AI-Speed Attacks Demand Moving From Fighting Cyber Fires to Preventing Them

‍The blog post below is redacted from a full article published on SC Media entitled: "Why the AI era demands we move beyond reaction and crisis"‍

Cybersecurity is trapped in a cycle of reaction and crisis management. For the fifth consecutive year, software vulnerability exploitation remains the most common initial attack vector. Yet we're still stuck in the same pattern. Scan, patch, detect, respond, repeat.

Application and Security leaders alike tell me the same story. Despite all our detection and response investments, attackers have an 11-day median dwell time. They only need 5-7 days to achieve their goals. For non-ransomware attacks, dwell times stretch to months.

Beyond the Firefighting Mentality

Carl Landwehr's building-construction-code analogy from a decade ago is still relevant. Building construction codes didn't emerge to justify more firefighters. They emerged to prevent hi fires altogether. In cybersecurity, we're still "hiring firefighters without paying adequate attention to a building industry continually creating new firetraps."

Real prevention means embedding security controls directly into the computing platform.  By making security enforcement a designed-in and structural part of building and running application workloads – not painted on as an afterthought – we can stop generating more noise and firefighting for overwhelmed devs and security teams.

Introducing Shift-Down Security

"Shift-Down Security" improves current approaches. Instead of burdening developers with endless "shift-left" security demands, we integrate guardrails directly into runtime environments. These guardrails enforce rules that distinguish normal operations from malicious behavior in real-time.

A core insight is to focus on the middle of the attack chain where attack-chains converge into a smaller number of actions. Prevent attackers from executing unauthorized applications within containers. Block attempts to bind shell interpreters to network sockets. Prevent Java and Python deserialized objects from executing OS commands. These are real techniques from real-world exploit chains, enforceable without complex policy tuning or interfering with app performance and reliability.

These guardrails work across application, container, and node environments. Modern attacks cross multiple boundaries within the compute stack. And AI-driven attacks will only increase the pace and reach of such attacks.  Our defenses must do the same - enforce real-time protections across the full compute stack: Apps, Containers and Nodes.

The Bottom Line

We can't keep playing defense forever. We need platforms that are secure by default. Not security painted on as an afterthought. This requires embedding real-time guardrails directly into computing infrastructure. Stop attack chains dead in their tracks. Don't just sound the alarm bells after damage occurs.