Via telegraph.co.uk -
Jonathan Evans, the new Director-General of MI5, faces a difficult first few months in the job. MI5 has been criticised for its failure to follow Mohammad Sidique Kahn, the 7/7 bomber. Kahn was known by MI5 to have been talking to one of those convicted last week for plotting in 2004 to place a huge fertiliser bomb in a shopping centre. Kahn would later kill himself and many others when he detonated his bomb on the London underground on July 7, 2005.
MI5's failure to follow Kahn is not difficult to explain: the organisation had, and still has, a very limited number of trained operatives, and so could not follow every individual connected in some way to those known to be terrorists. The decision not to place Kahn under 24-hour surveillance proved to be tragically wrong, but to have made the correct call at the time would have taken a miraculous degree of insight.
The public and politicians hope for miracles from MI5: unsurprisingly, it fails to provide them. The odds are always in favour of the terrorists. As the IRA used to say: "We only have to get lucky once, you have to be lucky every time." But MI5 has had some very significant successes. Last week's convictions are among them.
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This is so true...and it directly relates to network security.
Hackers only need to get lucky once, the protectors need to be lucky every second of every day.
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