Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

I used to think about security as a wall.

Keep the bad people out.
Strong passwords, good firewall, patched systems.
If the wall held, I was safe.

Then one credential leaked —
not even an important one, or so I thought —
and I watched how far it could reach.

That was the day I learned the real question.

Not “how do I keep them out?”
but “when one of them gets in,
how much of everything can they touch?”

Because that little key
turned out to open far more than it should have.
One leaked thing, and suddenly
the attacker had a map of the whole house.

Nobody had decided that on purpose.
That’s the part that stayed with me.
The blast radius wasn’t attacked into being.
It was just never designed.
We’d handed out broad access because it was easy,
and never asked what it would cost the day it leaked.

Now I design the radius on purpose.

Every system gets only what it needs.
Every key opens one door, not the building.
I assume the wall will fail somewhere,
and I ask what happens next.

I can’t promise nobody ever gets in.
Nobody honest can.

But I can decide, in advance,
how small that day has to be.

The wall was never the whole job.
The radius was.

– Serguey Asael Shinder