As a low-level, gravel crunching, grunt there are a few things that get drilled into your head through constant repetition, things like the only defense in an ambush is offense. If you’re caught in the middle of a well planned and executed ambush your pretty much dead so you might as well turn and run towards the hail of bullets coming at you and hopefully either run through them or scream loud enough to scare the guys shooting at you to stop shooting. Yeah, like I said, in an ambush your pretty much dead.
One of the other things that get drilled into your head is that obstacles must be kept under observation or they will be circumvented. You cannot spend all day in the hot sun setting up triple strand concertina wire and then walk away, the enemy will just cut through it. Sure it might slow them down for a while but it won’t stop them. However, if you’re standing there on the other side of the wire and the tanks come rolling along you will have more than enough time to call in the Warthogs before they can cut through the wire.
It is sometimes amazing to me how this simple principal of observation of obstacles is lost out here in the real world. Things like people installing a firewall and then never checking the logs. An attacker will bang on that firewall all day long until he finds a hole if he knows no one is watching. If you don’t observe your obstacles they will be compromised.
The folks over at Country Wide Home Loans evidently did not know of or understand his simple fundamental (to me anyway. Thanks Drill Sergeant!) security protocol. As a method to prevent dataloss by physical means they glued closed all the USB ports on their computers. Except evidently they forgot one machine. Of course the bad guy found this one machine and managed to siphon off personal information for 20,000 customers every week for two years!.
So an obstacle was put in place, the gluing closed of the USB ports, but there was no observation. No one checked the machines on a routine basis to see if rogue USB cards had been added to the system, no auditing of data transfer logs (assuming there were logs) for suspicious activity. No, just blind faith in super glue and the $14.00 an hour employee tasked with using the glue to get every single machine and not slack off early on a Friday afternoon.
Remember most security measures are just obstacles, all obstacles can be overcome given enough time and resources. Obstacles are nothing more than a deterrence, some obstacles are a bigger deterrence than others. So you can either run like a madman into the hail of bullets or keep your obstacles under observation.