The Art of Cyberwar | Part X | Terrain

The principles:

“The natural formation of the country is the soldier’s best ally; make use of it to your advantage.”

“When the general is weak and without authority; when his orders are not clear and distinct; when there are no fixed duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganization.”

“The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.” — Sun Tzu

Ground First

Sun Tzu makes a simple demand: know the ground on which you stand.

The proper ground turns disadvantage into leverage. The wrong ground turns strength into exposure. Terrain is not merely soil; it is topology, logistics, law, culture, and architecture. In the modern world, it includes cloud regions, compliance borders, identity planes, and network topology. Choose well, and the fight often narrows into something you can actually win.

This is not an abstract chapter. It’s a practical one.

If you’ve ever seen a breach unfold, you’ve witnessed terrain deciding outcomes in real time: attackers rarely “win” because they are stronger; they win because they enter through easy ground, move through poorly observed corridors, and reach valuable systems before defenders can orient.

The defender’s job is to resist. It is to shape the ground, so the adversary’s best options become expensive, loud, or impossible.

Types of Terrain – What They Feel Like, What They Demand

Sun Tzu names a wide variety of ground. In practice, the terrain we face, militarily, digitally, and politically, collapses into recurring patterns: open, narrow, steep, encircled, and expansive.

Each demands a distinct strategy. Each punishes a different kind of arrogance.

Open Ground – Fast, visible, unforgiving

Open ground is where you can be seen.

In war, it is flat land with no cover: movement is easy, concealment is costly, and discipline decides whether speed becomes an advantage or panic. Detection and clean maneuvering are important because contact is constant.

In cybersecurity, open ground is your public-facing surface area: internet-exposed services, public APIs, external portals, and remote access entry points. This is not where you want complexity. You want ruthless simplicity, fewer doors, fewer endpoints, fewer exceptions, paired with strong telemetry. Frameworks like the CIS Controls and NIST CSF explicitly prioritize inventorying and minimizing public-facing assets—making clarity and control here a universal best practice.

Open ground is also where deception works best. Decoys, false signals, and baited paths can pull an enemy out of position. In cyber, honeypots and canary tokens do the same: they invite movement into visibility and turn curiosity into evidence.

Real-world case: In 2021, the Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities (ProxyLogon) exposed thousands of organizations’ email systems to the internet. Attackers rapidly exploited unpatched, public-facing assets—demonstrating why CIS Controls and NIST CSF stress the importance of inventory and minimizing the external attack surface.

Open ground isn’t “unsafe.” It’s honest. It shows you what you built.

Narrow Ground – Chokepoints, bridges, legacy stacks

Narrow ground is where everything funnels.

In military history, chokepoints decide battles because geometry becomes force. A smaller army can hold a larger one, not by being stronger, but by limiting the enemy’s options. Just think of the legendary last stand of Leonidas and the Battle of Thermopylae.

In cyber and cloud, narrow ground is often the infrastructure everyone relies on and no one wants to touch: legacy integrations, VPN tunnels, identity gateways, brittle on-prem choke points, systems tied to modern workflows by thread and habit. They become bridges. Bridges become targets.

If you harden one thing this quarter, harden your chokepoints, segment around them. Add compensating controls. Increase logging where applicable. Treat narrow terrain as sacred because when it fails, everything behind it is exposed. The MITRE ATT&CK framework’s focus on lateral movement and privilege escalation highlights why chokepoints must be secured and closely monitored.

Mini-case: The 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack targeted a single VPN account—an overlooked chokepoint with no multi-factor authentication. This breach underscores the criticality of securing and monitoring privileged access pathways.

Martial principles show up cleanly here. Wing Chun teaches that in close range, cutting angles and superior structure become everything. Trapping is about denying your opponent options. Narrow terrain does the same: it constrains movement and penalizes sloppy positioning.

Steep Ground – Visibility and defensibility, limited mobility

Steep ground is an advantage you must maintain.

High ground offers visibility and defensive leverage, but you don’t sprint on it. Movement becomes deliberate. Once you lose it, regaining it costs more than taking it did.

