Stress-Testing Our Security Assumptions in a World of New & Novel Risks

The commentary argues that the most damaging security failures stem from basic, unchallenged assumptions and that defending solely by analyzing past incidents is insufficient. It proposes a future-resilience approach: explicitly identify and stress-test assumptions across four categories—Referent, Affect, Interdependence, and Governance—to model how those assumptions could be compromised and to build resilience that survives unforeseeable, cross-domain risks.