With today’s lighting-fast advancements in technology, enterprise organizations face an unprecedented barrage of cyber threats. The traditional cybersecurity “detect and respond” paradigm, often likened to firefighting, means we’re constantly reacting to breaches after they’ve already caused damage. This reactive stance can lead to significant financial losses, reputational harm, and, unfortunately, a high rate of burnout among security teams. But what if we could predict cyberattacks with the same foresight we apply to predicting tomorrow’s weather?

This is my vision for BforeAI and cybersecurity: a shift from being perpetual victims to preemptive actors in our own defense.

If we look back to 100 years ago, predicting the weather involved little more than looking into the sky, hoping for good weather, or praying for rain (or maybe the sun). Agriculture was unpredictable, and natural disasters like hurricanes claimed countless lives. Contrast that with today’s methods of predicting weather that involve:

• Massive data collection: Satellites, sensors, and supercomputing power constantly collect vast amounts of atmospheric data.
• Advanced modeling: Sophisticated algorithms analyze historical patterns to predict future weather with remarkable accuracy.
• Proactive preparation: We check our daily forecast, enabling us to carry an umbrella, plan vacations, and take measures to protect lives and assets from impending storms.

At BforeAI, we apply this same prescriptive AI approach to cybersecurity:

• Internet-scale observation: Our infrastructure continuously observes the entire internet at the network metadata layer, collecting over 5 billion behaviors from more than 1.5 billion infrastructures. This includes routing announcements, IP address changes, DNS configurations, and infrastructure movements across clouds—all updated six times every hour. We don’t collect content or private data; we focus on network movements.
• Behavioral AI modeling: Our machine learning converts these raw data snapshots into “behaviors,” allowing our system to understand the subtle shifts in infrastructure that indicate malicious intent. The system is trained to recognize good and bad behaviors through examples, much like a child learns by example.
• Predictive scoring: When an infrastructure’s behavior deviates and aligns closely with known malicious patterns, our system assigns a score. This signal indicates a future cyberattack is forming.
• Unprecedented anticipation: This predictive capability identifies threats a median of three weeks before they happen, with some sophisticated attacks (like ransomware) detected up to nine months in advance, and simpler threats (like fake websites) as short as six hours.
• Guaranteed accuracy: Our system boasts an impressive 99.95% accuracy and a near-zero 0.05% false positive rate, a testament to its continuous learning and improvement over five years. This accuracy is so robust that BforeAI offers a “PreCrime Guarantee,” reimbursing customers up to ten times the contract value if an attack occurs due to a missed prediction, backed by global insurer Munich Re. They spent nine months in our system, verifying our claims because, as you know, insurance companies don’t like paying out.

This foresight transforms an organization’s security posture. Instead of waiting for the fire to break out, predictive security enables preemptive action with two core capabilities of the PreCrime platform:

Disruption: Our intelligence feed, delivered via API, allows existing security systems like firewalls, DNS resolvers, and anti-phishing filters to preemptively block communication with future malicious infrastructure. This halts attacks (infiltration, exfiltration, command-and-control) before they can even begin. We are not interested in forensics or attribution; we are here to avoid the fire.

Preemptive Takedowns: For brand impersonation and fraud, we collaborate with global partners like Google Safe Browsing, VirusTotal, and Quad9 DNS to disrupt traffic to malicious destinations. Concurrently, we initiate preemptive takedowns with registrars and cloud hosters. Remarkably, 80% of these takedowns are completed before any content is even loaded on the malicious infrastructure, truly living up to the “pre-crime” concept we trademarked.

The result of this quick preemptive action? Deterrence!

Consistent preemption increases the cost and reduces the ROI for criminals. By stopping attacks before a single victim is made, we make attacking our customers uneconomical, leading criminals to divert their attention to easier targets. This measurable deterrence reduces attack volume over time for protected organizations. As I like to say, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your friend.

Embracing predictive security is proving to be a foundational step in building enterprise-wide cyber resilience, fostering a culture where every team can act as a preemptive defender:

Empowering Security Teams: By automating the detection and blocking of the vast volume of common attacks, predictive security frees up human security talent from “menial, administrative work.” This allows skilled professionals to focus on novel threats, strategic analysis, and continuous improvement, reducing stress and burnout. We believe there are fantastic firefighters in cybersecurity, and we want to remove the fires they don’t need to fight.

Strategic Reporting to Leadership: CISOs can move beyond operational metrics (like alert volumes) to demonstrate tangible business value—reporting attacks avoided, victims saved, and significant cost reductions (saving on remediation and forensics). This empowers strategic discussions at the board level, linking cybersecurity directly to business outcomes. We’ve seen 100% of our customers get promoted within six months of adopting our solution.

Balancing Human and AI Intelligence: The future of cybersecurity lies in a smarter redistribution of activities between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. AI handles the scale and speed of known attack patterns, while humans apply their unique problem-solving and creative skills to emergent and unpredictable threats.

Prioritizing Foundational Security: Predictive security complements, rather than replaces, existing defenses. It highlights the importance of basic cyber hygiene, such as robust DNS hygiene (DNSSEC, TLS certificates, DMARC, SPF, BIMI records) and diligent asset inventory/management, as these elements enhance the effectiveness of predictive insights. You should first secure your own domain before worrying about others impersonating you.

Continuous Cyber Awareness: While technology is important in these efforts, a resilient culture also requires continuous human education. Organizations should invest in ongoing cyber awareness initiatives, ensuring employees understand evolving threats and their role in collective defense.

Fostering Collaboration: True resilience requires a “coalition of the willing” – seamless collaboration between internal security, IT, and business units, as well as external partners and industry alliances (like Quad9, VirusTotal, and cloud providers) to quickly share intelligence and coordinate preemptive actions.

The threats are not going to slow down. The floodgates have been opened with the introduction of generative AI, so enterprises need to plan for the flood. Like a precise weather forecast, a predictive security approach enables organizations to anticipate storms, including their strength and path, enabling defenders to prepare, withstand, and repel with confidence. Together, we are making the life of cybercriminals very miserable.