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In American football, reviewing films from previous game days is fundamental to achieving victory on Sunday. Understanding an opponent’s tactics and stratagems is critical to crafting a defensive strategy for a football team. Reviewing your upcoming opponent’s past games helps you to have a direct understanding of how they really operate and what they’re likely to do when it’s your turn to face them. Implicit in taking the time to understand your opponent like this is the fact that you recognize that you’re facing a skilled opponent, and are paying appropriate respect to your opponent and their skills.

In a new opinion piece titled The Knight Fork: Defining Defense in 2013, Trend Micro’s Tom Kellermann reviews the “game day films” of cyberattacks and APT campaigns of the past year. As we get ready to enter 2013, he looks at these past trends to outline what defensive tactics may define risk management for security professionals in the coming year.

In this short paper, he draws on one of the key defensive principles in chess, the idea of the “knight’s fork”, a move that is assured of success by simultaneously attacking two pieces at once. Similarly, in an increasingly dangerous world with equally limited budgets, he outlines areas of focus that can maximize defensive benefit with the greatest cost benefit.

As Tom says, “The greatest head coaches as the greatest hackers are all grandmasters of chess. As we close out 2012 we must ask ourselves – how might we spin the cyber chess board and create a knight’s fork?”

Take some time and read The Knight Fork: Defining Defense in 2013 and you’ll get some ideas on how you can better protect your environment by creating a knight’s fork for 2013.