Often, corporate cybersecurity programs are inherently reactive. If the organization’s security tools identify a potential attack, they block the traffic or alert the security team so that it can begin incident response.
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Preemptive cybersecurity takes a more proactive approach to protecting the organization against potential threats. It uses AI and other capabilities to predict and prevent cyberattacks rather than responding to them.
Why Preemptive Cybersecurity Matters Now
Gartner describes preemptive cybersecurity solutions as AI and ML-powered tools designed to anticipate and neutralize potential threats before they materialize. These solutions analyze reams of data, analyzing it to identify patterns and trends that point to likely attack vectors and threats. They can also automatically implement security controls designed to manage these threats and protect the organization’s assets against attack.
Preemptive cybersecurity is important because organizations face a growing number of fast-paced, sophisticated cyber threats. Preemptive security solutions offer the ability to eliminate the threat to the business and allow security teams to scale effectively in the face of escalating attacks.
Market Drivers
According to Gartner, preemptive security will account for half of IT security spending by 2030. Some of the key drivers behind its rise include:
- AI-Powered Threats: The rise of AI makes attacks more sophisticated and scalable as attackers use AI to automate various elements of their attack chain. Preemptive cybersecurity is vital to protect the organization as responsive, manual processes become too slow to effectively manage automated attacks.
- Shrinking MTTR: The longer that an organization takes to remediate an identified threat, the greater the cost to the business. Preemptive security decreases MTTR by both eliminating some threats to the business and reducing security teams’ workloads so that they can more quickly and effectively address any successful intrusions.
- Rising Insurance Costs: Insurers are increasingly denying coverage or raising premiums due to the prevalence and expense of ransomware attacks and similar threats. Implementing preemptive security reduces the need for insurance coverage and makes the organization a lower-risk prospect for insurers.
Key Capabilities at a Glance
Preemptive security moves security teams’ focus from responding to threats to anticipating and preventing them. To accomplish this, it requires certain key capabilities:
Continuous Identification
Preemptive security is designed to identify and eliminate potential attack vectors before they can be exploited by an attacker. However, organizations’ digital attack surfaces are constantly evolving as changes to applications, configurations, and deployed systems, and the discovery and disclosure of new vulnerabilities introduce or remove potential attack vectors.
As a result, any assessment of the organization’s security posture is a snapshot that can quickly become stale. Attackers who keep abreast of emerging vulnerabilities and perform automated scanning can exploit new vulnerabilities shortly after they are introduced or publicized.
For this reason, preemptive security solutions must perform continuous identification to maintain an up-to-date view of an organization’s attack surface. By analyzing large volumes of intelligence data and performing predictive analytics, these tools can identify potential trends and threats as they emerge.
High-Accuracy Validation
Security teams commonly struggle with large volumes of false-positive detections and alerts. These consume resources, draw attention away from real threats, and can contribute to employee burnout.
A preemptive security solution that is prone to false positives has the potential to create more problems than it solves. This is especially true since these tools offer the ability to automatically remediate identified threats, a capability that could result in legitimate activities being blocked by the system.
For this reason, high-accuracy validation is critical for a preemptive security solution. Solutions should use simulated attacks to verify that a potential attack vector poses a threat to the business before implementing controls to remediate it.
Intelligent Automation
Preemptive security is designed to identify and eliminate potential threats to the business before an attacker can act upon them. This window is increasingly small as attackers use AI and automation to scale and expedite their attacks.
Preemptive security solutions must also implement AI-powered automation to support threat hunting, incident management, and the deployment of security controls. Eliminating the need for manual intervention both speeds up the process and increases scalability as organizations’ IT environments and digital attack surfaces expand.
Takeaways for CISOs & Architects
Key takeaways from CISOs and architectures include:
- Preemptive security is essential to keep abreast of automated, AI-powered cyber threats.
- Integrating preemptive solutions with existing security tools offers a holistic approach to security.
- The effectiveness of preemptive security tools depends on access to high-quality threat intelligence and strategic, intelligent automation of threat hunting, vulnerability management, and incident response.
Implementing Preemptive Security with IONIX
Traditional, reactive security is too slow and unscalable in the face of modern, AI-driven threats. Security teams are hamstrung by growing numbers of false positive alerts and reliance on manual remediation processes, which allow attackers to access sensitive data or deploy ransomware before they can be evicted from the network.
IONIX offers an attacker-centric view of an organization’s attack surface, using continuous discovery and simulated attacks to map out the most likely threats that an organization will face. Intelligent automation amplifies the effectiveness of the security team and reduces the window in which an attacker can exploit a discovered vulnerability.
Learn more about managing your organization’s real attack surface with the IONIX platform by signing up for a free demo.