A colleague of mine runs IT for a mid-sized logistics company. Last year, they got hit with ransomware on a Tuesday morning.
Their antivirus flagged the attack. About four hours after it started. By then, the damage was done. Customer data encrypted. Operations frozen. Three days of downtime that cost them more than their entire annual security budget.
They had security tools. Good ones, actually. The problem was that every single one of them was designed to react after something went wrong.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most businesses are starting to realise. Waiting for attacks to happen before responding to them is no longer a viable strategy. The threat landscape has changed too much.
The Old Playbook Is Broken
For decades, cybersecurity followed a predictable pattern. Build walls. Install firewalls. Deploy antivirus. Monitor for known threats. Respond when alerts fire.
It worked reasonably well when threats were simpler. When attackers used known malware signatures. When the attack surface was smaller and easier to defend.
Get exclusive access to all things tech-savvy, and be the first to receive
the latest updates directly in your inbox.
Those days are over.
Modern attackers don’t announce themselves with recognizable malware. They use legitimate credentials stolen from phishing campaigns. They move laterally through networks using tools that are already installed on your systems. They take their time, sometimes lurking for months before making their move.
By the time a reactive security system spots something wrong, the attacker has often already achieved their objective. You’re not preventing a breach at that point. You’re cleaning up after one.
Why Detection Alone Falls Short
Most security investments still focus heavily on detection. SIEM platforms. Endpoint detection and response. Network monitoring. Threat intelligence feeds.
All valuable tools. All fundamentally reactive.
They wait for something bad to happen, then try to identify it quickly. The assumption is that faster detection means less damage. And that’s true, to a point.
But here’s what those tools can’t do. They can’t stop an attacker who looks like a legitimate user. They struggle with novel attacks that don’t match known patterns. They generate so many alerts that security teams can’t possibly investigate them all.
I’ve talked to security analysts drowning in thousands of daily alerts. Most turn out to be false positives. The real threats hide in the noise. It’s exhausting work that burns people out fast.
The detection model assumes you can find the needle in the haystack quickly enough to matter. That assumption grows shakier every year.
Shifting From Reactive to Proactive
The organisations handling modern threats best have stopped playing defense exclusively. They’ve started thinking like attackers.
What does that mean practically? It means not just waiting for threats to arrive at your doorstep. It means going out to meet them. Disrupting them before they can do damage. Making your environment actively hostile to intruders.
One approach gaining serious traction is deception for active defense. The concept is clever. Instead of just monitoring for attackers, you plant decoys throughout your network. Fake credentials. Fake servers. Fake data that looks valuable.
When an attacker interacts with these decoys, you know immediately. There’s no legitimate reason for anyone to touch them. No flood of false positives to sort through. Just a clear signal that someone is where they shouldn’t be.
It flips the traditional model. The attacker thinks they’re making progress. In reality, they’re walking into a trap that exposes their presence and methods.
The Human Element Still Matters
Technology shifts are important. But they only work if the people and processes behind them evolve too.
Proactive security requires a different mindset. It means threat hunting, not just threat monitoring. It means assuming breaches will happen and planning for containment. It means red team exercises that test your defenses before real attackers do.
Many organisations still treat security as something you set up once and forget. Install the tools. Configure the rules. Move on to other priorities.
That approach made sense when threats were static. Today’s threats adapt constantly. Your defenses need to adapt just as fast.
The best security teams I’ve seen treat their work like an ongoing competition. They study attacker techniques. They simulate breaches against their own systems. They look for weaknesses before someone else exploits them.
What This Means for Your Organisation
You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. But you do need to start asking different questions.
Stop asking only “how quickly can we detect attacks?” Start asking, “How can we prevent attackers from succeeding even if they get inside?”
Stop assuming your perimeter will hold. Start assuming it won’t and planning accordingly.
Stop relying exclusively on tools that react to known threats. Start investing in capabilities that disrupt attackers proactively.
The gap between organisations that get this right and those that don’t will only widen. Attackers are getting more sophisticated. Their tools are getting cheaper and more accessible. The old defensive playbook gives them too many advantages.
Moving Forward
Security spending keeps rising. Breaches keep happening anyway. That disconnect tells you something is fundamentally broken with how most organisations approach the problem.
Reactive security will always have a role. You need detection capabilities. You need incident response plans. You need the ability to contain damage when things go wrong.
But if reaction is your entire strategy, you’re playing a losing game. The attackers move faster than your responses. They adapt quicker than your signatures update. They exploit the gaps between your tools.
Proactive security changes the equation. It creates uncertainty for attackers. It makes your environment unpredictable and dangerous for anyone who doesn’t belong there. It gives you information about threats before they become incidents.
The organisations that thrive in the modern threat environment won’t be the ones with the biggest security budgets. They’ll be the ones who stopped waiting for attacks and started actively hunting them.
That shift in thinking matters more than any single tool you could buy.
Start this month. Your future security posture depends on it.
