There’s a particular genre of language that shows up in almost every cybersecurity report, press release, vendor pitch, or CISO recommendation: security must be robust, solutions should be advanced, systems must be resilient, and threats are always sophisticated. It’s the poetry of the unexamined, the PR sheen applied to technical failure.

Take robust security. What does that even mean? What does robust protect against that, say, basic or adequate security doesn’t? Is it a measure of uptime? Coverage? Detection capabilities? Resilience under attack?

Most of the time, “robust” is a placeholder for we don’t really know how this works, but it sounds solid. It’s the cybersecurity equivalent of calling a car “sporty” without specifying the engine. The irony? Many of the systems labeled “robust” fail under the most mundane of attacks — misconfigurations, phishing, default credentials, or unpatched dependencies. Apparently, “robust” doesn’t mean verified, proven, or audited. It just means we’re hoping you won’t ask.

Then there’s the phrase advanced tools. Every vendor has them. Every CISO is “leveraging” them. And every breach report retroactively claims that “we should implement advanced tools to detect and respond.” But which tools, exactly? What made them advanced? Did they apply behavioral analytics? Correlate signals across domains? Or just produce prettier dashboards?

When everything is labeled “advanced,” the term loses all discriminatory power. Worse, it implies that the solution to systemic issues is always just a smarter tool away — never better processes, governance, or culture. “Advanced” becomes a way to outsource responsibility to technology. And that’s dangerous.

The word sophisticated is practically the industry’s safe word. It appears in breach disclosures like clockwork, usually to imply that the attack was so cleverly executed, no reasonable defense could’ve stopped it. But if your system was compromised because someone reused a password or clicked a fake login form, we’re not dealing with sophistication. We’re dealing with competence — on the attacker’s part, and a lack of it on ours.

Calling every intrusion “sophisticated” shifts blame away from structural flaws and toward the mythical prowess of the adversary. It’s a rhetorical move, not an analytical one. And it doesn’t help anyone.

Another favorite: resilient architectures. What does that even look like? Redundancy? Immutable infrastructure? Backup strategies? “Resilient” is often just another way of saying “we hope it doesn’t break too badly.” But that doesn’t answer the critical question: resilience under what conditions, with what mitigations, and at what cost?

This language problem isn’t cosmetic. It actively undermines our understanding of risk. Buzzwords don’t make systems safer. They make failures easier to excuse. The use of vague, inflated terminology creates an illusion of maturity — and an environment where assumptions replace analysis.

It’s not enough to say security is strong. We need to define how and why. Don’t tell me the system is robust. Show me the threat models, controls, and test results. Don’t say you use advanced tools. Describe the data sources and detection logic. Don’t label a threat as sophisticated unless you can explain its TTPs, and why your defenses failed.

We don’t need more powerful adjectives. We need more precise thinking — and more honest communication.