ITIL Was Not Built for Adversaries (It Was a Trap All Along) The year was 1989.

ITIL Was Not Built for Adversaries (It Was a Trap All Along)

The year was 1989.
The Berlin Wall was falling.
The Cold War was ending.
And somewhere in a grey UK government office, a committee decided what “incident management” would mean for eternity.

Thus, ITIL was born — a framework forged in the era of fax machines, permalocked desktop PCs, and union-approved coffee breaks.
It was never designed for digital combat; it was designed for British predictability.
The enemy wasn’t a state-sponsored threat actor. It was Derek from Accounts accidentally unplugging the printer.

Fast forward four decades, and enterprises are still defending themselves with a doctrine older than the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, the adversaries have evolved into self-replicating AI organisms that can pivot through Kubernetes clusters before your CAB even finishes quorum.

While your incident manager logs a ticket, the threat actor’s already minted NFTs of your source code.
While the “major incident bridge” asks for an update, the attackers are livestreaming your domain controller’s funeral.

ITIL is the empire that never died — an undead bureaucracy stumbling through cyberwar with a clipboard.
It mistakes documentation for defence, and process maturity for survivability.

And every time something burns, someone still asks,
“Did we follow ITIL?”

Yes, we did.
We followed it religiously — into the breach, through the smoke, and straight down into the regulatory afterlife.
We kept minutes. We assigned owners. We closed tickets.
The apocalypse was well-governed.

ITIL was not built for adversaries.
It was built to comfort management while the world caught fire quietly.
The hackers aren’t even angry anymore. They’re impressed. They’ve never seen a civilisation document its own extinction so thoroughly.

—Scott G 🥷💀☕