How Security Has Changed the Hacker Marketplace

**Executive Summary:** The article argues that security should be framed as economic deterrence: instead of chasing compliance checkboxes or raw vulnerability counts, organizations should measure and raise their "cost to exploit" so attackers find targeting them unprofitable. Practical recommendations include using bug bounties to gauge market costs, shifting security earlier in development, layering defenses, eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities, and adopting zero-trust and segmentation; the author forecasts that "cost to exploit" will become a CISO KPI tied to measurable ROI.