Fear sells when you’re selling security. Rule #1 of cybersecurity marketing: hackers are scary.

But what’s the scariest kind of hacker? Imagining a scary hacker, many will conjure the usual stereotypes: dim basement, black hoodie, mold growing on Mom’s spaghetti. But in an ad released in 2023, Cisco’s marketing department has flipped the usual script. Meet the scariest hacker of all: the sexy hacker.

This one-man legion of swoon is no stick-figure script kiddie living in mom’s basement. Hair cut and styled, skin exfoliated and moisturized, suited up and ambulatory, there’s not a speck of Cheetos dust on Cisco’s sexy hacker. He could do anything, fool anyone, steal anything, or get into any room. He could even take a selfie with the “classified” specs for your next-gen salad spinner. Did you see that thing? You were probably too distracted.

Of course, Cisco is correct: “A hacker doesn’t always look like a hacker.” Or as iSpot.tv explains using unattributed copy that could have come from Cisco,  “A handsome, sharply dressed man strides with confidence into a place of business, informing us that a hacker doesn’t always look the way we imagine.”

But the ad does not reject stereotypes of hackers so much as invoke them all through their absence, showing just how resilient popular ideas of hackers are. Whatever the audience imagines, Cisco counts on them to agree hackers aren’t smooth, well-dressed, or conventionally attractive. Cisco’s hacker is an antitype to hacker stereotypes, but it’s still typification.

In straying from the normal script, Cisco retains that cardinal tactic of selling security: stoking fear. Hackers are scary, even if they’re this guy. In fact, they become even more dangerous by not fitting with our stereotypical image of them. (Hot or not, many security threats and breaches come at the hands of sophisticated criminal or nation-state enterprises.)

In this way, Cisco exploits hacker stereotypes to a clever end. By expanding the audience’s perception of who criminal hackers might be from the stereotypical to the antitypical, they include everything in between. The security risks have gone from a recognizable villain to, for all you know, the person standing next to you. Whether or not intended to make a serious point about what hackers look like, the ad nevertheless reflects what Cisco believes its audience will respond to. And they seem to have confidence in their hacker antitype—so much so that Cisco doesn’t even take the time to specify what they are selling.

Ironically, given its anti-cliché message, Cisco finishes by making a caricature of itself: the anti-hacker, anti-freedom corporation. With his next victim in sight (the conspicuously mundane “T. Pearson Enterprises”), Cisco intervenes just as the hacker ecstatically proclaims, “A hacker is free!” His antics end as he faceplants into prison bars constructed from blue beams that rise to reveal the Cisco logo.

Cisco delivers a fantastic new symbol for its corporate relationships with hacker criminality, transforming the stubby blue lines of its logo from a hallmark of communication to a badge of laying down the law. What I once saw as a waveform, I now cannot help but see as the bars of a jail cell. (It is, in fact, inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge.)

This choice is surprising; big corporations are often extremely conservative about any modification or use of their logos. Cisco’s defacement of its logo here is more at home with an anti-corporate activist group than in its own ad.

Then again, maybe it just goes to show: the sexy hacker really can do anything.