Making Cybersecurity Disclosure Actionable: Jargon Debt,Genre Repertoires,and Protective-Action Infrastructure in Business Communication

Cybersecurity breach communication is often assessed as disclosure, yet disclosure does not necessarily give stakeholders resources to act. This article develops jargon debt as the communicative burden created when technical precision, legal caution, and reputational self-protection are not translated into stakeholder-usable pathways. Using an incident-first, corpus-assisted analysis of 207 public texts linked to 120 cybersecurity incidents, the study compares SEC filings, customer notices, public statements, and breach-registry records through human-coded debt, actionability, translation mechanisms, incident-matched contrasts, cluster-robust models, close readings, and a refined proxy for protective-action infrastructure. Results show that genre matters more than surface simplicity: customer notices provide the strongest action infrastructure, registry records create visibility with minimal guidance, and remedy verification plus audience segmentation convert technical and legal detail into practical affordances. The article contributes to business, technical, information-systems, and corporate communication by theorizing disclosure as stakeholder-action translation. It offers a practical audit for breach-writing teams across genres.