There is a silence in the digital world that feels wrong. It is not the silence of safety. It is the kind that settles right before something decisive happens. According to the India Cyber Threat Report 2025 by DSCI, India recorded over 369 million malware detections last year, an average of 702 threats every minute. Numbers like this don’t signal noise. They signal intent. The more closely you study this landscape, the more you sense the weight of minds working quietly behind it.

The minds built for quiet operations

We have spent years telling ourselves convenient stories about hackers, a jittery loner, a thrill-seeker, a brilliant misfit chasing applause in dark forums. But real research breaks these myths open.

Studies using the Big Five personality model show skilled hackers scoring unusually high on openness to experience, not impulsivity, pointing to intellectual curiosity and methodical thinking. Machine-learning models published in Frontiers in Computer Science in 2024 map hacker personality clusters closer to long-range planners than chaotic opportunists. Criminology research adds another layer: most studies examine the hackers who got caught, not the ones good enough to disappear forever.

To understand the real operators, you must build the picture from the environment, not from the arrests. When you do, a clearer, sharper silhouette emerges.

These people are brilliant in the widest sense of the word. They see systems as abstractions, patterns, power flows. They understand institutions more honestly than the institutions understand themselves. They can withdraw from the world for long periods, not out of anxiety, but because solitude gives them clarity.

Many come from corporate corridors. They were the talented ones who watched mediocrity move upward through politics, not skill. They learned early that large organizations reward compliance over insight. The resentment this creates is a quiet burn, controlled, not chaotic. For some, it becomes fuel.

Their ego is large, but steady. They want wealth, autonomy, and a life that reflects their capability. They do not want fame; visibility is liability. What they seek is a number, a sum that buys freedom from institutions altogether. Analysts estimate ransomware damage will cross $265 billion this year, with average recovery stretching beyond three weeks. But for the ones orchestrating the operations, the point is not disruption. It is exit.

This is what makes them dangerous. They are not gamblers. They are strategists. You cannot predict them by volatility. You can only predict them by patience.

Why patient minds love autonomous machines

And this patience becomes far more potent as businesses shift toward agentic AI, systems that act on their own, form goals, correct their steps, and move processes forward with near-human confidence. Organizations are already giving these systems composite permissions no single employee would ever hold.

Once an agentic AI becomes essential, it is never really “off.”
It becomes the organization’s hum, the persistent background movement no one questions.
A mind built for the long game sees this differently.
Where others see efficiency, they see an opening.

A quiet Trojan placed months earlier does not need to act immediately. It can wait inside the flow of autonomous operations until the environment is ideal. Triggered on a long weekend or holiday week, the agentic system will execute the theft itself, moving data or money with the same calm precision it uses to run the business.

The hacker’s patience pairs perfectly with the AI’s autonomy.
A system that never sleeps is a gift to someone who can wait.
By the time anyone notices, the work is done.

The storm forming in the silence

What looks like a quiet cybersecurity landscape is not quiet at all. It is structured stillness—the kind that precedes a deliberate strike. We have seen this blueprint before. Zero Days (Alex Gibney) revealed how devastating operations are composed in long stretches of silence, formed patiently, revealed only at the moment of execution.

This new silence is shaped by minds that understand restraint. Minds that know that moving too early ruins the outcome. Minds comfortable with waiting months or years for the single, precise moment when an autonomous system is trusted enough to follow their hidden instructions without question.

The threat that emerges from such operators will not be dramatic or noisy.

It will be exact. It will be prepared. And it will target the intersection where our dependence on AI becomes irreversible. The real adversary. To prepare for what is coming, we must stop clinging to the pop-culture silhouettes, Elliot Alderson, Lisbeth Salander, Neo. They make the threat feel romantic, impulsive, unpredictable. The real adversary is a disciplined, rational individual who wants one thing above all, freedom. Freedom purchased with quiet wealth. Freedom from institutions. Freedom from being controlled by the same systems they understand better than anyone else.

The storm will not announce itself.
It is already gathering.

The author is Nitaant Singh, CPMO, Cross Identity.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCISO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCISO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.

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