The Art of Attack

Chapter 5Curiosity, Persistence, and Agility

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

—Francis Bacon

What's the one thing persistence needs to exist?

It's a goal.

Persistence needs a pursuit. It could be argued that it also needs curiosity as its momentum, although I can concede there are exceptions to that rule—not all persistence is fueled by curiosity. Some forms of persistence rely on dogged beliefs and unwavering prejudice or narrow-mindedness. For instance, malicious attackers do not use curiosity as a tool. Instead, they team their persistence up with malevolent intent and pedal their beliefs that way. These two things—curiosity and persistence—don't always go hand in hand, but the combination is vital for the mindset we are seeking.

Curiosity itself is a driving force of progress within an attack scenario, but it will not pay off without persistence. There's also another point that can't go unmentioned here: you will have nothing to persist in if you cannot take in information and leverage even the most ordinary information properly. If you jump on the wrong pieces of information and try to use them persistently to your advantage, the operation will misfire early on. This is where another cognitive skill intersects: mental agility. There are two times it is pertinent. One is when you've leveraged good information against a target or environment but still end up with a less-than-adequate ...