Nobody Attacks You in General
Last timeDrawing the System Honestly
Describe your attackers by what they can do and what they want, not by how frightening they sound. Then throw away the threats that are real and have nothing to do with you.
Capability, not character
Ask a team who might attack them and the answers arrive as adjectives.
Sophisticated attackers. Determined attackers. State actors, usually
mentioned with a slight laugh. Script kiddies, mentioned dismissively.
None of those descriptions lets you decide anything. You cannot look at a
proposed defence and ask whether it stops a determined attacker, because
determination is not a quantity your system interacts with.
Describe them instead as a capability, which means five concrete things:
the budget they can spend, the time they can spend, the access they
already have, the skills they can hire, and the consequence they are
willing to risk.
| budget, 0 to 3 | time, 0 to 3 | access already held, 0 t | how much of your incomin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| an opportunist running a | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| a criminal group after r | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| somebody who already has | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| an organisation with a s | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
Sophisticated is not a property of a person. It is a price. A technique
that cost a research team two years in 2015 costs anybody fifty dollars
and a weekend now, because it has been written up, packaged and resold.
So capability is not fixed either, which is the first argument for the
final lesson of this course.
Motive decides the target
Capability says what somebody can do. Motive says which of your assets
they come for, and you already have the asset register from the first
lesson, so this step is a mapping rather than a new exercise.
The lesson stops here
5 more paragraphs to go
You have read the opening. The rest of the argument, the problems that check whether it landed, and the lines worth keeping at the end all come with a plan.
The first lesson of every course in the library reads the whole way through, free, so you can see exactly what the rest of them are.
See the planThe contentsThis is the reading half
Starting the course gives you your own copy of it. Every idea on every page has problems standing under it, marked with a reason rather than a tick, and any sentence you do not believe can be opened and argued with. None of that can happen on a page nobody owns.
The contents