Best Defense Against a Cyber-Attack Is to Know Your Adversary

Tom Chapman likes to quote the ancient Chinese general and military philosopher Sun Tzu when he's talking about cyber-security. "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles," Chapman quotes from Chapter 3 of "The Art of War."

Chapman, who is director of cyber operations at EdgeWave Security, believes that if enterprises looked at security the way the military does and used military-grade practices, few network breaches would succeed. Chapman gets his military slant because he was in charge of part of the U.S. Navy's cyber-war operations.

This is why he thinks the North Korea theory about the attack on Sony Pictures isn't accurate. He said that nothing about the attack makes sense if you try to blame that country. Instead, he thinks the attack was either someone making use of readily available attack scripts found on the Internet, or it was an inside job. He also said that it's obvious that Sony Pictures had very weak security practices, partly because they had so few people in the IT department assigned to security functions and so few of them actually did hands on security work.