In cyber/cloud terms, the “steep ground” is where you place your crown jewels: production enclaves, privileged access vaults, critical logging pipelines, backup infrastructure, and identity governance, zones with strict access controls, immutable logs, and minimal pathways. NIST Special Publication 800-53 and CIS Controls both emphasize layered defenses and strong separation for critical assets, reinforcing the need for deliberate, hardened environments.

These environments should feel “steep” to anyone moving through them, including your own staff. That friction is the point. Steep terrain ensures enforcement of control.

Industry example: Major cloud providers routinely isolate customer data and management functions in highly restricted “steep ground” zones, applying controls from NIST SP 800-53 and CIS to prevent lateral movement and ensure containment if a breach occurs.

In Jiu Jitsu, this is akin to mount or back control: you don’t rush to snatch up a submission. You stabilize, isolate, and apply pressure through position and then finish. The defender who gets impatient on steep ground usually falls off it.

Encircled Ground – When you risk being surrounded

Encircled terrain is where isolation becomes lethal.

In war, encirclement breaks supply lines, erodes morale, and forces rash decisions. In cyber, encirclement often begins as “convenience” and ends as captivity: vendor dependencies, brittle third-party integrations, shadow IT no one owns, “critical” workflows held together by one person’s tribal knowledge.

The danger is that encirclement rarely feels dramatic at first. It feels normal until you need to restore. Until a vendor is down. Until the contract becomes leverage. Until the only admin is on PTO and the incident is already in motion.

Encircled ground demands exits: recovery paths, out-of-band access, air-gapped backups, and playbooks that restore connectivity without improvisation. CIS Control 11 and the NIST CSF Recovery Function both emphasize the importance of tested backup and recovery plans, as reliance on a single vendor or system is a strategic vulnerability.

Recent headline: In the wake of the 2022 Okta breach, organizations that relied exclusively on one identity provider faced business continuity risks. Those with tested out-of-band recovery and contractual exit clauses, as recommended by CIS and NIST, were able to restore operations more quickly.

If you don’t have those, you don’t have resilience. You have hope.

Expansive Ground – Flat, wide, tempting for overreach

Expansive terrain invites ambition. It also hides risk.

Movement feels easy because there’s “room,” but oversight drops as the supply lines lengthen. This is how empires, and cloud estates, collapse: not from one failure, but from accumulated, ungoverned territory.

In cyber, expansive ground is sprawl: dozens of cloud accounts, multiple providers, endless permissions, duplicated tools, integrations stacked on integrations. Sprawl isn’t evil. It’s simply unmanaged terrain.

Expansive ground demands scalable governance: infrastructure-as-code policies, automated compliance, continuous asset inventory, and hard limits on “just one more integration.” Otherwise, you end up “owning” too many things to defend any of them properly. Both NIST CSF and the CIS Controls call for continuous asset management and automated enforcement to keep sprawl in check.

This is where adversaries thrive, inside your noise.

Example: Several high-profile breaches, including Capital One (2019), were linked to sprawling cloud environments where asset management and policy enforcement lagged behind rapid deployment. This highlights why NIST CSF and CIS Controls call for continuous inventory and automated governance.

Choosing the Ground – Offense Through Selection

A leader’s first tactical choice is where to fight. Good generals choose terrain that favors their force and punishes the enemy’s approach. That’s a decision, not a reflex.

In cybersecurity, this is how you win before the breach: place valuable services behind hardened, observable layers and force attackers into monitored choke points. Make lateral movement steep. Make privilege escalation loud. Make time and friction the price of progress.

In cloud architecture, it refers to trust zones and least-privilege boundaries that govern movement, much as terrain shapes an army’s movement. If an adversary wants access, they must climb and be exposed while doing it.

In foreign policy, it means choosing diplomatic and economic levers rather than landing zones that stretch logistics and public support. Sometimes the “terrain” is public will. Sometimes it’s alliance cohesion. Sometimes it’s your economy. Burn those, and you’ve lost the campaign even if you win the first clash.

