The Cybersecurity Playbook

CHAPTER 2Mr./Ms. Cellophane

A very simple analogy that I use with the boardroom when you’re talking about cybersecurity and defense is a baseball game. I’ve got to pitch a perfect game every time. [Adversaries] only have to get one single. It doesn’t even need to be a bad apple that gets in. It can simply be somebody set up a server and missed a step. The reality in cybersecurity, if you’re on the defense, you have to pitch a perfect game every time. That’s not going to happen.

SVP/EVP, Professional Services Company

Poor Amos. His wife murders her lover in cold blood and claims doing so in self-defense against the man she says is an “unknown” intruder. Amos dutifully stands by her side, even after discovering the ugly truth of the affair. Everywhere Amos goes, he is a shadow in the background of his wife’s lurid story, practically invisible to all around him.

I’m speaking of the character Amos in the award-winning musical Chicago. His character laments just how overlooked he is in his solo number of the production aptly titled, “Mister Cellophane”:

• And even without clucking like a hen,
• ev’ryone gets noticed now and then,
• Unless, of course, that personage should be
• invisible inconsequential me.
• Cellophane, Mister Cellophane
• should have been my name, Mister Cellophane,
• ’cause you can look right thru me,
• walk right by me and never know I’m there.

Many of us can relate to Amos in sometimes feeling like we are invisible. It’s usually not a great feeling, typically accompanied ...