What stops it
Not twelve defences for twelve entries. Six habits, and the coverage map below shows which rows each one closes.
Coverage
| Habit | Closes or weakens |
|---|---|
| Verify on arrival | Ranks 2, 4, 11, and most of what arrives during an outage |
| Keep no balance | Rank 1 completely, and most of the cost of rank 10 |
| Unique credentials | Rank 5 completely, part of 10 |
| Read the middle | Rank 4, part of 2. The ends variant closes 9. |
| Refuse urgency | Ranks 3 and 7, and it sits underneath most of the others |
| Size orders | Caps 6 and 8. Changes the cost rather than the odds. |
The gapNothing here closes rank 9, because a machine that has been compromised makes every local check unreliable. That is a real gap and it is better stated than papered over.
AVerify on arrivalUnder a minute, and it settles what nothing else can.Every sessionBKeep no balanceCloses rank one entirely, and costs nothing at all.FreeCUnique credentialsUniqueness is the property. Strength was never the issue.Ten minutesDRead the middleForgeries match the ends. Substitutions replace everything.Five secondsERefuse urgencySits underneath most of the table. A clock is the answer.A day of patienceFSize ordersChanges what a failure costs rather than how often it happens.Worse unit price
Why six rather than twelve
Because defences and failures do not correspond one to one. A single habit can close several entries and some entries need nothing more than a decision made once. Listing a countermeasure per row would produce a longer page that is harder to act on, and length is not the same as coverage.
The six below are ordered by how much they close relative to what they cost, which is the same principle used to rank the losses themselves.
What each one costs you
| Habit | Cost | When you pay it |
|---|---|---|
| Verify on arrival | Under a minute | Every session, forever |
| Keep no balance | Nothing | Each time you finish an order |
| Unique credentials | Ten minutes | Once, at setup |
| Read the middle | Five seconds | Every address you did not paste from a current list |
| Refuse urgency | A day of patience | Only when something is pressing you |
| Size orders | A worse unit price | Every order |
Two of the six are free, two are paid once, and two are ongoing. The ongoing ones are the ones that lapse, and they lapse because they produce no visible result on the days when nothing was wrong.
The order to adopt them in
- Keep no balance, because it is free and immediate and closes the top entry outright.
- Unique credentials with saved recovery, because ten minutes now removes two failure modes permanently.
- Verify on arrival, because it needs a fingerprint collected first, which is an hour of work.
- The rest, which are adjustments to things you already do rather than new tasks.