Security isn’t what it used to be, especially in the area of computing. It has become far more ephemeral, less obvious and much more important. To keep pace with the evolving threat landscape, we all need to reset our expectations about what cybersecurity actually is in today’s world and look carefully at what it might become.

In the earliest days of computing, physical security was the name of the game. The door to the mainframe room had a lock on it, and if you couldn’t get in, you didn’t have access to what the computer produced. Computers did their work in disconnected silos, communicating to their human supplicants only through paper coming out of their printers.