4 : The Modern Ninja !!BETTER!!
Cyberjutsu is the playbook that every modern cybersecurity professional needs to channel their inner ninja. Turn to the old ways to combat the latest cyber threats and stay one step ahead of your adversaries.
4 : The Modern Ninja
Mr. McCarty has produced what I absolutely have to call a labor of love. As a career cyber security professional I have read and authored more than a few of these. McCarty has summed up his knowledge of cyber security and married it with his learnings of the ninja stories of old Japan. At the risk of marginalizing his effort, this has been done before in the cyber industry with the work of Sun Tzu, the Chinese military general. So, what new is brought to the table in this effort? As a start, McCarty uses very specific Ninja examples and intertwines them with technology and defense, and marries in the most important and often missing pieces of thought and analysis.
Anesthesiologists and intensivists are modern professionals who provide conscious sedation and respiratory care and prescribe medicines with potential toxicity. Similarly, ninjas, covert agent soldiers who carried out special operations in medieval Japan, also had ample knowledge of toxicology, psychology, human consciousness and respiration. Although the extent of their knowledge remains largely unknown, that which has been described in the literature appears to be practical and scientifically explainable from the standpoint of modern medical science.
A man named Hammerhead is out to make a utopia of the overworked and underpaid model of modern society. Nobody pays attention to him on the street though, as he announces plans against the rich man Zeniru, who owns a nearby apartment building.
These different mindsets based on skills andspecialization can be compared to two famousJapanese warrior types: ninja and samurai. Thedevelopment team has many characteristics incommon with the ninja warrior:
For ronins, the Bushido represents a moral codeconcerning attitude, principle, behavior and lifestyle.For IT operations teams, ITSM practices andprinciples represent the same thing. As IT operationsprogress through the modernization journey, thesepractices should adapt to the evolving ethicalstandards and regulations of the digital age related toboth information and technology:
The world is volatile, uncertain, complex andambiguous. IT as a discipline is evolving, andmodernizing IT operations has become a vital partof adapting to technological advancements, newways of working and new disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how a disruption canaccelerate technology trends and lead to theemergence of new trends at a faster pace. IToperations should be prepared to adapt and adoptwhatever new processes will influence its threepillars: people, processes and technology. Maybethe day will come when the ronin warrior becomesobsolete and a new type of warrior rises.
The arcade version of Ninja Gaiden (released in 1988, in Japan, North America, and Europe)[5] was a Double Dragon-style beat 'em up, in which the player controls a nameless blue ninja (red for a second player) as he travels to various regions of the United States, to defeat an evil cult led by a descendant of Nostradamus, who is trying to fulfill his ancestor's prophecy of the rise of an evil king in 1999. The player has a variety of techniques, such as a flying neck throw and a backflip.[6] The player can obtain power-ups by throwing characters into background objects, such as street lights and dumpsters. The player fights primarily with their bare hands, although a sword can be used for a limited time as a power-up; they can use overhead environmental objects as a prop from which he can deliver more powerful kicking attacks. Although the game takes place in different environments, there are primarily only five kinds of enemies, all of which appear in every level (although some levels have extra enemy types). The game is remembered for its infamous continue screen, where the player character is tied to the ground underneath a descending circular saw.[7]
The first Ninja Gaiden for the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in Japan on December 9, 1988, in the United States in March 1989, and in Europe on August 15, 1991. Set in a retro-futuristic version of 1988, a ninja named Ryu Hayabusa finds a letter by his recently missing father, Ken, telling him to go to America and meet with an archaeologist Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith tells Ryu that two statues hidden by Ryu's father and the doctor have the power to end the world if united. Ryu ends up in South America and battles Jaquio, an evil cult leader bent on reviving the ancient demon called "Jashin" and responsible for the attack on Ken Hayabusa.
