97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know

Chapter 9. Don’t Overlook Prior Art from Other Industries

Ben Smith

There’s nothing I like better than uncovering a clue that someone else may already have figured out the very problem I am grappling with. This is especially awesome when that potential solution arrives from a completely unexpected source, someplace well outside the boundary of information security.

Here are some examples in thinking about how you might deal with...

Adversaries

We tend to be hardwired in thinking that “telecommunications” is a recent innovation. But communicating at a distance, and the networks humans use to move a thought from one place to another, have taken many forms over the centuries. Think about Depression-era bicycle couriers on Wall Street, commercial express companies, national postal service programs, semaphores, flag signaling, line-of-sight and relay communication, heliographs, fire-based beacons, smoke signals, synchronous optical telegraphs, and carrier pigeons.

Do you suppose there might be (already learned!) lessons about how each of these telecommunications networks was exploited for mischief or crime, poisoned with false data, or simply used in some unanticipated way?

Projects

As an information security professional, your coworkers may consider you an unwelcome representative from the Department of No. Where this can become especially uncomfortable is when we are tasked with ...