Damage can occur in an instant. Clearly an automated capability to respond to an intrusion that can prevent or limit the damage would be highly desirable. Given our increasing reliance on COTS, we need ways to cost-effectively make sure that the software we buy does what we want it to and only what we want it to. Any Information Age organization buys millions of lines of code each year whose exact origins are not known with any degree of confidence. Knowing for sure that data were not altered or compromised and that the source of a piece of data or a message was verified would go a long way in the effort to combat certain types of IW attacks.
More work needs to be done to provide cost-effective data and source authentication.