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In security, we speak about different strategies of protection. Mainly, there are three to consider. First kind, usually called shell protection corresponds to the act of preventing the intrusion before the access. For instance, a door, fence, password on a website or silver galvanization of the utensils.

That's usually very powerful and easy to maintain. Occasionally, there's a breach and then, we have problems, unless there's also the other kind of security implemented. Here, we're talking about smoke dispensers, mazes, ambulating patrols, honey pots, fake repos etc.

What would be a good term for that? (Extra great if it's formal'ish.)

The one I've been using is impregnation protection but I'm not sure if it makes sense, let alone is correct linguistically, let aloner comprehensible to regular people.

(The third is deterrent protection and not relevant to this question.)

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    Also, shell protection seems to be a very specialist term. Jul 11 at 11:58
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    Are you asking about defense in depth? (Impregnation protection does not really make sense - it sounds like you're talking about birth control.)
    – stangdon
    Jul 11 at 12:09
  • @stangdon Haha, that's contraceptive but I see your point. It might be my Swedish spooking but isn't e.g. impregnating shoes an act of making the leather water resistant by immersing the surface in a fat, water repelling substance? Meaning 1 Jul 11 at 15:11
  • @KonradViltersten Yes, you're right that impregnating can also mean any act of infusing a material with something else. But it's more common (I think) for it to have its more literal meaning of "making pregnant".
    – stangdon
    Jul 11 at 15:20
  • Are you asking if there exists such a term, or are you looking for suggestions?
    – gotube
    Jul 11 at 18:02

1 Answer 1

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I've never heard of "shell protection", but I do have a set of words that should work for you:

  • Deterrence: What you can do to prevent an attack from being launched.
  • Prevention: What you can do to halt a launched attack before a breach.
  • Mitigation: What you can do to limit an attack after a breach.

This is vocabulary I picked up while dealing with ransomware protection professionals. An example of mitigation with ransomware would be preventing old backups from being automatically deleted.

For example, according to HYPR:

Mitigation, or Attack Mitigation, is the reduction in severity or seriousness of an event. In cybersecurity, mitigation is centered around strategies to limit the impact of a threat against data in custody.
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Mitigation strategies are used by many companies and public-sector entities to isolate and minimize the damage or impact of a threat until a problem can be counter-measured.
...
Example:
"Even though the government's systems were breached, the mitigation strategy in place prevented additional security incidents while appropriate countermeasures were implemented to answer the question of how to defend against future similar attacks."

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  • This is not bad at all. And I like that it's abstract enough to be applicable in a wide range of situations, too... I'll make an addition to the bullet list to make it (in my opinion) perfect. Feel free to rollback if you disagree. It's helpful anyway and my opinion may be different from the majority's, anyway. Jul 14 at 11:25

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