People & Culture
People are Critical Infrastructure: Fighting Burnout in Cybersecurity
QUICK SUMMARY
Burnout is a serious issue in cybersecurity, in which job stress and lack of support can lead to decreased motivation, diminishing job performance, and mental, physical, and/or emotional exhaustion. To mitigate this industry risk, organizations must view people as a key part of critical infrastructure. The article explores major causes of burnout in cyber and offers suggestions on ways to make things better, including rest periods, mental health support, automation of repetitive tasks, job rotation, and shifting from an incident-response to a risk-reduction focus.
In early August 2026, Bloomberg reported about a tragic cluster of suicides among operators within the US Cyber Command. At least five cyber operators took their own lives between early June and early July. Contributing factors, according to the report, included an increased workload due to ongoing military conflicts in Iran and elsewhere, as well as an accelerated operational pace due to the need to both use and defend against advanced AI models.
These tragic deaths may have been the result of burnout: physical, emotional, and/or mental exhaustion that can lead to decreased motivation and diminishing job performance. To combat burnout in the cyber workforce, organizations should first and foremost treat their people as a key part of critical infrastructure. Potential fixes include mandatory rest and recovery spells, especially after intense periods of work, cross-training of employees and workload rotation to offer a variety of work duties, automation of repetitive tasks, and redesigning workflows to reward incident prevention over crisis response.
Causes of Burnout in Cybersecurity
Burnout is a real concern not only in cybersecurity, but in many professions. Police officers, teachers, and healthcare workers are examples of professionals whose workload and job-related stressors can raise the risk of burnout. I myself taught elementary school for six years. One particularly challenging group of students in my fourth year pushed me close to the edge of burnout and led me to switch to a different school district the following year. Although the causes of stress in teaching and cybersecurity do not neatly align, the dangers are the same: mental and physical health tolls on the worker, impacts on their family members, diminished work effectiveness, and the worker potentially leaving the field entirely.
Numerous factors can lead to burnout among cybersecurity professionals. These include job-related stressors such as long hours, alert fatigue, or the isolation of remote work; industry-related factors such as the rapid pace of technological change and how AI is transforming the cybersecurity landscape; and a lack of support in the workplace. We will consider a number of these factors.
Cyber professionals often work long hours under high levels of stress. This may include overtime work or the need to be on-call in case of an incident requiring immediate response. The work of cyber defenders is often high-stakes and involves defending mission-critical data and assets within an organization. The pressure to perform quickly and optimally in the face of threats from unknown adversaries is very real.
Many security operations center (SOC) analysts find themselves in a persistent threat environment, in which automated systems generate a high number of alerts for them to triage. This can lead to alert fatigue, especially when many alerts turn out to be false positives: harmless incidents for which an alert was generated. The repetitive nature of performing low-value tasks such as sifting through false alerts can wear analysts down over time.
Some cybersecurity professionals also have a hero mentality, viewing their work as critical to defending their organization, data privacy, or even human lives in certain situations. Such people will go to great lengths and endure significant hardship to accomplish their tasks. Organizations that prioritize incident response over risk mitigation and incident prevention contribute to this problem.
Additionally, the isolation that results from remote work can negatively impact the mental health of cyber professionals. The COVID pandemic led to increasing levels of remote work. Although working from home can have many economic and personal benefits, it can also isolate workers from their colleagues and negatively impact mental health. When your home is also your office, it can be difficult to draw clear lines between the worlds of work and non-work.
We must also consider the rapid pace of technological change in our current world, especially related to artificial intelligence. Advanced AI models are skilled at identifying vulnerabilities in software and systems, and they allow bad actors to carry out sophisticated phishing campaigns and other cyberattacks. AI has greatly improved cyber defense, but defenders must increasingly deal with AI-enabled cyber threats. The operational speed of attacks within the current AI-supercharged threat environment further increases the pressure on defenders.
Finally, organizations that do not provide adequate support for their cyber operators greatly increase the risk of burnout within employee ranks. Workers who do not feel supported by colleagues or management, who feel pressured to push themselves beyond their limits, or who cannot access resources such as counselors and adequate rest breaks, are at increasing risk of burnout.
Recommendations
What can be done to make things better? Panelists addressed this topic during a session entitled “Burnout & Cyber Resilience: Addressing systemic risks in cyber operations” at the September 2026 Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. Debbie Sallis of The Cyber Guild moderated the panel, which included David Grundy (Tines), Becky Koonge (National Weather Service), Patricia Titus (Abnormal AI), Mary Polanco (Live and Lead Well), and Jothi Dugar (National Institutes of Health). In 2025 The Cyber Guild partnered with NightDragon, Billington CyberSecurity, and Carahsoft to form a coalition that aims to empower the next generation of cybersecurity leaders and mentor the new cyber workforce. This Billington Summit panel contributed to the coalition’s mission.
The panelists’ recommendations reinforce the idea that people are a key part of critical infrastructure, not just protectors of it. Human factors in cybersecurity, such as designing tools to be user-friendly, prioritizing work-life balance, and taking a holistic approach to employee health, play a key role here. Potential fixes include mandatory rest and recovery periods, cross-training of employees and workload rotation, automation of repetitive tasks, and redesigning workflows to reward prevention over crisis response.
Mandatory rest and recovery periods after prolonged incident response engagements or long periods of intense work are a clear need. Ensuring that workers have access to mental health support is also crucial. Organizations such as the Mental Health Hackers, who educate tech and cybersecurity professionals about mental health risks in their fields and provide support services, are an important resource also. When I was in the classroom, all teachers had a card with a number they could call if they needed help. Employees also benefit from time to interact with their colleagues in person and in a more relaxed environment. As a teacher, planning sessions and after-school team meetings took up a lot of my time, but they also allowed me to bond with my colleagues and gave us time to vent our frustrations in a safe way. Cybersecurity professionals need these opportunities too.
Burnout can be caused by long hours with high stress and while doing the same tasks over and over again. Cross-training employees to enable them to build new skills and get a break from one particular role can both help reduce burnout risk and create more versatile workers. Allowing workers to rotate between departments periodically can help them develop new relationships, build diverse skill sets, and keep them alert and focused.
Organizations should use AI tools to automate low-level, repetitive tasks that can become dull and tiring for human operators. Human oversight is needed when AI tools take over such work, but freeing humans to do higher-level tasks is highly beneficial. Employees should be empowered to take on duties that AI cannot do as well: managing human relationships, using organizational context to make informed decisions, and ensuring that AI systems are doing their work safely and correctly.
Finally, redesigning workflows to reward prevention over crisis response can help shift the focus from a hero mentality to a protector mentality. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is the right idea here. Use AI tools to improve vulnerability discovery and prioritize patching, and ensure that security tools are regularly tuned to minimize false positive alerts.
The deaths of US Cyber Command personnel this past June and July were tragic not only for the operators and their loved ones: our nation also lost some skilled cyber defenders. The burnout threat in cybersecurity is real, but solutions are available. Although AI developments have added new stressors to cybersecurity work, these tools can also lighten the load for cyber professionals. Addressing burnout in this field is crucial to ensuring that our organizations and infrastructure are adequately defended against the cyber threats that menace them every day.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Thursby is a cybersecurity policy analyst who recently completed an internship in the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology and Security+ certification. His areas of focus include AI governance and operational technology cybersecurity policy. Stephen also volunteers with The Cyber Guild, the Cybersecurity Canon project, and the Maryland Center for Critical Infrastructure Security. He is eager to contribute his research, writing, analysis, and communications skills in a full-time role with an organization focused on public policy, education, or OT cybersecurity.