Mirror Chess Is Not Good Cyber>
Forbes – Sam Curry
For those that donât play, mirroring in chess is a strategy where you simply copy the moves of your opponent. Generally speaking, it is a terrible approach: it opens you up to predictable weaknesses asynchronously because there is asymmetry in chess that can be exploited when you know the steps your opponent will take. To those not steeped in all things chess, the game looks symmetrical. However, the game is actually asymmetrical in the following ways: The board isnât symmetrical: the rightmost square on the nearest row (if youâre playing properly) is always white, and the left-hand peer is always black. The pieces arenât symmetrical: Kings face Queens and vice versa, looked at in either the X direction or the Y direction of the cartesian cut-up of the chess board. The moves arenât symmetrical: each player takes a move in their own turn, on their own timeline, slightly slipped from one another temporarily. Mirror chess became our analogy for looking at mirroring behavior in the cyber domain too. So how is cybersecurity âasymmetricalâ. David and I started by looking at all the ways that we see a defensive team acting on auto-pilot in strategy and execution and narrowed it down to three. Feel free to disagree with these or to add your own dimensions, but these are a good start: Mirror Adversary Behavior Mirroring Past Behavior Mirroring Other (1st order chaos as described here) Fields (e.g. IT) In looking at risks, David and I rapidly came to the conclusion that there are some very obvious (âno, duhâ) types of risks associated with mirror complications. For the most part, we donât care about the simple risks that others see and we dove deeper to find the secondary risks. For each area of analysis, we looked at four areas: complication, predictable impact, predictable response and mirror problem.
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samcurry/2019/02/11/mirror-chess-is-not-good-cyber/#689516375425