May the Fourth Be With You!
Celebrating Star Wars Day with a look at what Darth Maul’s training can teach you.
What better way to kick off a Star Wars Day celebration than with a classic crawl?
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo. While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events, the Supreme Chancellor has secretly dispatched two Jedi Knights, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, to settle the conflict....
Star Wars has sooo much to teach us, but unfortunately fantasies about trade disputes or Jedi Knights really aren’t part of that. What Star Wars can really teach us is how to threat model.
In Episode I, we see the Jedi board a ship, and then run around almost as if there’s no effective blast doors or isolation... but nobody remembers the plot of Episode I. What many people do remember from that movie is Darth Maul, with his horns, his red and black face and his double bladed lightsaber.
Fun side fact: Star Wars Lego was first released at the same time as Episode I, and in The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, we learned that the Star Wars team told Lego that “it would be cool” if the new lightsaber brick could take beams on both sides...for “no particular reason.”
In fact, Maul is having a bit of a resurgence right now, with “Maul: Shadow Lord.” The title is simply “Maul” because “Darth” is a title, given to Sith. After failing his master Darth Sidious, he’s no longer a Sith, so it’s just “Maul.”
The show also some references to what happens as a Sith is trained, and... well, in the spirit of avoiding spoilers for the show, let me say what it’s not: Supportive. Focused on modern theories of learning which treat mistakes as learning opportunities, rather than a gateway to punishment.
To celebrate May the Fourth, we want to encourage everyone to embrace threat modeling and become a master in your own way. To help with that, we’re offering a one-fourth-off coupon, maythe4th, that discounts any of our self-pace threat modeling courses, including the Learn Cyber Security With R2D2. We created that course to celebrate the release of Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn from Star Wars.
All our training is designed with modern instructional guidance in mind, and creates a path that, once you start down it, forever will it dominate your destiny... but you know, in a good and useful way where the skills become an increasingly important part of how you act as a guardian of peace and justice.