6. The Skill of Cybersecurity: Adversarial Thinking 127 Lastly, to isolate practical thinking, consider the question: how could you pull off an epic surprise birthday party for your best friend? If you take the time to really think this through, you will feel your mind engaging in practical thinking. After figuring out how much time you have before your friend’s birthday, you work backwards to determine a feasible timeline. Then you start thinking about who to invite and how to invite them without your friend finding out. You also realize you need a venue and that you need to plan entertainment, food, and refreshments. You might consider delegating some of these tasks to others, trying to determine who would be a good fit for which jobs and how you can enlist their help. You also start thinking about under what pretense you can get your friend to the venue without spoiling the surprise. Along the way you play out scenarios and imagine obstacles, risks, and constraints, and start planning how you can work around them. This is practical thinking. These three ways of thinking are different and feel different. They are meant to capture types of intelligence that all people possess to one degree or another. To illustrate the triarchic model’s explanatory power, Sternberg provides an example he has seen many times as a university professor. Some of his undergraduate students excel at college and appear to be a natural fit for graduate school, but when they get there, they fail. What explains how they could be so successful in one arena yet fail in another so closely related? He believes it could be that these students have high analytical intelligence which works well in the structured world of undergraduate education, but they lack either the creative or practical intelligence necessary to excel in graduate school. Creativity is needed to perform original research, and practical intelligence is needed to navigate and achieve the many necessary milestones. Now that we understand Sterberg’s triarchic theory, we can apply it to hackers to develop a definition of adversarial thinking. How do the three areas map to attributes of hackers? What contributions do book smarts, creativity, and street smarts make to a hacker’s success? (see Figure 6.2) Figure 6.2 The triarchic theory applied to hackers.
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