Proactive Cyber Defence

Proactive Cyber Defence means acting in anticipation to oppose an attack against computers and networks. Proactive cyber defence will most often require additional security from internet service providers.
Some of the reasons for a proactive defence strategy are about cost and choice. Making choices after an attack are difficult and costly. Proactive defence is key to mitigating operational risk.


In the Fifth century, B.C., Sun Tzu advocated “foreknowledge” or predictive analysis as part of a winning strategy. He warned that planners must have a precise understanding of the active threat and not “remain ignorant of the enemy’s condition.” The thread of proactive defence is spun throughout his teachings.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was likely the first to use of the term proactive in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning to distinguish the act of taking responsibility for one’s own circumstances rather than attributing one’s condition to external factors.
Later in 1982, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) used “proactive” as a contrary concept to “reactive’ in assessing risk. In the framework of risk management ‘proactive” meant taking initiative by acting rather than reacting to threat events. Conversely “reactive” measures respond to a stimulus or past events rather than predicting the event. In military science, then and now considers defence is the science-art of thwarting an attack. Furthermore doctrine poses that if a party attacks an enemy who is about to attack this could be called active-defence. Defence is also a euphemism for war but does not carry the negative connotation of an offensive war. Usage in this way has broadened the term to include most military issues including offensive, which is implicitly referred to as active-defence. Politically the concept of national self-defence to counter a war of aggression refers to a defensive war involving pre-emptive offensive strikes and is one possible criterion in the ‘Just War Theory’. Proactive defence has moved beyond theory. It has been put into practice in theatres of operation.
In 1989, Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, published by Free Press, transformed the meaning "to act before a situation becomes a source of confrontation or crisis.” From that day “proactive” has been placed in opposition to the words "reactive" or "passive."
Cyber is derived from “Cybernetics”, a word originally coined by a group of scientists led by Norbert Wiener and made popular by Wiener's book of 1948, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cyberspace typically refers to the vast and growing logical domain composed of public and private networks; independently managed networks linked together through the lingua franca of the Internet, the Internet Protocol (IP). The definition of Cyberspace has been extended to include all network-space which at some point, through some path, may have eventual access to the public internet. Under this definition, cyberspace becomes virtually every networked device in the world, which is not devoid of a network interface entirely. There is no air-gap anymore between networks.