But Richard Rushing, senior director of information security for a large technology company, says the search for perfection distracts the community from a lot of tweaks it could be making to deal with targeted attacks more quickly and efficiently. At the , he outlined ways to do that in a talk called "Defending against targeted attacks using duck tape, popsicle sticks and Legos."

are now the focus at all levels of organization, industry, people, technology or third parties; stealing anything of value, he said. Companies spend six and seven figures a year to defend against it, to little avail. Rushing's goal was to show the value of security through imperfection by taking tools that are already in house or available in the open source community to achieve a faster, more agile defense.

He calls it the MacGyver approach. It's not perfect. But in some cases it might be better, he said.

"Working for a stalemate is the winning game right now," he said. "It's about common-sense security. There's no such thing as perfect."