While the arcade game itself bears little or no connection to the later NES trilogy or Xbox revival, certain aspects of it were carried over to the first NES title. The first stage in the NES game is a loose adaptation of the first stage in the arcade game and the opening cutscene in the NES game vaguely resembles the intro in the arcade version. Both games feature Jason Voorhees lookalikes and the final boss in the arcade game vaguely resembles Bloody Malth from the NES game. The game introduced many of the series' staples, including cinematic cutscenes, the boomerang-like Windmill Shuriken, and the magical techniques called Ninja Arts. To use the ninja arts, players must collect power-ups. Each art uses up a certain number of power-ups.
The third game, titled Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom features rogue secret agents, genetic engineering and the eponymous warship. The gameplay is largely unchanged and more is revealed about Foster, the CIA agent who sent Ryu after Jaquio in the first game and his true intentions towards the ninja. It is the first game in the series to have limited continues. Additionally, most attacks deal 2 damage units to the player character (rather than 1 in the previous games), who still has only 16 health units. Additions include a sword extension power-up that increases the range of the player's attack until the end of the level or until death, new types of surfaces from which the player can hang, and automatically scrolling areas.
A Mega Drive/Genesis version of Ninja Gaiden was in development by Sega sometime in 1992.[15][16] It was planned to be a belt scroll-style beat-'em-up similar to the arcade version of Ninja Gaiden, instead of following the side-scrolling platform game format from the NES trilogy.[17] The plot would have involved Ryu traveling to the United States in order to track down a pair of sibling ninjas named Jin and Rika who have gone rogue by stealing the Secret Scrolls of the Huma (an alternate romanization of the name "Fūma"). The Mega Drive version is not a port of the arcade game, but some of the stages (such as a casino) and enemy characters (like the hockey mask-wearing punks) are similar,[18] though the play mechanics are very different.
Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword was released in March 2008, for the Nintendo DS. The game is played in a diagonal top-down view with 3D graphics, and the player needs to hold the Nintendo DS sideways. Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword is played using the stylus. The story is set six months after the events of 2004's Ninja Gaiden. There is a new playable female ninja character, Momiji.[21]
Released in 2014 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows, the game follows the exploits of the ninja Yaiba Kamikaze. The game received mixed reviews, with many magazines and websites criticizing the repetitive gameplay, difficulty and level design.
Ninja were all aboutusing social engineering, technology, and physical skill to collect and controlinformation. Given that information and data are now more powerful than everbefore, I actually think this is a highly relevant time for thoseskills. They have never been more important; it is only the technology that hasreally changed. The urban ninja would simply need to adapt these technicalskills.
An urban ninja in the21st century would probably have more in common with the charactersfrom Watch Dogs, rather than Ryu Hyabusa. But as in Feudal Japan, they woulduse covert operations to collect information and subtly sway the course ofevents in their favour, to further a cause, or to advance their personal power.
Again, I am NOTadvocating this. But understanding it has huge benefit for protecting yourselfagainst precisely those kinds of attacks. And there is clearly an edge to begained by learning urban ninja skills.
Moreover, it mightmean learning about the way that your clothes will affect the way othersperceive you and how you can use this to gain trust and influence. Real ninjasdressed as beggars when they wanted others to underestimate them, and theydressed like farmers when they wanted to blend in. The urban ninja must then adapttheir attire to help serve their goals.
Ultimately, if youhave an advantage in terms of information (you have more information on youropponent and situation than they have on you or the situation) and you havegreater mobility and versatility (often a product of the terrain or context),then you will be in a position to emerge victorious. This is what ninjas andurban ninjas are all about.
Ninjas may seem mysterious, but the origin of their name is not. The word ninja derives from the Japanese characters nin and ja. Nin initially meant "persevere," but over time it developed the extended meanings "conceal" and "move stealthily." In Japanese, ja is the combining form of sha, meaning "person." Ninjas originated in the mountains of ancient Japan as practitioners of ninjutsu, a martial art sometimes called "the art of stealth" or "the art of invisibility." They often served as military spies and were trained in disguise, concealment, geography, meteorology, medicine, and also the arts of combat and self-defense we associate with modern martial arts. Popular legends still identify them with espionage and assassinations, but modern ninjas are most likely to study ninjutsu to improve their physical fitness and self-defense skills. 041b061a72