Cybersecurity ROI: Attackers benefit from security & finance misalignment

**Executive summary:** This analysis combines SOC alert data and a 300‑leader survey to show that the 2025 threat landscape is dominated by preventable identity-based attacks and high-impact cloud misconfigurations—failures that trace to underfunded or inconsistently applied foundational controls. It identifies a persistent communication and metrics gap between security teams and finance (low confidence in security’s ability to quantify business impact, misaligned KPIs, and insufficient CISO–CFO engagement) and recommends framing investment asks as financial exposure and resilience outcomes, reporting the metrics finance values, and elevating regular C-suite collaboration to close the investment gap and reduce preventable breaches.