Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Denning

Denning’s warning lands with the calm force of someone who’s watched “unlikely” threats turn into bureaucratic emergencies. The phrasing is almost studiously non-alarmist - “could,” “more attractive” - but that restraint is the point. She’s signaling a shift in incentives: once the internet stops being mostly screens and starts being doors, engines, thermostats, and medical devices, the payoff for attacking it stops being symbolic and becomes physical.

The key move is “closely coupled.” That’s systems language sneaking into public policy: interdependence doesn’t just add convenience, it adds shared failure modes. When your car is a network node and your fridge is a data source, security stops being a niche IT problem and becomes an infrastructure problem. Denning isn’t picturing a lone hacker making a website blink; she’s anticipating that the attack surface will sprawl across everyday life, and with it, the potential for coercion. Cyberterror becomes “attractive” not because extremists suddenly love code, but because connectivity creates leverage: disruption at scale, plausible deniability, low cost, high visibility.

The context is the long arc from early internet optimism to the Internet of Things reality: devices shipping with weak authentication, rushed updates, vendor lock-in, and consumers trained to click “accept” on risk. Her subtext reads like an indictment of how modernization gets sold: we tether critical functions to networks first, then ask institutions to invent governance afterward. In that gap, threat actors don’t need science fiction - they just need default passwords and a society that can’t unplug.