Hence, offensive cyber capabilities may be developed in collaboration with industry and facilitated by private sector; these operations are often led by nation-states.
The proactive defense strategy is meant to improve information collection by stimulating reactions of the threat agents and to provide strike options as well as to enhance operational preparation of the real or virtual battlespace.
The offensive capacity includes the manipulation and/or disruption of networks and systems with the purpose of limiting or eliminating the adversary's operational capability.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was likely the first to use the term proactive in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning to distinguish the act of taking responsibility for one's own circumstances rather than attributing one's condition to external factors.
With the rapid evolution of information warfare operations doctrine in the 1990s, we have begun to see the use of proactive and preemptive cyber defence concepts used by policymakers and scholars.
In this book, proactive threads include the call to deter malicious activity and prevent cyber attacks against America's critical infrastructures.
As one of the founding members of Canada's interdepartmental committee on Information Warfare, Dr. Robert Garigue and Dave McMahon pointed out that "strategic listening, core intelligence, and proactive defence provide time and precision.
Similarly, deterrence and diplomacy are required in the right dosage to dissuade purposeful interference with the national critical cyber infrastructures in influence in the democratic process by foreign states.
The briefing was reported by Dan Dupont in Inside the Pentagon on September 26, 2002, and was also discussed by William M. Arkin in the Los Angeles Times on October 27, 2002.
[15] The Los Angeles Times has subsequently quoted U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld revealing the creation of the "Proactive, Pre-emptive Operations Group".
[16] Today, the proactive defence strategy means improving information collection by stimulating reactions of the threat agents, provide strike options to enhance operational preparation of the real as well as virtual battle space.
The group would be overseen by the White House's deputy national security adviser and would carry out missions coordinated by the secretary of defence.
The discipline of world politics and the notions of pre-emptive cyber defence topics are the two important concepts that need to be examined because we are living in a dynamic international system in which actors (countries) update their threat perceptions according to the developments in the technological realm.
On the other hand, we can still use the PTT to explain the security perceptions of the United States and China, as a rising country, in terms of their use of pre-emptive cyber defence policies.