Inside the Security Mind: Making the Tough Decisions

The Art of Higher Security

Earlier I discussed the Virtue of Higher Focus as a fundamental security concept. With hundreds of thousands of hackers using hundreds of thousands of tools to exploit hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, there is little hope of addressing every possible security issue directly. Thus, it is important to approach security from a “higher” view.

If a new worm broke out, putting the Internet on high alert for contamination, it would, of course, be necessary to take a specific action, apply a specific patch, close a specific port on the firewall, or add a specific signature to all IDS devices. This is not contradicting the Virtue of Higher Focus. However, if we took specific actions that prevented only this worm and ...