Cybersecurity First Principles: A Reboot of Strategy and Tactics

8 Summation

If you don't like peas, it is probably because you have not had them fresh. It is the difference between reading a great book and reading the summary on the back.

—Lemony Snicket

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

—Douglas Adams

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in 500 pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Overview

This book is the culmination of roughly 30 years of my experience working in the cybersecurity community. I arrived on the scene just as the Internet began to be useful to business, to academia, and to general‐purpose government functions. You could say that I was there from the beginning. The current state of cybersecurity thinking is largely due to me and my peers in the industry trying to figure it out on the fly. We have made some great progress. We have also made some big mistakes, which is par for the course in any great adventure. Most of the mistakes get corrected over time with the people, process, and technology triad as we find new and better ways to accomplish certain tasks or realize that the method we were using to accomplish something wasn't really working. The one mistake we haven't corrected, though, is coming to some consensus about what all this effort is really about. It's a common meme in the community ...