Choosing ground is an active defense. It doesn’t surrender initiative; it shapes the enemy’s options.

This is where martial deception becomes a strategy. A feint isn’t a lie, it’s an invitation. In Wing Chun, you draw the reach, trap the limb, clear the line, and strike at the same time. In Muay Thai, you show the jab to invite a teep to sweep the leg. In Jiu Jitsu, you offer the submission attempt you’re prepared to counter. Terrain selection works the same way: you present what looks like access, but what you built is a corridor of control.

Leadership, Discipline, and Knowing Your Soldiers

Sun Tzu insists a general must know his troops. That’s leadership in a sentence.

A leader’s indecision, ego, or poor communication is as lethal as bad geography. Poor leaders over-commit, under-communicate, or ignore warnings. They treat friction as disobedience and clarity as optional. That is how organizations drift into the “slovenly haphazard” disorder Sun Tzu warns about: plenty of tools, no coherence.

Discipline matters. Soldiers and engineers, treated with respect but held to standards, perform under pressure. Leniency breeds sloppiness; cruelty breeds silence. Both are operational risks.

Know your teams: strengths, fatigue thresholds, and tempo. Rotate duty. Limit emergency hours. Maintain training. In cloud and cyber, this includes on-call limits, respect for sleep, post-incident retrospectives, and psychological safety to report near-misses before they become incidents.

Morale shows up earlier than metrics. Leaders build the culture that sustains long campaigns.

Calculation Before Battle – The Work of Winning

Sun Tzu elevates calculation above impulse: the commander who measures many variables before engagement usually wins; the one who does not, loses.

This calculation is methodical: map terrain, count supplies (capacity), estimate enemy options, and plan contingencies.

In cyber, that means knowing your attack surface, understanding threat actor patterns, identifying likely pivot points, and building tested response runbooks. Rehearse, not because you expect a breach, but because you refuse to improvise under duress.

In the cloud, this entails calculating blast radius, recovery objectives, and the cost of complexity relative to the cost of resilience. It also means choosing fewer tools and mastering them, because every new platform is a new terrain you must defend.

In policy, it means calculating costs in treasure, trust, and time. Private-sector analogs are attention, capital, and brand.

Winning is the product of preparation. You cannot improvise a viable posture in a crisis.

Specific Strategies by Terrain – Practical Moves

Open ground: prioritize speed and detection; keep public assets to a minimum; deploy decoys and canaries; monitor aggressively. (CIS Controls 1, 7; NIST CSF Identify & Protect).
Narrow ground: enforce access controls and logging; funnel traffic through audited gateways; validate identity aggressively. (MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF Detect)
Steep ground: design immutable environments and strict separation; place critical controls in high-ground enclaves with minimal human pathways. (NIST SP 800-53, CIS Control 13)
Encircled ground: ensure out-of-band recovery, air-gapped backups, manual admin paths; maintain contractual exit clauses with vendors. (NIST CSF Recovery, CIS Control 11)
Expansive ground: prune and consolidate; adopt infrastructure-as-code policies and automated compliance; set hard limits on new integrations. (CIS Control 1, NIST CSF Asset Management)

Every choice reduces the opponent’s options and preserves the defender’s leverage. In practice, aligning terrain strategies with proven frameworks isn’t bureaucracy; it’s how you translate doctrine into daily operations.

Parallels: Rome, Corporations, and Nations

Rome didn’t fail because it was weak; it failed because it could no longer pay for its expansion. The pattern repeats: a leader mistakes reach for control, stretches supply lines, and forgets the home base.

In business, over-expansion without integration kills cash flow and culture. In policy, interventions without sustainable objectives are hollow support. In cyber, growth without governance turns territory into liability.

The remedy is the same: select advantageous ground, keep logistics tight, and honor the limits of what you can sustain.

