It happens when you can’t predict what’s coming next. This is true in many aspects of life, but it's especially true for cybersecurity professionals trying to stop the next new unknown and novel attack on an organization. When cyberattacks happen and can’t be stopped, chaos ensues and damage is done.
It was Copernicus in the 1500s who discovered that the earth travels around the sun, building the heliocentric model of the solar system. Johannes Kepler in the 17th Century advanced that discovery by showing that the earth goes around the Sun in an elliptical, not circular, shaped orbit.
We can take any two bodies and a starting condition and accurately predict where each body will be at a given time in the future. Being able to predict accurately helps avoid chaos.The titular problem of the series is what plagues an advanced alien civilization that contacts Earth. Unfortunately, this civilization evolved on a planet around not one star but three stars.
Back here on Earth, after Kepler and Newton, scientists naturally thought that they could evolve the same approach of the two-body solution and just account for another planet or body. Basically, just extend the formulas from two to three, and voila! nature of this problem means that new tools and methods that can handle this complexity must be used.The cybersecurity industry as a whole has historically been viewing the world through the lens that the problem of cyberattacks can be solved the same way that Kepler solved how a planet orbits a star—that we just need to look at observed history and write another rule or two to perfectly capture how things seem to work and we can then detect the next forthcoming attack.