Week 08: Lecture Reflection
In the morning lecture, we started off by covering errors, and the question was, when something goes wrong, what is the root cause? We covered root cause analysis, where we try to work out what was the original reason something went wrong, because if we can work that out, we can prevent future errors from occurring. We went through a cyber disaster example:
We could blame user error (shift the blame)
We could blame the culture
After that we went through how humans focus on what grabs our attention instead of what’s important. We talked about magicians and how the whole trick relies on the magician controlling the audiences attention, drawing them away from where the real trick is happening.
We covered frequency gambling, where we match the current situation with previous situations, and we pick the most common solution we’ve used in the past. We covered a few smaller topics like confirmation bias and satisficing (good enough, not perfect). Admittedly at this point in time my attention was drawn elsewhere and I stopped taking notes on the morning lecture. Hopefully I’ll be able to read through the compiled week 08 notes for what I missed out on.
In the evening lecture, Richard Buckland read us a story! About the 3 mile island nuclear reactor incident. “If you design a system without security in mind, expect normal security breaches” - Richard. He said we have to stop focusing on scapegoats and systems that can’t fail, and design systems so that the impact is limited when things go wrong.
We covered the steps in asset management
Work out your most important assets, and just defend them
Assume you will be breached and set it up so that it won’t be a total disaster (compartmentalize?)














