Attacker's Royal Road to Your Company's System

Following up on earlier posts on systemic failures and their causes, this is a great line by Vordel's Mark O'Neill:

Freud wrote that dreams are the "Royal Road" to the unconscious. Messaging Systems and mainframes can be the Royal Road for a malicious user to attack a banking system, unless the security thinking moves from a "claim by claim" thinking to thinking about the full transaction.

What a great concept - you are dreaming that the messaging system does not need security, and instead you give the attacker a Royal Road straight to your book of business.

Also, Vordel's conference is coming up this month in Dublin, the lineup looks good, esp. the keynote - Don Adams's (TIBCO CTO) "Service Oriented Architecture, Security and a Modern Shillelagh"