Summary
Clearly, researching in the downtime can give a strong advantage in a competition or adversarial setting. These advantages can be leveraged in many forms, from exploits used to gain access, through mapping out an organization, to better understanding an application or operating system, or even exploiting an attacker tool to learn more about it. The point is that using this time to research and automate techniques can give a clear advantage over the opposition. A deeper understanding of any of the technology at play can give one party an advantage over the other, by exploiting a feature of the technology the other party is using but don't yet know about.
In the final chapter, we will look at ending the conflict and remediating a compromise.