Understanding Predictive Cybersecurity and Preemptive Defense at BforeAI

• PreCrime™ takes a revolutionary approach to cybersecurity that leverages predictive AI to stop attacks before they happen, moving beyond traditional detection and response methods.
  
• Modern cyberattacks rely on sophisticated malware that’s designed to evade detection, rendering blacklists and signature-based security models ineffective.
  
• Brand protection with PreCrime™ is particularly relevant for public-facing companies in finance, healthcare, retail, and other industries.
  

 

The most famous heist movies always have a scene showing the thieves preparing for their crimes. Whether it’s an elaborate ruse to reach a casino vault like in “Ocean’s 11” or a quick getaway from a bank like in “Baby Driver,” the theft only succeeds if nobody sees it coming.

This is what PreCrime™, BforeAI’s predictive technology, does for security experts. PreCrime™ identifies criminals early in the planning stages — before an attack has launched. This allows companies to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity, essentially locking criminals out before they’ve even found a way in.

It might sound too good to be true, but thanks to enormous data processing capabilities through artificial intelligence (AI), PreCrime™ is not only possible — it’s readily available and attainable for organizations in all industries ranging from auto manufacturing to retail ecommerce. Many experts agree that the future of cybersecurity will rely on predictive analytics and technologies such as BforeAI’s PreCrime™.

The History of PreCrime

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick first coined the idea of precrime in his 1956 novella, “The Minority Report.” You may be familiar with the 2002 film adaptation — a Tom Cruise action flick about precognitives predicting violent crime. Predictive cybersecurity is certainly less dramatized, but it’s far more effective.

First, it’s important to make a distinction. Sometimes predictive cybersecurity is mistakenly associated with policing practices such as community profiling. What PreCrime™ looks at, however, has nothing to do with social or economic conditions. BforeAI scans digital entities such as network devices and IP addresses to detect unusual activity.

Since the early 2000s, cybersecurity companies have used machine learning and complex data analysis to find patterns consistent with online criminal behavior, but early techniques were expensive to implement at scale. In recent years, AI advancements have allowed for faster data processing with higher degrees of accurate detection, all with a low barrier to entry. In other words, predictive analytics are higher quality and easier to act on than ever before.

Reactive vs. Preemptive Cybersecurity

The problem with most traditional cybersecurity measures is that they’re reactive. Think of it like a smoke detector in your home. The device only sounds an alarm after there’s sufficient smoke in the hallway, which likely means that a fire has already started.

In cybersecurity terms, this might look like updating a firewall or applying a patch over a system vulnerability after there’s been some kind of breach. The goal is to minimize the damage or prevent future attacks, but it’s too late to stop all financial losses or damage to the company’s reputation.

Preemptive cybersecurity, on the other hand, zeroes in on threats before they launch an attack. This is analogous to finding faulty wiring that could cause a fire before it actually does. In today’s threat landscape, reactive security is simply too slow to act and too limited in response to deter cybercriminals. The only effective long-term cybersecurity strategy has to include preemptive measures. 

 

Modern Cyberattacks Are Increasingly Sophisticated

Many cybersecurity programs rely on blacklists — a list of IP addresses, domains, or email addresses that have previously been associated with malicious activity. While a blacklist is effective in blocking known threats, it can’t account for new ones.

Cybercriminals and hackers have also found ways to leverage AI. Modern malware is designed to evade detection. Some types of malware are polymorphic — which means the program.

changes its code to avoid detection — or fileless, meaning the software doesn’t require a download that would normally flag an antivirus software.

Signature-based security methods, such as checking network traffic against a known blacklist, simply don’t stand a chance against these newer techniques. Companies are forced into reactive positions, only able to detect a network intrusion after it has occurred.

 

Meet PreCrime™: BforeAI’s Preemptive Approach 

So what can PreCrime™ do that older cybersecurity methods can’t? Instead of relying on blacklists or virus scanners, BforeAI uses behavioral AI to monitor the internet for criminal infrastructure. It’s the computer equivalent of a meteorologist spotting a low-pressure system and inferring that a storm is about to happen.

