Few years ago my neighbour Pier (Hi, Pier 😎) got me in to MMA and especially Muay Thai. The new adventure allowed me to evolve my understanding of martial arts and I came to realise that it’s not necessarily about the skill of my opponent, but it’s all about myself! Today the strength and size of my opponent doesn’t faze me at all as I concentrate on ..MY technique, strategy and stamina! I also started to see my past mistakes in the behaviour of many beginners joining my gym! I obviously share my recently collected experience to help others, but what’s incredible is that I often find the inexperienced fighters an easy target when (safely) sparring because of many misconceptions that they bring from outside.
I recently started to wonder if I’m able to pinpoint few parallels in the world of MMA and my professional work in Cyber Security!? Well.. YES I DO! And so here I am writing a blog where I will attempt to describe my point of view while enjoying the some awesome views in Split, Croatia! (pictures attached, enjoy!)
Crowd: Impossible!
Me: Well.. let’s take a closer look!
1. Strategic mindset
Fighting in a ring has nothing to do with a pub brawl that is often awkwardly simulated by the beginners in the ring! It’s NOT about swinging in the first round while losing all your stamina and energy opening yourself to a painful defeat initiated by your body followed by your mind and finally finished by your opponent in the later rounds! A ring fight is ALL about strategic, cool and clear mindset allowing to assess yourself, your opponent long before and then during the match while strategically utilising his weaknesses to your advantage! It’s about defining your game plan favouring your talents, continuously adjusting it depending on your opponent’s behaviour. Finally, it’s all about technique and speed continuously trained for months or years instead of chaotic and reactive actions complement with incomplete or untested defence! Guess what?! Cyber Security is VERY similar! It’s not about spending large amounts of money and buying shiny and innovative technology full of funky buttons, graphs and statistics. It’s actually a strategic mindset pointing at understanding yourself, your weaknesses, goals, risks and their likelihood. It’s about proactive and complete modelling, planning and training preparing for many eventualities including defeat and speedy recovery leveraging the safeguards available to you - technology is just a tool used in Cyber Security as we are actually fighting against a motivated human mind in similar fashion to a MMA match. Cyber Security is a journey therefore don’t expect to resolve your problem by defeating your opponent in the first rounds. Similar to ring battle, expect that your training and ring fight will last forever!
2. Tick-box exercise
Imagine this, you are suddenly transformed in to a modern business on a route to virtual battle ring with an invisible ghost-like opponent that is difficult to spot not mentioning about successful eradication. What strategy would you employ to protect yourself from the upcoming challenge?
Plan A: Partnering with experienced coach allowing to successfully guide you through the experience
Plan B: Self-Study supported by best practices
Plan C: No plan supported by overconfidence and hope
As you read through these options hopefully answers become obvious, but it seems that most of the beginners in both MMA and Cyber Security start with option C, upgrade to plan B and finally learn their lessons and understand that only plan A delivers the expected outcome. The beginners in my gym usually learn this during the first 60 minutes of their training. They initially hope for one punch Bruce Lee style knockout, they expect to move like Muhammad Ali with punching power similar to Mike Tyson. Unsurprisingly, their confidence ends up on their knees grasping for air and hoping for a sip of water. The consequences of learning a similar lesson in Cyber Security surround ones reputation and cost money one way of the other!
Cyber Security is not a finite problem therefore a high-level unstructured and selective tick-box approach turning in to “JOB DONE” without fully appreciating the nature of the Cyber Security landscape is a reason for a smile on the face of a Threat Actor successfully exfiltrating valuable information at this very moment!
3. The fundamentals
It seems that MMA and Cyber Security tends to be rather scary. I personally don’t share that opinion, but I know where it’s coming from. Human mind motivated by our instincts fear many things, but in this case we simply fear what we don’t understand! Without any knowledge of MMA and Cyber Security both domains sound mystical or even magical. Since magic doesn’t exist (forgive me Gandalf! ;) ), how do we navigate in this complex world of attack and defence techniques and vectors? It’s simpler than you expect! Before you will aim at the sky, FIRST do the basics RIGHT! Train you muscle memory, define a complete plan based on industry standards and execute it methodically. Remember that it’s much easier to build something from scratch than rebuild it in the future. Also, all of the legendary sport athletes or industry experts in the history had solid fundamentals allowing them to extend their greatness beyond their limits. The truth is that especially at the beginning of our journey in both MMA or Cyber Security, we can easily leverage the knowledge and experience of our coaches and global community. We should avoid defining our planing and training regimes from scratch on our own as that’s not the goal of our journey! We should uplift our skills if necessary to gain experience providing security and confidence during our journey through MMA and Cyber Security. In both situations, that will rapidly increase our chances of success and allow us to avoid painful and embarrassing disappointments!
To summarise, Mike Tyson was right when he said that “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face!”. Trust me, I felt it many times in the gym and conceptually during many sleepless nights at work. I’m still standing, I’m focused and excited about the future! It’s true that maybe we can’t really accurately predict the future and life will challenge us in many shapes and forms. We can however prepare to it while simply doing the basics right, living in the moment while caring about our surroundings and think strategically allowing us to develop a direction supported with MANY options rather than a high level tick-box based world with a thin surface that can and will be cracked in the future! Cyber Security is not only important, but it’s the right thing to do! As for MMA.. it’s the most intense, dangerous, physically and mentally challenging sport that I tried in my life… I’m going back on Monday! :)