Mother Nature’s 7 Lessons for a Safer World
- Author: Stephanie Forrest
- Full Title: Mother Nature’s 7 Lessons for a Safer World
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #planet
- URL: https://nautil.us/mother-natures-7-lessons-for-a-safer-world-257526/
Highlights
- Defense is simply hard, whether it is devising public health responses to a pandemic, protecting a business against ransomware cyberattacks, or securing a border against hostile incursions. (View Highlight)
- Designing a detection system to discriminate accurately between “self” and “other” requires that system to be extremely precise in order to avoid making mistakes and either missing some attacks—or overcorrecting and harming the self. (View Highlight)
- Defending a system of any significant complexity almost always runs the risk of mistaken identity, where the response is directed against a part of the system itself. (View Highlight)
- perfect detection is impossible due to inherent ambiguities. Reliable citizens may be turned by foreign operatives, information that is harmless in one context may be misleading in another, and the so-called “fog of war” can increase the odds of friendly fire. (View Highlight)
- Many threats are tolerable at low levels but dangerous when they rise above a threshold. (View Highlight)
- Deciding where to set such thresholds not only impacts defensive effectiveness, but also its cost—if we deploy resources every time there is even a minor threat, defensive expenditures (be they measured in time, money, or energy) can become prohibitive. (View Highlight)
- A successful defense system must, as much as possible, deploy a proportional response—one that does not cause more damage than the original threat. (View Highlight)
- A detection system that is precise enough to avoid autoimmunity while still detecting nearly all attacks is resource-expensive. (View Highlight)
- Adaptation, evolution, and innovation allow attackers to discover weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a defense system, enabling them to stay one step ahead of a defense system. (View Highlight)
- we need to adapt—to changing personal circumstances, to changing attackers and attacks, to a changing political or economic climate to an evolving virus—to deploy effective and appropriately tailored defensive strategies. (View Highlight)
- we need to recognize that defense is costly and continuous. (View Highlight)
- when the systems we are trying to protect are all identical, the attacker only needs to devise an attack against one system, and it immediately has a method for attacking all (View Highlight)
- much defense is a “weakest link” problem (View Highlight)