Strong Link - Weak Link in software security

Give me an example on how I could apply the Strong Link - Weak Link principle in designing a security component for a piece of software. Is there such a concept of "weak" modules in software security, where in case of an at开发者_如何学JAVAtack these will deliberately fail first, and determine the impossibility of the attacker to access and compromise any other, more sensitive data?

One thing that can happen accidentally is to fail (as DoS) under a dictionary attack. Generally you would want to throttle, which I guess is a weaker version of weak module.