My recent SOC Service Manager experience got me to thinking about cyber tool sprawl and the return on investment that my customer was getting for their cyber investment. There is easily over 30 different cyber tools in their portfolio which is not unlike many large organizations these days. And it seemed during my tenure that […]
Active Cyber Defense
The future of our digital world is in serious peril from the ubiquitous and constantly evolving cyber threat – a threat to which today’s static and reactive security mechanisms cannot easily cope. Cyber defenses must be transformed to proactively disrupt and dismantle the attacker’s kill chain to defeat today’s and tomorrow’s dynamic cyber threat. Our defenses must become anticipatory through predictive analytics to foresee and forestall our adversaries’ next moves. Our defenses must also be context-aware, so that they can adapt dynamically to counter and deflect new attacks, while also ensuring that mission goals can still be met. Ultimately, the protections for our digital world must evolve quickly to a new era of active cyber defense.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a non-profit organization that provides a treasure trove of information and assistance designed for the cyber practitioner, including assessment tools, recommended controls, best practices and advice, information about threats, special memberships and more to help organizations get started securing their environment and to stay secure [SEE sidebar ad […]

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab’s Integrated Adaptive Cyber Defense (IACD) project is maturing and moving into high gear as playbook automation begins to take hold across multiple government and industry sectors. Standards and tools are emerging that will become the bulwark for active cyber defenses for the next generation. Learn from the Technical Leader […]

The operational tempo of the enterprise in cyberspace demands engagement of protections in cyber-relevant time. No longer can enterprises depend on human-driven processes to address the ever-increasing number of cyber events across the exponential number of devices that must be managed. Innovations in cyber threat intelligence; predictive analytics; situational awareness through artificial intelligence / machine […]


Well, it has been a long break since the last article of this series but I feel duty-bound to do this third article on cybersecurity investment since I find the possibilities resulting from a “risk-adaptive” security approach to be compelling. Generally cyber defenses must be pre-planned with cost-benefits carefully weighed prior to investing in new […]

Quantum computing is highly desired by the supercomputing community for solving a wide range of problems that are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to solve today. One example of a hard problem that will become much easier due to quantum computing is factoring large prime numbers. This hard problem forms the basis of much of […]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hotbed of innovation but I have been wondering who is really innovating in the IoT Security space. It seems to me that IoT security calls for highly adaptive measures and therefore is a good fit for those who visit this site. Recently I was contacted by Cassie Phillips […]

ActiveCyber’s Quest for the Holy Grail of Cyber Investment: Part 2 ActiveCyber is on a journey this month to find the holy grail formula for cybersecurity investment. In this article we report about what we learn at our second and third stops on this journey. (Go here to learn about our first stop on this […]

How Much Should I Invest in Cybersecurity? What Technology Should I Invest? Organizational risk managers and CISOs are faced with a seemingly bewildering set of investment choices and decision methods for determining the monetary amount and best technical options for cybersecurity investment. Cybersecurity investment business cases are often hard to justify since cyber operations usually […]
