Preemptive Cybersecurity: Can It Work?

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, a new paradigm is emerging that goes beyond traditional prevention and detection methods. Preemptive cybersecurity represents a sophisticated new approach to protecting digital assets before an attack can begin, but will it work?

Analysts certainly believe it can, as they are increasingly writing about the promise of preemptive approaches. According to a Gartner® report: “Focus on preemptive cybersecurity to disrupt threats prior to initial access to reduce the traditional reliance on detection and response.”¹

This topic also came up briefly during my recent discussion on the CYBERCRIME: From the Front Lines podcast. However, I’d like to offer greater context here. After all, powerful detection and response solutions like EDR, XDR, and MDR were created because we failed to keep the bad guys out.

The Concept of Preemptive Cybersecurity

If you’ve been in security for a while, you probably remember when organizations built massive defensive walls to try stopping attacks before they could happen. Two things quickly became clear: While threat actors continued to find their way past these defenses, your own employees often could not, because the walls blocked legitimate business. As a result, the pendulum shifted to a nearly singular focus on detection and response—essentially, planning to be breached and preparing a rapid response to limit the damage and recover from the event. Now, the pendulum is swinging again, and it's great news for defenders, especially for lean teams and those with tight budgets.

An increasing number of organizations are combining today’s powerful detection tools with the ability to prevent most attacks in the first place. This swing toward preemptive cybersecurity involves injecting intelligence directly into prevention strategies.

The key difference from the past lies in customization and intelligence. Unlike one-size-fits-all security approaches, preemptive security creates tailored, dynamic protection that adapts to specific environments and individual users.

This approach leverages advanced technologies, including AI, to create what I like to call "smart walls." These aren't static barriers, but intelligent, adaptive security measures that can do the following:

Understand user behavior
Recognize unique device characteristics
Dynamically adjust protection levels
Minimize friction for legitimate users
Maximize complexity for potential attackers

The goal isn’t just to stop attacks — it’s to make breaching your defenses so difficult and expensive that cybercriminals decide it’s not worth the effort. Most attackers are driven by profit, so if the time and resources required to compromise your systems outweigh the potential reward, they’ll simply move on to an easier target. You want to be less appealing than the next organization.

Proactive hardening techniques are at the heart of this approach. By using AI and behavioral intelligence, security teams can create intricate, personalized security landscapes. Imagine an attacker entering a constantly shifting maze where they can't distinguish between walls and doors – that's the essence of preemptive cybersecurity. Here’s a recent interview where I discussed a simple way to think about this new preemptive approach.

The Need for Preemptive Security

A preemptive approach to security represents a significant evolution from traditional security models. Instead of simply reacting to threats or attempting to create unbreachable barriers, preemptive security anticipates and neutralizes potential risks before they can develop. Many organizations are already implementing this approach and reporting incredible results.

One significant cyberattack trend right now is the increasing frequency with which threat actors use legitimate tools to carry out ransomware attacks. In fact, recent Bitdefender Labs analysis of 700,000 high-severity attacks revealed that legitimate tools – often IT administration tools - are leveraged 84% of the time. This is a significant risk for every organization because you already have these legitimate tools in your environment, and threat actors often use them because these attacks blend in and are difficult for traditional detection tools to spot.

This is where preemptive security meets the moment. Because conventional endpoint security is static and built to fit all users, organizations can’t uncover and block access to legitimate tools without impacting productivity or generating high administrative overhead. 

Earlier this year, Bitdefender launched GravityZone PHASR, which Forester called “groundbreaking technology” for its preemptive approach.

PHASR changes the one-size-fits-all security paradigm by tailoring hardening and security configurations to each user’s unique behavior and active attack vectors.  

It leverages individualized AI algorithms to continuously learn the behavior patterns for each user on a specific endpoint

It correlates these patterns with Bitdefender Labs threat intelligence to identify risky tools and playbooks that are used in attacks (without blocking behaviors not used by attackers, which could needlessly affect legitimate users)

It identifies atypical actions for specific users that can be safely restricted

Preemptive Security Example

We can find a simple example of preemptive security by looking at a single tool: PowerShell.

The reality of PowerShell:

It’s already installed in your environment
Most of your employees do not use it
Your admins absolutely need it
Threat actors frequently leverage it in attacks

This seems like one of those impossible-to-solve challenges, but preemptive cybersecurity finally solves it. GravityZone PHASR automatically restricts this tool for those who don’t need it or use it; then, it allows the tool for those who do need it; at the same time, it blocks the handful of high-risk actions within that tool – specific actions admins don’t need, but threat actors use most often in their attacks. This goes well beyond binary allow/deny lists and enables security to behave differently for each user and on each system.

Let's look at a simple analogy for preemptive cybersecurity that we’ll borrow from the world of physical security. Imagine an office building where not everyone needs access to every room. A preemptive approach acts like a smart security system:

It automatically locks rooms that employees never use, so no one can wander in accidentally — or maliciously.
It grants access only to those who genuinely need to be there to do their jobs.
Even for those with permission, it blocks a few dangerous actions inside the room — like tampering with the electrical panel — because while regular staff never touch it, intruders often do.

The result? Everyone can work freely, but attackers can’t exploit legitimate spaces or tools to cause harm.

Another benefit is that this neutralizes attack-pattern reuse strategies where attackers perfect a security bypass on one system and reuse it against others known to have the same system. In other words, dynamic hardening makes carrying out an attack on your organization more costly and time-consuming, making your organization more secure.

Early Outcomes from Preemptive Security Implementations

The preemptive security approach through GravityZone PHASR helped customers, who were already using robust application allowlisting, to reduce their attack surface by 30% or more in one month, uncover risky software that was in use but was not supposed to be (such as cryptominers), and identify tools that were unused but accessible. It is also enabling security leaders to demonstrate and quantify proactive risk posture improvements to their boards. 

As cyberthreats continue to grow in sophistication, preemptive cybersecurity offers a promising approach. The future of cybersecurity isn't about building higher walls – it's about creating smarter, more adaptive defense systems that can anticipate and neutralize threats before they become real risks. And I’m optimistic this forward-looking approach can work, because it already is.

Here are some additional resources to explore as you consider your next steps around preemptive security:

¹Gartner, Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Global Attack Surface Grid, Luis Castillo et al., 17 September 2025