Understanding Prescriptive Security

When you think about something prescribed probably, a visit to a doctor comes to your mind. You have a health problem, so you visit a doctor. The doctor carefully listens to your troubles or complaints and then comes up with a prescription medicine based on your symptoms.

You would think it’s not possible to make a connection to cybersecurity, right? Probably you can. There is a term prescriptive security that may resemble a visit to a doctor. But instead of prescribing medicine, you get a prescription of various measures needed to protect yourself from a cyber attack.

Until this time, most cybersecurity approaches were based on reactive or predictive measures. These measures can be called a perimeter defense. The first type, a reactive measure, focuses on reacting to a thread that has already occurred. The approach reacts to the threat from a cyber attack.

The second type, the predictive approach, is reacting to potential threats. It’s a type of approach that predicts what can go wrong and implements various protective measures.

Naturally, both of these approaches are still widely used. But the modern world needs modern solutions. An increased risk of cyber attacks forces us to react, especially when having huge volumes of data to protect.

That’s why we now can benefit from the new type of cybersecurity — prescriptive security. Read the article to learn more about the new defense method against cyber attacks.

What is Prescriptive Security?

So, what is a prescriptive security approach? It’s a type of threat intelligence security that aims to establish security measures and protocols depending on the inputs of risks. The idea of the approach is to keep up with potential risks to implement necessary controls that won’t allow damage to the protected system.

Instead of using the method of analysts’ intuition to implement security measures, prescriptive security uses a different strategy. It’s based on a well-developed plan that can be enforced repeatedly to protect the system.

This type of approach operates by using a combination of various means that were formerly associated with security tools. For example, the new strategy makes use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics features to spot threats as quickly as possible.

Understanding Prescriptive Security

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Features of Prescriptive Security

The exciting thing about the new mechanism is that contrary to the previous, it benefits from having huge volumes of data to protect. Traditional measures often had problems with protecting massive databases, but the new approach relies on having more data.

The more data prescriptive security has to protect, the faster it learns from attacks and existing threads. Meaning, it keeps implementing new security measures to nearly eliminate the risk of a successful cyber attack.

Another curious thing about prescriptive security is that it analyzes the data stored outside of the individual system. It keeps track of potential new threats to learn what to expect and understand whether the traffic is legit. Artificial intelligence is called “intelligent” for a reason. When a separate device makes a particular suspicious request, the AI will want to understand why.

The usage of prescriptive security should be extremely useful for businesses. If previously, identifying a cyber threat or even an attack was almost like finding a needle in a huge stack of hay, today, it’s possible with prescriptive security.

The system can now create a detailed picture of every component of the system so anytime something new and suspicious appears within the system, it is considered a cyber threat or attack.

Advantages of Using Prescriptive Security

Overall, the new approach to cybersecurity offers promising results. The system is much more effective when compared to previous approaches. Here are some of the benefits of using a prescriptive security mechanism:

It takes milliseconds to identify an attack or a threat. The information about thousands of events is stacked in one place. It also offers threat intelligence to analyze this data. The analyst simply has to make a decision based on this data.
Better visibility so that when an incident occurs, the system will quickly link the virus to the phishing attack and then to the analyst to make a decision. The human involvement (and thus mistake) is minimal thanks to automated protocols that dictate how to operate in each situation.
Repetitive actions. As it was mentioned, the system learns from all the attacks and threats. When an attack happens, the system creates a protocol of what to do next time when a similar event occurs. And when it occurs, the system reacts immediately, giving no chance for the attacker to do anything.
The more data the system has to protect, the better. Unlike all former strategies, a huge volume of data is no longer a liability for the security system. On the contrary, it’s a big benefit. Whenever an attack takes place, the system learns from the attack. All other similar attacks won’t have any influence on the system as it already knows what to do.

The new approach can also respond to attacks without human involvement. When a cyber-attack takes place, it’s a huge stress. But when the AI uses various protocols and procedures to respond, there is no stress. Such an approach reduces the risk of human mistakes since the involvement of people is minimal.

The Bottom Line

The problem of cyber security is real in our modern world. Cybercriminals are organized and often work in groups. Even with the help of ethical hackers, you can’t expect to respond to an attack. Even though modern cybersecurity measures are still useful, they are behind new strategies used by criminals.

The implementation of prescriptive security is supposed to help businesses and other organizations to stay ahead, or at least on the same level as criminals. Instead of trying to predict what attacks might occur, it’s best to use a complex system that can simultaneously identify, react and learn from hackers. And that’s exactly what prescriptive security offers.