconstruct what actually happened.

• Decisions, not defects: Using all the tools and processes at their disposal allows teams to move from simply identifying a technical exploit to understanding the chain of events and decisions that made it possible in the first place. "Breaking something down forensically isn’t about finding a single technical failure. It’s about understanding how a series of decisions created the conditions for that failure to matter," Romney explains. "If you don’t do that work, you’re just reacting."

• Cyber culture: The greatest barrier to deeper analysis is rarely technical. It's cultural. Leadership pressure for fast, blame-free answers pushes teams to stop early, discouraging the hard questions that expose systemic issues, resource tradeoffs, or leadership decisions themselves. As Romney puts it, "Leadership wants a quick and consoling answer. They want one that doesn’t indict anybody. But the real root cause can often be traced right back to leadership."

• High five!: Building an inquisitive culture begins with celebrating discoveries, shifting the focus away from criticism. Romney advocates for creating a system of positive reinforcement where discovering the next layer of a problem is seen as a collective win, encouraging teams to keep digging. "You have to build a communal, congratulatory process where every time somebody finds the next layer of the problem, it's a high five. The attitude is to congratulate them for finding the next thing and then immediately ask where else the team can dig deeper."

The forensic mindset is often dismissed as too slow for modern business, but that criticism misunderstands its purpose. Deep analysis is foundation building. Acting on incomplete information may produce quick progress, but it creates fragile outcomes that fail under pressure. By establishing a clear understanding of what actually happened, organizations gain the ability to accept risk deliberately rather than blindly, making faster decisions more durable instead of more dangerous.

• All about attitude: Romney points to a compromised innovation environment as a clear example of how culture creates risk. Because the system held no customer data and carried no immediate regulatory exposure, security was treated as optional. Attackers later exploited unpatched remote code execution flaws in the Kubernetes cluster, gained full control, and forced the company to delete the entire environment, wiping out thousands of hours of work. "The cause was not the innovation account having a vulnerability," Romney explains. "The cause was the attitude of the teams that stood it up, who thought it didn't matter to put security into that system."

• Mind the cracks: For Romney, incidents should function as learning experiences that reinforce better habits. "You use a learning experience like this to show why it’s good to have a solid security pattern baked into everything," so teams no longer have to question whether security belongs. Once that foundation is in place, maintenance becomes part of normal operations. "If a crack comes into the foundation, you’ve got somebody in there fixing it," he says, describing a disciplined cycle of identifying exposure, confirming impact, and addressing vulnerabilities before they escalate.

At its core, Romney’s approach rests on accountability that starts at the top and turns inward. He views scrutiny not as a threat, but as a requirement for staying effective in a field that refuses to stand still. "As a security guy, I indict myself all the time," he says. "I look at my own work, identify where I made a mistake, and recognize that I have to correct it. If I don’t accept that there are things that have to get fixed, I’m ultimately going to become irrelevant."