Daily Inspiration Quote by Dorothy Denning

Denning’s sentence doesn’t dramatize cyberterrorism; it disciplines it. By starting with “If we take as given,” she accepts vulnerability as the baseline reality, then immediately narrows the debate to a harder, less sensational problem: who can actually do this, and why would they bother? That pivot is the intent. It pulls attention away from headline-friendly fear and toward the operational triad that matters in security work: vulnerability, capability, motivation. The rhetorical move is almost bureaucratically calming, but the calm is strategic. It signals: stop arguing about whether the lights could go out and start mapping the people who could flip the switch.

The subtext is a critique of threat inflation. “Cyber terrorist attack” is the phrase that politicians and pundits love because it compresses uncertainty into a single, cinematic villain. Denning treats it as a hypothesis to be tested, not a story to be sold. Her framing also implies that vulnerability alone doesn’t equal risk. Plenty of critical infrastructure is exposed, but meaningful attacks require access, specialized knowledge, time, and a tolerance for consequences. Motivation is the quietest word here and the most pointed: many actors with capability (states, well-resourced criminal groups) may not share the terroristic incentive structure, while true ideologues may lack the technical depth to move from disruption to strategic impact.

Context matters: Denning’s career sits at the intersection of computer science, public policy, and national security debates that have repeatedly swung between panic and complacency. This line reads like an attempt to keep public decision-making anchored in threat modeling, not mythology.