I heard this phrase today, and my cybersecurity brain immediately went somewhere else with it.
In cybersecurity, the diggers are almost always ahead of the fillers.
Someone discovers a vulnerability before there is a patch.
Someone develops a new attack technique before there is a detection rule.
Someone finds a way around a security control before the vendor updates it.
Someone sends the phishing email before we know what the new campaign looks like.
Then the rest of us start filling the holes.
We patch. We update. We block. We investigate. We change configurations. We educate users. We add another control.
And somewhere else, someone is already digging another hole.
That can make cybersecurity feel like an endless reactive cycle. In many ways, it is. You cannot patch a vulnerability that has not been discovered yet, and you cannot write a detection for every attack technique that has not been invented.
But that does not mean cybersecurity has to be purely reactive.
The goal is not to somehow get ahead of every digger.
The goal is to build an environment where digging is difficult, where new holes are noticed quickly, and where one hole does not collapse the entire foundation.
That is why fundamentals still matter.
Zero Trust. Least privilege. MFA. Network segmentation. Patch management. Endpoint protection. Logging. Backups. Incident response. User education.
None of these guarantee that someone will not find a way in.
They help determine what happens after they try.
I think that distinction matters for technology leaders.
A mature cybersecurity program should not be measured by whether an organization ever experiences an incident. Eventually, somebody is going to dig somewhere you did not expect.
The better questions are:
How quickly did we see it?
How far could they go?
What did we already have in place to contain it?
How quickly could we recover?
And what did we learn before the next hole was dug?
We may never eliminate the diggers.
But we can get much better at protecting the ground.