The Thinking Adversary
Faraday's read: the tell of an attack is not damage, it's coordination. Weather floods the low ground; an adversary floods the ground that matters. When two failures that shouldn't correlate fail together, on a schedule, aimed at the thing you'd reach for in a crisis, stop calling it bad luck. Luck is uniform. Malice has taste. The moment your outage looks curated rather than random, you are no longer doing reliability engineering. You are being read by someone who studied you first.
Knowledge check
Give one observable signature that distinguishes a deliberate attack from an accidental failure, and explain why it points to intent.
Show the answer
Correlated failure of components that have no shared physical cause — for example, the primary system and its backup going down together, or the failure timed to a maintenance window. Random faults are statistically independent and scatter across a facility; an adversary concentrates effort on high-value, load-bearing components, which produces a non-random, 'optimized' pattern that chance does not.