EXPOSED
Tier-1 work — alert triage, log correlation, phishing-report review, vulnerability scan output, policy and control documentation — is exactly what LLMs plus SIEM automation already do at usable quality, and it is where most headcount sits. What holds is the accountable end: deciding whether an incident is a breach, running containment during a live intrusion under executive pressure, and owning risk acceptance decisions that carry regulatory and contractual consequences. No license gates the work, so the moat is judgment and organizational trust, not law.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $99,730 → $129,180 +3.6% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+28.5% 182,800 → 234,900 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +28.5% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~16,000 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CryptologistThreat HunterCyber OperatorRed Team MemberSystems AnalystWarning AnalystBlue Team MemberSecurity AnalystSecurity AuditorVirus TechnicianAll-Source AnalystIncident ResponderTechnology AnalystCyber Intel PlannerSecurity ConsultantSecurity SpecialistSource Code AuditorExploitation AnalystCyber Defense AnalystCybersecurity AnalystData Security AnalystCyber Security AnalystCybersecurity EngineerCloud Security Engineer
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: embodiment .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Alert triage against SIEM rules, enriching IOCs from threat feeds, writing up phishing submissions, and mapping scan findings to CVSS scores are pattern-matching over structured logs that SOAR playbooks and LLM summarizers already handle end to end, while threat hunting on a novel TTP, reverse-engineering an unfamiliar loader, and negotiating a compensating control with an application owner who refuses to patch still need a person — a 9 puts the split roughly at Tier-1 gone, Tier-3 intact.
Fully desk- and screen-based Everything happens through a console: EDR agents, cloud audit logs, ticketing, and the occasional badge-in to a datacenter for a physical-access review, with a 2 rather than 0 only because some analysts still rack a network tap, image a seized laptop, or run a physical pentest walkthrough.
Certification preferred, not legally required CISSP, GCIH, and CISA are hiring filters, not licenses; nobody's certification is revoked for missing an intrusion, breach notification is signed by the CISO or general counsel, and the statutory exposure under HIPAA, GLBA Safeguards, or SEC Item 1.05 attaches to the entity — a 5 reflects that certification is near-mandatory in practice while conferring no personal legal standing.
Meaningful discretion Calling whether exfiltrated data triggers a 72-hour GDPR notification, deciding to isolate a revenue-generating production host mid-intrusion, and signing off on a risk acceptance that an auditor will read back to you are ambiguous calls with regulatory consequences made under time pressure — held at 13 rather than higher because the final breach determination and the decision to pay or not pay usually escalate to the CISO, counsel, or the board.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (9/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (13/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 26 of this occupation's 37 points (70%).
Embodiment (2/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to information security analysts on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 55/100, still EXPOSED.
SEC cyber disclosure rules (Item 1.05, in force since Dec 2023) already require a named officer's materiality determination on 8-K filings; if enforcement actions extend personal liability down to the analyst/CISO chain — as in the SEC's SolarWinds case against CISO Tim Brown — or if state breach-notification statutes require a named accountable individual to attest that an AI-generated incident assessment was human-reviewed, a sign-off role hardens
Genuine two-tier occupation: as SIEM/LLM automation absorbs alert triage, log correlation and phishing review, the surviving role is adversary-facing judgment — threat hunting against an active human attacker, deciding scope of containment during a live intrusion, and interpreting whether an anomaly is compromise or noise. Task-mix shift raises measured resistance for those who remain even with zero new law, while cutting headcount
If DORA (EU, in force Jan 2025) and CIRCIA reporting deadlines (72-hour / 72-hour and 24-hour ransom payment) force a named individual to make the reportability call on a clock, the risk-acceptance decision becomes formally owned rather than diffuse
AI systems themselves becoming the attack surface — prompt injection, model supply chain, agent permission scoping. NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act Article 15 security requirements create work with no established playbook for automation to have learned from
Cyber insurers conditioning coverage or claim payout on attestation by a named, credentialed human (CISSP/GIAC) that controls were validated and incident response followed policy — already appearing in ransomware policy warranties; extension to explicit human-attestation clauses would make the signature contractual rather than optional
Buyers of penetration testing and red-team engagements specifying human operators in scope-of-work — driven by PCI DSS 4.0 requirements for penetration testing by qualified personnel and by client insistence that adversary simulation not be purely automated scanning
The limit. No license gates this work and none is realistically coming — there is no state board for security analysts, and CISSP is a private credential with no statutory force. The liability and accountability levers concentrate at the CISO/incident-commander tier, not across the 190k headcount; most of the gains described accrue to a shrinking senior slice while the tier-1 base erodes. Aggregate score movement is likely modest even if every lever fires.
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 16,560 | $148,950 +15% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 11,330 | $140,470 +9% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 7,080 | $133,610 +3% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 5,220 | $136,550 +6% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 4,820 | $129,630 +0% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 4,700 | $161,780 +25% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 4,600 | $138,170 +7% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 4,550 | $131,490 +2% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,280 | $176,120 +36% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 3,730 | $162,310 +26% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 4,700 | $161,780 +25% |
HR Katha reports cybersecurity firm Rapid7 is cutting 12% of its workforce as part of a shift to an AI-first approach.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.