Closing: Ground, People, Calculation

Terrain teaches humility. It forces honesty about supply lines, political will, and human limits. Leaders must select ground that fits their forces, know their people well enough to deploy them without breaking them, and calculate relentlessly before contact. The best strategy isn’t the loudest; it’s the one most rigorously mapped to the ground and standards that define your domain.

Sun Tzu’s point is blunt: the general who prepares wins because he has already made many small victories before the first clash. The rest simply discover, too late, what the ground beneath them already knew.

The Next Step: Situations Reveal the Ground

Sun Tzu ends this chapter the way a good fighter ends an exchange: not with noise, but with control.

Terrain is not merely where you fight; it is what the fight allows. It determines which tactics are available, which movements are costly, and which victories are possible without incurring blood, bandwidth, or morale costs. The wise commander doesn’t “try harder” on bad ground. He changes the angle, changes the conditions, and shapes the enemy’s options.

Muay Thai does it with ring craft: take space, cut off exits, force exchanges where your strikes land cleanly. Jiu Jitsu does it with: position, then control, then submission, and sometimes with a ruthless setup: allowing the opponent to chase the submission you expected, only to counter when they overextend.

Terrain works the same way. Choose it well, and you’re not only defending but shaping the enemy’s approach until their “attack” becomes the opening you built the environment to reveal.

That leads us directly back to the principles that opened this chapter:

“The natural formation of the country is the soldier’s best ally; make use of it to your advantage.” Because once you understand the ground, you stop fighting the fight the enemy wants, and start forcing the battle they cannot win.

And when leadership is weak, orders are unclear, and duties are unfixed, the result is exactly what Sun Tzu promised: utter disorganization, not because the enemy was brilliant, but because the ground exposed what was already unstable.

The highest standard remains unchanged: the general who advances without vanity and retreats without fear, whose only thought is to protect his people and do good service, is the jewel of the kingdom.

Bridge to Part XI – The Nine Situations

Terrain teaches you what is possible. The Nine Situations teaches you what to do when possibility collapses into reality, when you’re advancing, retreating, encircled, trapped, deep in enemy ground, or approaching decisive contact.

It is a doctrine of movement under pressure: acting in accordance with circumstances without losing coherence.

You’ve learned how to read the ground.
Next, you’ll learn how to fight on it.

Security Without the Pessimism | Capstone: The Human Architecture of Resilience

There’s a moment in every incident, and in every life, when things go sideways.
An urgent alert comes in at 2 a.m.
The phone buzzes with something you didn’t want to see.
The room suddenly feels smaller.
Your pulse skyrockets ahead of your ability to reason.

That’s the pivot point.

Not the breach, not the threat actor, not the malware strain. The moment your mind decides whether to rush, freeze, or breathe.

And if the past two decades in cybersecurity have taught us anything, it’s this: The most overlooked control isn’t technical at all — it’s the ability to think clearly under pressure.

You can build the best firewall on earth, layer your identity stack, and lock down every endpoint within reach. But if the wrong person panics at the wrong moment? Your architecture won’t crumble, but your response will.

And the irony is that the same pattern shows up everywhere.
In the gym.
In martial arts.
In American foreign policy across multiple generations.
In corporate culture.
In our personal lives.

Technology changes. Tools evolve.
But human behavior remains the battlefield.

This capstone is about that battlefield, the one beneath all the dashboards and diagrams.
The human architecture of resilience.

Not fear.
Not pessimism.
Not endless warnings.
Just clarity, culture, awareness, and depth.

I. The Calm Before the Click: Thinking Clearly Under Pressure

Cybersecurity professionals often discuss “root cause.”
The CVE.
The misconfig.
The missing patch.
The malicious link.

But if you trace incidents far enough back, you rarely find a purely technical failure.
You find someone who was tired.
Someone who rushed.
Someone is overloaded with tasks, tabs, or alerts.
Someone who clicked before the mind caught up.

Attackers have known this longer than we have.
Social engineering is, at its core, the psychological equivalent of an ambush.
It doesn’t rely on brilliance — it relies on rhythm.
Interrupt someone’s rhythm, and you can make them do almost anything.

