One of my coaches used to say “The sizes of the windshield and the rearview mirror are the way they are for a reason”.
It is important to know where you’ve been, but it is much more important to know where you are going.
Time spent thinking about the past is useful in the sense that you can take an analytical approach to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. If you’re simply looking back to either dwell on mistakes or live in the past is a waste.
I do think the time spent looking back can be valuable when using the lens of “where did we go wrong, and where can we improve?”
Looking at something like the Verizon DBIR can help inform you about what the attackers are doing. This is by no means a blueprint to what attackers will bring against your environment, but it is good to know what attackers have been seen doing.
As I wrote yesterday, it can be frustrating to see the same attacks work over and over again… maybe we would benefit with some time spent looking back?
The Personal Blog of Sean Goodwin 