A book by Chris Perkins
BREAKTHE CHAIN
Defending at Machine Speed
Building resilience in the age of autonomous AI attacks.
Foreword by Chadwick Smith
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Cover art by MJ Gonzales, Book Design by Alan Hebel.
Inside the Book
Break the Chain follows the arc of a good response. It names the problem, designs the answer, shows you how to build it, and tells you where to start.
Read the Foreword
Page 1 of 2
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I The four Parts · 1 of 4
Part 1 · The Crisis
“The words come first. Everything you build later depends on getting them right.”
Name the gap between fifteen-minute attacks and eleven-hour responses.
- Build a shared vocabulary
- Recognize ten patterns behind the gap
- See why starting small now matters
Explore Part 1 · 6 entries
The Language of Survival
A shared vocabulary gives the team a common starting point.
- Time-to-good-decision
- Attack stages and cascade rings
- The Trust Mesh
Chapter 0: The Clock Is Exponential
Four phases reveal how the threat changes through 2030 and beyond.
- Targeted attacks to ambient breach
- Three ways organizations fail
- Three human truths
Chapter 1: The Rhythm Broke
A fifteen-minute attack breaks the defender’s familiar rhythm.
- Attack complete at 9:15
- First alert at 11:00
- A toolkit for closing the gap
Chapter 2: The Rules Changed in Silence
Knowing your own network gives you an advantage the attacker must earn.
- More resources aren’t enough
- Response must come earlier
Chapter 3: The 10 Patterns That Explain the Gap
Ten patterns make exponential change useful for Monday’s decisions.
- Why catching up fails
- Where thresholds change outcomes
- Why small, early bets matter
Chapter 4: The History of the Future
Twenty years of breaches reveal a widening gap between tools and culture.
- Three generations of change
- A fourth already emerging
II The four Parts · 2 of 4
Part 2 · The Architecture
“Our digital fortresses are like sandcastles crumbling under the relentless tide of innovation.”
Replace static defenses with a continuously adapting Trust Mesh.
- Four pillars of adaptive defense
- How one compromise becomes many
- From a reactive SOC to a Trust and Access Office
Explore Part 2 · 2 entries
Chapter 5: How One Becomes Many
A single compromise can cascade across sixteen systems before triage.
- Attacker motive
- Attack stages
- Connected-system cascades
Chapter 6: What Adaptive Systems Actually Mean
Adaptive defense changes how systems work together.
- Sensing
- Sense-making
- Decision intelligence
- Learning, with deception as an early signal
III The four Parts · 3 of 4
Part 3 · The Methodology
“You cannot solve an exponential problem with a linear process. You need a new machine, and this is how you build it.”
Build machine-speed defense within the constraints you actually have.
- A three-phase approach and twelve-week roadmap
- Map attack paths and make the budget case
- Create the smallest viable victory
Explore Part 3 · 4 entries
Chapter 7: Mapping Your Cascade Pathways
Map the attack paths toward your most critical assets using tools you already have.
- Find cascade pathways
- Identify intervention points
- Establish a measurable baseline
Chapter 8: Making the Case—From Analysis to Budget
Turn technical analysis into a proposal leadership can fund.
- The Cascade Scorecard
- The math of early intervention
- A worked example of the 5 Cs
Chapter 9: What Technology Can't Fix
Build around trust before buying another platform.
- People, process and governance first
- Technology and data follow
- Start with one free decoy
Chapter 10: Why Culture Eats Technology
A working platform can still fail when the culture rejects it.
- Diagnose the culture
- A sixteen-week change method
- Scripts for four hard conversations
- The Chief Resilience Officer
IV The four Parts · 4 of 4
Part 4 · The Roadmaps
“Great transformation needs a beginning.”
Choose your role, find your first move, and begin.
- Paths for practitioners and leaders
- Prove value with small wins
- Build evidence for larger change
Explore Part 4 · 3 entries
Chapter 11: Practical Monday Actions
Each role gets a day-by-day plan for its first week.
- Practitioner actions
- Technical-leader actions
- Business-leader actions
Chapter 12: Practitioners: Start Small, Prove Value, Scale (6-Month Roadmap)
Turn daily ground truth into evidence that earns permission to scale.
- A six-month roadmap
- Small wins that prove value
Chapter 13: The Question That Decides Everything
The final question is whether to begin now or wait for a breach.
- The coming autonomous adversary
- The case for defending together
- A return to 180 seconds
+ Keep at hand
Field references
& closing
Nine practical appendices and the people behind the book.
Appendices · Nine field references
These are field references for doing the work, written to be used alongside the chapters.
- A: Complete Cascade Pathway Mapping Methodology. Find the chain of reasonable steps that adds up to a catastrophe, using a spreadsheet, before an AI finds it.
- B: Deception Grid Implementation Guide. The cheapest control there is: a free decoy that catches an intruder before they reach anything that matters.
- C: Board-Level Metrics Dashboard. Four questions and four numbers for directors who need to govern resilience without managing it.
- D: CRO Role Definition & Hiring Guide. What the Chief Resilience Officer owns and how to hire one.
- E: Golden Path Automation Playbook. Remove standing access, and you remove the fuel every cascade runs on.
- F: TAO Organizational Model. How a security operations center becomes a Trust and Access Office.
- G: TTGD Measurement Toolkit. How to measure time-to-good-decision, from today's baseline to the twelve-month target.
- H: Grassroots Influence Playbook. No budget, title or mandate required. Start with one small win that's impossible to deny.
- I: Agentic AI Threat Profile & Attacker Dossier. A profile of the adversary that found a seven-hop path through a hospital network that human testers had missed for three years.
Closing · Acknowledgements & backers
Acknowledgements
The people and ideas that made the book. Chris calls them a Trust Mesh of their own.
Kick Ass Kickstarter Backers
Collective defense starts with someone going first. These are the people who did.