History played the same game long before phishing emails existed.

During WWI, the U.S. population had no appetite for a European conflict until the Committee on Public Information mastered message engineering on a national scale.

During Vietnam, selective narratives were used to anchor the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, one of the clearest examples of how urgency overrides discernment.

After 9/11, emotional exhaustion and fear gave the green light to decisions that would shape two decades of conflict, including the push toward Iraq in 2003 on intelligence the government already knew was questionable at best.

The pattern is timeless: pressure → perception drops → people accept what they would normally question.

In cybersecurity, that’s the moment a breach begins. Not when the payload deploys, but the moment someone stops breathing long enough to see clearly.

Martial arts teach this early: when your structure collapses, so does your mind. The fight is rarely won by the strongest, but by the one who stays calm.

Cybersecurity isn’t so different. We need quieter minds, not louder alarms. Consider the Apollo 13 mission: when an oxygen tank exploded in space, it wasn’t advanced technology alone that saved the crew—it was the unwavering composure, clear communication, and problem-solving focus of both astronauts and mission control. Their story remains a testament to the power of preparation, training, and the human spirit under pressure.

Psychological research supports this need for balance: the Yerkes-Dodson Law demonstrates that while a certain level of stress can sharpen performance, too much leads to mistakes and paralysis. It’s not the loudest alarms or the highest stress that produce the best outcomes, but the ability to operate with steady focus under pressure.

II. Security Isn’t a Toolset. It’s a Culture.

This is the part vendors never put in their brochures.
Tools matter, of course they do, but they’re not the foundation.
If a team’s culture is fractured, fearful, or fatigued, the best tool becomes another dashboard no one trusts.

A culture of security is built on three traits: Curiosity. Communication. Psychological safety.

Curiosity is the click buffer. It’s the pause before the action. It’s the “does this feel right?” instinct that catches what technology misses.

Communication is the force multiplier. If people don’t feel comfortable asking questions, you don’t have a security program; you have a façade. The worst breaches happen in organizations where employees believe that reporting something suspicious will get them punished.

Psychological safety is the foundation beneath it all. You cannot build defense through fear.
If people feel judged, they go silent. And silence is where threat actors win.

Across American history, the same dynamic appears at scale. Governments that relied on controlling the narrative rather than fostering transparency created long-term instability.
Nations that punished dissent instead of listening to it made poorer decisions, walked into unnecessary conflicts, or ignored early warnings because no one felt safe raising them.

In cybersecurity, the equivalent is leadership that says: “If you click a bad link, come to us immediately, you’re part of the solution, not the problem.”

Culture isn’t a policy. Culture is what happens when no one is watching.

III. The Invisible Threat: Complacency

Complacency is the enemy that feels like a friend. It arrives quietly. It shows up after long stretches of “nothing happened.” It hides behind phrases like:

“We’ve never had an incident.”
“We’ve always done it this way.”
“Our tools would catch that.”

Every major breach you can name—SolarWinds, Equifax, Colonial Pipeline—roots itself in complacency somewhere: A missed update. An over-trusted vendor. An assumption that the environment was safer than it actually was. The 2013 Target data breach is a sobering example: multiple security alarms were triggered, but critical warnings were overlooked amidst noise and unclear processes. The failure wasn’t just technical—it was cultural and human. True resilience is built not on more tools, but on clear communication, shared responsibility, and organizational discipline.

There’s a parallel here, too, in public psychology. Before WWI, the U.S. believed oceans protected it.

Before the Vietnam War, we believed that superior technology guaranteed strategic clarity.
Before 9/11, we believed asymmetrical warfare couldn’t reach our shores.
Before the Iraq invasion, many believed intelligence agencies couldn’t be wrong.

Every time, familiarity dulled skepticism. Certainty replaced awareness.

Threat actors exploit the same weakness in cybersecurity: When we stop questioning our own assumptions, we hand them the keys.

But the solution isn’t paranoia. It’s presence—the discipline to stay aware without fear, engaged without burning out, and to use quiet periods to strengthen fundamentals rather than relax them.

