What is Security Theater?
When we secured our Series A funding, we were up front with our investors regarding what we’d use the money for: ending security theater. My cofounder, Bryan Onel, spent 10+ years as a pentester breaking into companies that had a SOC 2 report sitting in their Trust Center. That’s the direct result of security theater, which runs rampant in compliance and security. Companies are compliant, but not secure. Compliant, but breached.
And that’s exactly why we built Oneleet: to make compliance a natural byproduct of security, not the other way around.
Defining Security Theater
Here’s the version of security theater that we’re fighting against with everything we do at Oneleet:
Examples of Security Theater
Security theater happens when compliance work doesn’t account for your actual risk. It’s actions you take because a checklist says to, not because it has any meaningful impact on your company.
For example, imagine a three-person startup holding a formal board meeting to satisfy a SOC 2 control, or setting up an anonymous whistleblower channel. These activities don’t meaningfully impact the security posture of the company. They’re a complete waste of time.
Other notable examples of security theater: Running a Nessus scan and calling it a pentest. Scanning a landing page and claiming you have server vulnerability scanning. Meanwhile, none of these things on their own have any impact on an organization’s security. They miss the entire point.
The AI revolution has only made things worse. Any script kiddie can fire up Claude and use it to exploit vulnerabilities in bulk. And that’s why security theater isn’t just an annoyance now. It’s an actual threat to organizations.
Why People Fall for Security Theater
People fall for security theater because the compliance industry makes it hard not to.
Compliance is supposed to show that you’re secure, so most people treat the two as though they’re the same thing. But a SOC 2 audit doesn’t show how secure you are. It checks whether your controls meet a set of broad criteria — criteria that are flexible enough that a company can meet them with bare-minimum controls. A company can tick the boxes, document them well, and walk away with the same report as a company that takes security seriously. From the outside, the two look identical.
Founders are busy, and there’s a huge difference in the cognitive loads required to get secure or get compliant. Getting compliant results in a badge that you can show off. Getting secure is rewarded by not being breached. There isn’t the immediate payoff that founders flock toward.
Too many compliance vendors take advantage of that. Many of them position the badge as the finish line and let customers use it as proof of security, whether or not there’s any real security behind it. That’s completely backward.
Compliance should be a byproduct of security. If you do security well, you’ll be compliant. And that’s how we built Oneleet. We help companies achieve compliance frameworks by making them genuinely secure.
How Oneleet Views Security (and Compliance)
Oneleet views compliance as the natural result of being secure. That looks like scoping controls to your business. Instead of handing you a generic checklist, we start with what makes sense for your company at its stage and size — controls that actually improve your security. And we do almost everything in-house, from pentesting and code scanning to attack surface monitoring and security training.
This tool ownership is also why real security doesn’t slow you down. We don’t have to rely on third-party vendors to make it happen (except for the auditor), so you get compliant while you get secure — without sacrificing speed.
Our Mission: To Fight Security Theater
It’s upsetting to see other compliance vendors selling ticked checkboxes instead of real security. And because this is the norm in the industry, it’s easy to see how buyers get tricked into thinking that compliance is a worthwhile venture while security is some daunting, obscure task.
It doesn’t have to be.
We’ve worked hard to become the all-in-one platform for compliance and security. And until “compliant” companies stop getting breached, we won’t stop fighting security theater.
