Accept the Monster: Why You Don’t Need an Exorcist—You Need a Necromancer

In modern enterprise security, we often talk about platforms, integrations, and “end-to-end solutions”—but what we’re really describing more often than not is a creature. A stitched-together, semi-living artifact assembled from acquired products, inherited features, and incompatible roadmaps. It works, mostly. But it’s neither elegant nor entirely sane. Let’s call it what it is: a Fractal Frankenstein.

“Frankenstein,” because it’s cobbled together from whatever was available at the time—packet filters from one acquisition, deep packet inspection from another, zero trust from a third. These components don’t always share a design language, an API philosophy, or a logging structure—but they’re wired together anyway, under the banner of a unified platform.

“Fractal,” because the dysfunction repeats at every scale. Zoom in on a single product module, and you’ll see the same architectural chaos as the whole platform: overlapping layers, recursive configs, unspoken dependencies. You think it’s turtles all the way down? Try syslog daemons and half-deprecated feature flags.

And yet, it lives. Somehow. Maybe even securely, on good days.

There’s a temptation in this industry to talk about modernization as if it’s a simple binary: out with the legacy, in with the new. But that narrative assumes you can cleanly separate old from new, that the legacy won’t bite back when you try to unplug it. In reality, your firewall appliance or “security cloud” isn’t a clean slate—it’s a creature of habit, held together by duct tape, tribal knowledge, and the collective anxiety of three product managers.

Here’s the proposal: stop trying to exorcise the monster. Learn to work with it. You don’t need a replatforming effort; you need a bench of necromancers—engineers who know how to speak to the ghosts in your infrastructure.

A good security necromancer doesn’t flinch when the SNMP module restarts itself. They know which log directories lie, and which actually speak the truth. They understand that “single pane of glass” often just means “now your confusion has a dashboard.” They trace lateral movement not just across networks, but across organizational memory.

This isn’t romanticizing broken systems—it’s accepting the complexity of what already exists. Frankenstein’s creature didn’t ask to be created, but it deserved care all the same. So does your security stack. Document its oddities. Test its fail states. Build a culture where keeping the monster alive is treated as skilled labor, not a burden of shame.

Because the real risk isn’t living with a Fractal Frankenstein. It’s pretending it isn’t there.

-jayne // hacker // witch // protocol archaeologist // firewall necromancer