Build An Awful Escape Room Experience!
Make Alcatraz look like a free pass!
Welcome to the latest instalment of The Karma Future!
Today we will be considering how to thoroughly ruin someone’s day (some, unkindly, may say that it’s a skill I naturally exceed at!), but don’t fret, as it’s for good reasons…and may ensure you aren’t the one whose day is being ruined!
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Build An Awful Escape Room Experience!
The popularity of escape rooms has exploded in recent times, as the immersive experience combined with collaborative puzzle solving has proved successful, even in these times of digital supremacy.
I have experienced several great, fun examples of the genre and I’d thoroughly recommend the uninitiated to try it too!
However, my mind keeps drifting towards what the antithesis of these enjoyable challenges would look like; what would make them transform from fun immersion into a foreboding, claustrophobic, awful experience?
I’m thinking that you would want to make the puzzles to progress as complex and frustrating as possible, with oppressive surveillance, visibility reduced to a bare minimum and incomplete information for exploiting the vulnerabilities to escape, even if you call on the staff member at hand for assistance.
The reason that I’ve been thinking about this is because I think an impossible escape room is a good analogy for designing truly robust cybersecurity.
Consider the malicious actor like an escape room participant, they are systematically hunting out clues to exploit the systems at hand to make progression towards their ultimate aim of escaping the constraints imposed. Every clue they crack is like a layer of security, and if they reach a point where they have insufficient data in the game, they could call on insider help from the game masters; the equivalent of this in reality is social engineering their progression.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to design an impossible escape room, after all no riddle in the world can overcome explosives, but you can make them as inhospitable, impenetrable and frustrating as possible!
The only way to ensure no-one ever defeats your escape room is to not open it up to visitors in the first place, but since that isn’t really a viable solution, alternative measures are required.
Envision your security protocols and processes as an escape room. If a nefarious party were to visit, what would their experience be when trying to make successful progress towards infiltration?
Would their review on HackAdvisor be “5* accommodating and fulfilling experience! Would hack again!” or “1* avoid at all costs! Frustrating and a complete waste of time!”?
Hopefully, it’s the latter, however if you would like the peace of mind of knowing your escape room would deter even the most hardened enthusiast, then ELEKS Cyber Security Services can assist, from pentesting and auditing, to robust security roadmaps and comprehensive support to give you the reassurance you require!
Feel free to drop me a message or contact me on LinkedIn if you’d like to learn more!