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Preventing a Cyber Environment

By Milica Djekic

In practice, the best way to avoid something from happening is to prevent it. A cyber prevention
is normally seen as a passive principle in cyber security. It relies on a real practical experience
and certain scenarios that already occurred and got resolved. What is needed regarding a cyber
prevention is a proactive approach to the way we deal with a certain cyber situation. That
approach could offer us an opportunity to predict some scenarios before they happen and keep
a step ahead of the threat. In this article, we plan to deal with the concept of cyber procedures
as a good example of how we could prevent our cyber environment and also try to suggest
through examples how to think proactively in cyber defense.

What is a cyber prevention?

As it is said, a cyber prevention is a way to avoid something to happen in cyber sense.
Practically, it suggests the use of, say, anti-malware software, cyber procedures and the other
passive measures in order to protect a cyber environment from incidents.

A cyber prevention is a quite passive approach in cyber security, because it does not include
any sort of the active dealing with a threat. It mentions all those scenarios, situations and
measures that can allow us to act before a threat even occurs in our cyberspace.

From that perspective, it’s getting clear how a cyber prevention is important within a cyber
defense. For instance, if a cyber prevention is highly successful, there is a significant probability
that a cyber incident will not happen at all.

A modern industry practice suggests that today’s cyber security invests the highest amount of
efforts in a cyber prevention. Many believe that the other two aspects of cyber business such as
monitoring and incident response should be as well-developed as a prevention is.

A prevention and monitoring deal quite close to each other and they have a strong application in
practice, while an incident response is very like a challenge for the future. As we said, if a cyber
prevention is 100% reliable, you would never need an incident response, but, as we know, that’s
not the real-case-scenario.

Finally, it’s obvious why such an amount of investments goes to cyber prevention. If we make a
prefect prevention mechanism, theoretically, we can completely avoid a threat. In practice, the
use of a good prevention system can reduce a level of the risk and offer us more secured
cyberspace.

Can cyber procedures offer us more security?

At work or even at home, we deal with plenty of cyber situations through our computer, the web
and mobile technologies. We can see through our experience that many of those situations
repeat and sooner or later we would notice it would be necessary to know how to resolve any of
them.

23 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – January 2015 Edition
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