A cyberattack can’t happen instantaneously or come from nowhere. Criminals need to first set up the domains and networks they’ll use for an attack, and this is what PreCrime™ is trained to notice.

The BforeAI PreCrime™ platform actively scans more than 98% of the internet to identify suspicious behavior patterns consistent with a cyberattack or brand impersonation. When an anomaly is detected, BforeAI can initiate a domain takedown within minutes, disrupting and preventing an attack before it occurs.

 

How PreCrime™ Works 

Fundamentally, PreCrime™ works through predictive attack intelligence. This technique relies on behavioral AI to monitor and score data, identifying normal user behavior patterns and detecting deviations that may indicate malicious activity. BforeAI collects data on more than 1 billion infrastructures and 500 million domains, updating multiple times per hour for the most precise results.

For comparison, imagine a bank lobby. Customers come in and out every day, usually staying for just a few minutes — this is a baseline of normal behavior. If one day a customer comes in and loiters, making note of security cameras and the building layout, this would be suspicious. Behavioral AI would flag this suspicious activity as potentially indicative of a bank robber.

While the bank robber example is meant as an illustration, BforeAI’s digital behavioral analysis maps hundreds of billions of data points into a graph analysis, giving a high-fidelity representation of real-time online activity and a false positive rate of less than 0.05%.

 

Immediate Disruptions

On average, PreCrime™ disrupts attack infrastructure within seven minutes of a “malicious” prediction (indicating a site will be used for malicious purposes). As PreCrime scores infrastructure based on its predicted likelihood to be benign, suspicious, or malicious, the system immediately automates action on malicious sites to disrupt internet traffic to those sites. BforeAI works with a group of “disruption partners” that cooperate to ensure malicious sites are unable to commit their intended crimes.

Disruption partners include DNS services and threat intelligence aggregators that power the infrastructure of the internet or incorporate BforeAI findings in their software solutions, including anti-malware, virtual private networks (VPNs), mailbox anti-phishing solutions, and browsers. This complex set of services solutions form the infrastructure of internet routing and effectively contribute to block traffic to malicious sites, enabling PreCrime™ to preempt attacks while the takedown request is processed.

This means that potentially-damaging websites are disabled or rendered ineffective (disrupted) before an attack can materialize. 

This is like putting a police barrier on a highway to prevent a criminal from passing a checkpoint — it’s an intermediary step that happens before the full investigation is closed. While the disruption is in place, BforeAI sends information to the registrar hosting the malicious infrastructure for further review.

 

Automated Takedowns

PreCrime™ is not only a technology to identify potential threats, but it also serves takedown requests to internet service providers (ISPs) to remove illegal or harmful content. The PreCrime™ platform identifies malicious infrastructures and predicts attacks an average of 18 days in advance of other threat intelligence tools, with 80% of takedowns completed before there is content on the infrastructure.

For example, if a cyber criminal registered a spoofed domain — that is, a website very similar to a legitimate company with the purpose of tricking customers — BforeAI can identify and remove the domain before any content even appears on it.

PreCrime™ scans for:

• Brand impersonation attacks
• Fake domains
• Fake email accounts
• Social media impersonators
• Other phishing scams or identity theft
  
  

Users on the PreCrime™ platform can review the flagged content and submit a takedown request to the registrar. Importantly, the potential attack is already disrupted while this information is under review.

Of course, criminals can simply try again, but eventually, the process becomes so time-consuming and frustrating that the criminals simply give up. Targeting a brand with PreCrime™ enabled becomes too expensive and difficult to be worth the effort. 

 

What Industries Use PreCrime™?

Because so many companies rely on online transactions and data exchange, PreCrime™ is used in a variety of industries.

