What Happens After the Breach Isn’t Just Technical

A novel about burnout, breach response, and the people behind the metrics.

What if the real cybersecurity risk is not the malware, but the silence? Not the exploit, but the exhaustion? What if the firewall is not a device at all, but a person, and that person is close to breaking?

The Human Firewall is a novel set inside a financial services firm facing more than just cyber incidents. It follows Daniel, Layla, Tom, Angela, and Raya as they navigate high-pressure incident response while quietly enduring burnout, doubt, and unspoken fatigue. What begins as DNS anomalies and missed alerts becomes a deeper reckoning. The question is not just how to stop the breach, but how to stop breaking the people trying to defend against it.

This is not a story of lone technical heroes or cinematic hackers. There is no dramatic save. No one swoops in. Instead, this is a quiet, layered account of what it means to work in cyber defence when the tools are strong but the culture is brittle. It is about the moment someone flinches before escalating. The unspoken rule that analysts must appear unshakeable. The silence that follows a near miss. The moment someone stays late, again, and no one asks if they are coping.

Themes explored in this book include:

• Human resilience in cybersecurity and security operations centres

• Burnout in incident response teams

• Psychological safety, trust, and emotional load in breach response

• Rethinking IR playbooks with people in mind

• Leadership culture and organisational empathy
  

Through its characters, The Human Firewall makes visible what most cyber reports do not. The emotional impact of living in constant alertness. The weight of never being wrong. The quiet courage it takes to say, “This might be nothing, but can someone look?”

For CISOs, this is a mirror. For cyber professionals, it is a recognition of what they have felt but rarely voiced. For leaders across all industries, it is a challenge to build environments where trust matters more than throughput, and where success includes who stays when the pressure lifts.

If you have ever wondered how your SOC team really feels during the quiet hours after a breach, or if you are leading in a world where risk is constant and rest is rare, this story is for you.

• You cannot automate care.
• You cannot measure trust in dashboards.
• You cannot build resilience by pretending people are endpoints.

This is not just a cybersecurity story. It is a human one.

For readers of The Phoenix Project, Tribe, Turn the Ship Around, and anyone who believes culture is the real perimeter.