From Whack-a-Mole to Checkmate: Preemptive Cyber for Breach Prevention

If Resolution #1 was about treating AI like production, Resolution #2 is about treating attackers like engineers: methodical, iterative, and very focused on whatever gets them paid fastest.

After watching the cyber security pendulum swing for the past couple decades, from IDS to IPS during my McAfee days, to endpoint “prevent everything” eras with Host IPS and Application Whitelisting (or allowlisting nowadays), then the long march into EDR/XDR and “detect & respond” vs. AI-based prevention, one pattern keeps repeating: prevention gets trendy, gets over promised, disappoints, and then comes roaring back when defenders realize they’re drowning in alerts and vulnerabilities (and many times can't keep up with attackers).

The problem isn’t prevention. It’s blanket prevention.

Trying to “prevent everything everywhere” is how security teams end up with brittle controls, angry users, and the false comfort of dashboards that look busy. Prevention works best when it’s scoped to what actually matters: crown jewels + the attack paths that lead to them.

And in 2026, those paths are getting more crowded.

Attack surfaces keep expanding (yeah, sounds cliché), CISOs and practitioners now need to think cloud, SaaS, identity sprawl, endpoints, edge and OT systems. At the same time, attackers have gotten pickier. They don’t “spray and pray” forever. They follow paths of least resistance toward assets that move the needle like privileged identities, critical apps, sensitive data stores, edge environments, and the systems that keep revenue flowing.

Meanwhile, defenders are squeezed by two forces that compound each other:

• AI-accelerated adversaries who can iterate faster
• An unstoppable vulnerability volume problem that makes “patch it all” a fantasy

That’s why 2026 can’t just be “detect & respond, but faster.”

Resolution #2: Shift from “Detect & Respond” to “Predict & Prevent”

Start with your highest-impact attack paths.

Why This Matters

Traditional programs often run on a loop:

• Detect something suspicious
• Triage alerts
• Contain and remediate
• Repeat… faster, with more automation

But when the threat landscape accelerates and your backlog grows, you start paying what we like to call the “unknowns tax”: time and money lost to surprises, blind spots, and incidents that never should’ve been possible in the first place.

A preemptive posture is a direct response to that reality:

• Attackers iterate quickly (now with AI in the mix)
• Exploit chains appear and spread fast
• Your environment changes constantly (cloud, SaaS, endpoints, identity)
• “Patch everything” is not a strategy

So the new win condition becomes simple to state, but hard to do well:

Reduce the number of viable attacker moves on the paths that would cause material damage.

What To Do: Adopt the “3 Ds” Mindset (Deceive / Deny / Disrupt)

Think of this as a targeted preemptive program that combines:

• Predictive prevention: anticipate likely attack paths and harden what matters
• Deception: create high-signal tripwires and waste attacker time
• Moving target defense: reduce attacker certainty and replay ability
• Exposure management: prioritize exploitable exposure based on real paths, not raw CVE counts

Here’s how it breaks down.

1) Deceive: Make Attacker Progress Loud (and Expensive)

Deception isn’t about “cool bait servers.” Done right, it’s a signal amplifier, especially valuable when noise is your biggest enemy.

Where deception tends to work best:

• Privileged identity paths: fake admin accounts, decoy credentials, honey tokens
• Lateral movement corridors: decoy shares, decoy services, false RDP/SSH targets
• High-value data paths: canary documents, instrumented repositories

Goal: Turn “unknown unknowns” into high-confidence, high-context alerts that are hard for an attacker to trigger accidentally.

Translation: if someone touches the wrong thing, you want it to be obviously wrong.

2) Deny: Remove the Easy Wins Around Crown Jewels

This is where “predict & prevent” earns credibility: deny the moves attackers actually use, not the ones we wish they’d use.

High-leverage denial controls:

• Tiered admin model + strict PAM enforcement
• Phishing-resistant MFA for privileged access
• Network segmentation / microsegmentation around critical apps and data
• Egress controls for sensitive systems (limit who crown jewels can talk to)
• Stronger identity posture: conditional access, device trust, continuous evaluation

Goal: Reduce feasible steps in the kill chain, especially around privilege escalation and data exfiltration.

Translation: If attackers can’t get privilege, can’t move laterally, and can’t get data out easily, they’re forced into noisier, riskier moves.

3) Disrupt: Break the Attacker’s Ability to Iterate

Disruption is about making your environment harder to “learn,” harder to replay, and harder to operationalize.

Examples that actually move the needle:

• Rotate credentials and secrets more aggressively where it matters
• Shorten token/session lifetimes for privileged workflows
• Randomize or mask infrastructure elements attackers rely on for certainty
• Throttle suspicious auth patterns and high-risk tool use
• Auto-contain quickly when deception triggers (isolation on high-confidence evidence)

Goal: Shorten attacker dwell time and stop repeatable playbooks from working.

Translation: Attackers love predictability. Disruption is how you take it away.

What Leadership Cares About (and You Can Measure)

This approach isn’t a promise to stop all attacks. It’s a commitment to reduce business-impacting outcomes.

The outcomes that matter:

• Fewer material incidents
• Faster containment when the real thing happens
• Less “unknowns tax” (fewer surprise pathways and preventable failures)

And the commitments you can state plainly:

• Reduce exploitable exposure on assets that would actually hurt the business
• Catch real intrusions earlier with higher-signal detection
• Contain scenarios you’ve already decided are unacceptable

TL;DR

“Detect & respond” will always be necessary. But if that’s your whole strategy in 2026, you’re volunteering to play defense at maximum disadvantage.

Treat attackers like engineers. Map the paths that matter. Then deceive, deny, and disrupt, starting where the business would feel it most.