 

Financial Services

Banks, investment firms, and peer-to-peer payment applications are frequent targets of phishing attacks. These scams can come over email, SMS, or social media, seeking to gain access to sensitive personal and financial information. BforeAI helps financial institutions safeguard investor assets and protect their brands from reputational harm.

 

Manufacturing and Utilities

Manufacturers and utility providers are particularly vulnerable to supply chain attacks, often occurring when cybercriminals impersonate trusted suppliers or vendors to gain unauthorized access to a company’s systems. PreCrime™ can stop impersonation tactics, protecting not only financial information but also critical infrastructure.

 

Pharmaceutical and Healthcare

Healthcare companies hold an enormous amount of confidential information, and data breaches can have long-lasting consequences on a provider’s reputation. Additionally, ransomware attacks can take vital systems offline, crippling hospital infrastructure. BforeAI preemptively flags malicious domains ahead of an attempted hack. 

 

Retail and Entertainment

As banks increasingly rely on more robust cybersecurity measures, fake ecommerce stores are gaining popularity as criminal gateways to stealing financial information. Many fraudsters create fake social media profiles to lure unsuspecting victims. PreCrime™ gives online retailers confidence in their secure operations, allowing them to safely grow their businesses. 

 

Challenges in Preemptive Cyber Defense

It’s important to understand that PreCrime™ is intended as a supplemental cybersecurity tool to be used in conjunction with other security measures. A preemptive cyber defense strategy has some inherent limitations, including:

• Addressing internal threats. PreCrime™ is designed to address threats involving external network communications and malicious infrastructures. For internal or off-network techniques, other detection and response solutions are required.
  

• Reliance on internet metadata. The effectiveness of PreCrime™ depends heavily on the quality and completeness of internet metadata on domains and infrastructures, and there is always a risk associated with incomplete data sets. BforeAI attempts to mitigate this risk by using its own network of sensors to gather high-quality information.

• False positives. Although the false positive rate is extremely low (0.05%), it is not zero. PreCrime™ Intelligence regularly re-scores Indicators of Future Attack (IoFAs) and self-corrects to limit the risk of business disruption due to a false flag. Also, the PreCrime™  Guarantee reimburses customers up to ten times the value of their service contract if they’re impacted by a cyberattack due to a failure by BforeAI’s predictive solutions.

PreCrime™ is most effective when used in conjunction with other security tools and practices. The platform seamlessly complements major Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) softwares, including Microsoft Defender and CrowdStrike Falcon Insight. Additionally, PreCrime™ connects through API to existing threat intelligence systems for centralized security oversight and organization analytics, empowering security operations teams to maximize their data collection from their current detection and response platform.

 

Using PreCrime™ with Other Security Tools

PreCrime™ integrates with existing features in an organization’s cybersecurity strategy.

• DNS RPZ (Response Policy Zone): PreCrime™ Intelligence works in DNS RPZ configurations to disrupt malicious domains at the DNS resolution phase and preventing connections to harmful external sites.
• Anti-Spam Systems: By integrating PreCrime™ Intelligence on domains and IPs linked to anti-spam campaigns, email systems can better filter harmful inbound messages and mitigate phishing risks.
• Firewalls: Incorporating the PreCrime™ Intelligence feed into firewall rules creates an enhanced perimeter defense against external threats.
• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): SOC teams can enrich their SIEM tools with PreCrime™ Intelligence to better map security events across the network, facilitating faster detection and response to potential threats based on predictive data.
• SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response): Organizations can use PreCrime™ Intelligence to automate threat response workflows in SOAR systems, allowing for faster mitigation strategies, such as automatically isolating infected endpoints or blocking malicious communications.

 

The Future of Cybersecurity

PreCrime™ is no longer just theoretical. Preemptive techniques are the cornerstone of tomorrow’s best cybersecurity practices. Gartner is taking notice, recognizing BforeAI as a pioneer in this emerging space of predictive attack intelligence.

Schedule a demonstration to see how PreCrime™ can elevate your organization’s security profile. As attacks become more sophisticated, you can’t afford to wait.