CyberSecurity and Basketball: Seemingly Unrelated, Yet Similarly Illustrating The Dangers Of Unseen Threats

I recently came across the following interesting infographic (reproduced with permission), comparing unseen cybersecurity threats to the threats faced by basketball teams that do not fully recognize and appreciate the offensive capabilities of one or more opposing players.

While professional sports and cybersecurity may seem like two completely unrelated disciplines, the reality is that professionals working in both fields face similar prospects of suffering serious failures if they fail to both correctly identify and properly address any significant threats posed by their opponents. Whether on an NBA court or in an information-security operations center (SOC), professionals must understand what resources they have at their disposal, and make decisions as to how to best deploy those resources.

Over the years, I have seen multiple instances in which significant cybersecurity “incidents” have resulted from security teams failing to understand their own inventory of assets and attack surfaces, underestimating their enemies’ capabilities, and making catastrophic decisions vis-à-vis task prioritization.

In many cases, cyber-defenders developed a wildly exaggerated sense of security as a result of measuring the wrong things (using the wrong metrics, establishing incorrect key performance indicators (KPIs), etc. – a concern that I will discuss in another article soon – and, a problem that, per the infographic, happens in the world of basketball as well.

In the meantime, check out this infographic:

Reproduced with permission of Nowsourcing