Success Quote by John W. Thompson

Four to six months is a lifetime in cybersecurity, and John W. Thompson is bluntly translating that reality into executive language: time-to-failure. The phrase "closure rate between discovery and exploitation" is quietly damning because it frames defense as a race you are currently losing by design. The clock starts when a vulnerability is found, not when it becomes public, and it stops when an adversary turns it into a working weapon. If that window is months long, attackers get to industrialize the process. They can automate scanning, build exploit kits, and pick the softest targets at scale.

The rhetorical move is the compression: from "four to six months" to "seven to 10 days". That is not an optimization goal; it's a cultural rewrite. Thompson, a boardroom operator with deep ties to enterprise tech, is speaking to systems that move at the speed of procurement cycles, change-control meetings, and risk committees. The subtext is that those rituals are now a liability. Security isn't failing because people don't care; it's failing because the organization is structured to be cautious, and caution is indistinguishable from delay to an attacker.

Calling it "an enormous challenge" is doing dual duty. It signals seriousness without assigning blame, making it easier for leadership to hear. At the same time, it smuggles in an indictment: if you cannot patch, mitigate, or compartmentalize within days, your threat model is fantasy. In a world of rapid exploitation and zero-days, speed is strategy, not a KPI.