Martial artists call this “maintaining the white belt mentality.” It’s the idea that no matter how skilled you become, your awareness must remain humble. The strike you don’t see coming isn’t the strongest; it’s the one you assumed wouldn’t land.

IV. Defense in Depth Begins With Humans in Depth

Defense in depth is usually presented as a diagram: Layers. Controls. Policies. Logging. Detection.

But the deepest layer is always the human beings behind the console.

Humans who communicate clearly under pressure.
Humans who don’t panic.
Humans who collaborate instead of silo.
Humans who maintain integrity even when no one is watching.

You can’t automate those traits.
You can only cultivate them.

A resilient team has depth:
Depth of character.
Depth of discipline.
Depth of humility.
Depth of trust.

Leadership plays a massive role here.
A leader who panics creates a cascading failure.
A leader who hides incidents creates blind spots.
A leader who blames creates avoidance.

But a leader who stays calm?
A leader who listens?
A leader who respects the intelligence of their team?

That kind of leadership becomes its own security layer, the kind attackers can’t penetrate.

Martial philosophy applies here beautifully:
The master doesn’t fight everything.
The master knows when not to fight.
The master conserves energy, maintains structure, and remains sufficiently present to move precisely when needed.

That’s cybersecurity at its best. Not a flurry of tools or panic-driven responses. But steady awareness, grounded action, and a team that trusts itself. The response to the Stuxnet worm demonstrated the power of multidisciplinary collaboration: security researchers, government agencies, and private-sector teams worked together to analyze, share intelligence, and adapt rapidly. Their coordinated effort underscores that no single individual or technology has all the answers—resilience is a collective achievement.

V. The Four Pillars of Real Resilience

Looking back across this entire series, four fundamentals keep appearing.

1. Calm

The ability to breathe before acting. Security begins in the mind, not the machine.

2. Culture

Tools help. Culture protects. Culture catches what software can’t.

3. Awareness

Not paranoia, presence. The discipline to question, verify, and stay awake to the world around you.

4. Depth

Technical depth is valuable. Human depth is irreplaceable. Depth fuels resilience in every domain: networks, clouds, teams, and nations.

These aren’t pessimistic ideas. These are empowering ideas. They’re principles that make security feel less like fear and more like clarity.

Threat actors depend on confusion. They depend on fatigue. They depend on people who doubt their instincts.

A calm mind. A strong culture. A present awareness. A deep team.

That’s how you win. Not loudly, but with consistency.

VI. Final Thought: Security Is a Human Practice Before It’s a Technical One

If there’s a thesis to Security Without the Pessimism, it’s this: Security isn’t something we bolt onto systems. It’s something we build into ourselves.

The work isn’t glamorous or cinematic. It’s often quiet, slow, and unrecognized. But it matters, because every decision and moment of awareness contributes to something bigger than any one of us, a culture of resilience.

So here’s the takeaway: You don’t need pessimism to stay secure. You just need presence. You need clarity and people who care enough to pause, communicate, and stay humble.

That’s the foundation of a safer digital world, built one calm, aware, disciplined human at a time.

The Art of Cyberwar | Part III | Attack by Stratagem

The principle:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Sun Tzu – Chapter III

Strategy vs. Stratagem

A strategy is designed for longevity, while a stratagem addresses immediate challenges. Strategy anticipates years ahead to foster resilience. Stratagem focuses on the next breach, exploit, or distraction.

Within cybersecurity, strategy encompasses architectural design, layered controls, validated incident response plans, and a culture prepared to act decisively during crises. Stratagem represents the attacker’s tools, such as persuasive emails, covert code injections, or precisely timed physical penetration tests.

Both approaches are powerful, yet each possesses inherent limitations.

The Modern Battlefield: Fluid and Fractured

The threat landscape evolves continuously. Traditional boundaries are replaced by cloud environments, API vulnerabilities, and interconnected third-party networks. Security architects must prioritize adaptability and fluidity over static defenses to effectively mitigate risks.

Zero Trust principles, continuous validation, and integrated security practices throughout the development lifecycle enable proactive identification and mitigation of vulnerabilities prior to production deployment. In an environment where compromise is presumed and rapid response is critical, these measures are indispensable.

Effective defenders adopt a proactive stance. They anticipate adversary actions, analyze behavioral patterns, and design systems to adapt under attack rather than fail.

Attack by Stratagem: The Psychology of Exploitation

Major breaches often originate through psychological manipulation rather than technical flaws. Techniques such as phishing, vishing, and deepfakes exploit cognitive vulnerabilities to diminish user awareness. This approach mirrors historical propaganda methods, where controlling perception leads to controlling behavior.

While governments previously leveraged headlines and radio broadcasts, contemporary attackers exploit digital interfaces such as login pages and hyperlinks. Both strategies depend on user fatigue, habitual behavior, and misplaced trust. If users believe a fraudulent login page is legitimate, they inadvertently compromise security.

Similarly, if citizens equate fear with patriotism, they may relinquish critical judgment in favor of perceived safety. As Ben Franklin observed, individuals who prioritize temporary safety over essential liberty may ultimately forfeit both: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.“

This tactic operates effectively across a spectrum, from individual email inboxes to broader ideological movements.

The Architecture of Awareness

A resilient security architecture reflects the characteristics of an aware and vigilant mindset.

Network segmentation limits the blast radius. Application hardening predicts misuse before it happens.

Firewalls and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems provide the critical, irreplaceable resource of time.

Knowing your environment is knowing yourself.

Without a thorough understanding of all dependencies, exposures, and behavioral patterns, it is impossible to detect significant changes or anomalies. The same principle applies at the national level: when societies cease to critically evaluate their narratives, division and deception proliferate with ease.

Propaganda Built Into the Code

James Montgomery Flagg, I Want You for U.S. Army, 1917, collection of Chip and Carrie Robertson, photo by Robert Wedemeyer — James Montgomery Flagg, *I Want You for U.S. Army*, 1917, collection of Chip and Carrie Robertson, photo by Robert Wedemeyer

From Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information to the televised theater of Desert Storm, America learned how framing shapes belief.

Attackers apply similar principles, constructing their deceptive tactics by exploiting established trust.

Deceptive login pages replicate corporate portals, ransomware communications adopt professional language, and deepfakes are crafted to appear and sound authentic.

The primary threat is not the attack itself, but the absence of awareness regarding potential dangers. Stratagem prevails when critical scrutiny is abandoned.

Reverse Engineering the Present

Post-incident analyses consistently reveal that warning signals were present before breaches. Although alerts, logs, and telemetry data were available, they did not translate into actionable understanding.

Visibility does not equate to genuine situational awareness.

Historical events reinforce this observation.

The United States has engaged in conflicts based on incomplete or inaccurate information, often mistaking perception for certainty.

In both cybersecurity and geopolitics, failure frequently results from conflating raw data with meaningful insight.

Understanding adversaries requires effective intelligence gathering, including threat hunting, reconnaissance, and red-team exercises.

Self-awareness in cybersecurity necessitates discipline, such as maintaining asset visibility, ensuring policy integrity, and sustaining composure during operations.

A deficiency in either area enables adversarial stratagems to succeed.

The Quiet Defense

The most robust networks, analogous to resilient individuals, operate discreetly.
They do not engage in ostentatious displays; instead, they maintain a constant state of preparedness.

Their resilience is embedded within their structural design rather than expressed through rhetoric.

Authentic resilience does not stem from more active dashboards or faster technical tools. Resilience is rooted in organizational culture, situational awareness, and a humble approach. It is defined by the ability to learn, adapt, and respond more rapidly than emerging threats.

Cybersecurity, akin to statecraft, is a continuous endeavor to prevent breaches. Success is achieved not by engaging in every conflict, but by anticipating and neutralizing threats before they materialize, thereby securing victory without ever having to fight. Bringing us full circle back to understanding the fundamental nature of the original principle: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.