Gartner just said the quiet part out loud: by 2030, preemptive cybersecurity will account for 50% of security spending, up from less than 5% today. They named deception technology as one of three core capabilities in this shift. For organizations already using deception platforms, this isn’t news. It’s validation that what we’ve been doing actually works.
The cybersecurity industry is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. According to Gartner’s September 2025 analysis, preemptive cybersecurity solutions will account for over 50% of IT security spending by 2030, up from less than 5% in 2024. At the heart of this shift: advanced deception technology.
Gartner’s Managing Vice President Carl Manion said, “Preemptive cybersecurity will soon be the new gold standard for every entity operating on, in, or through the various interconnected layers of the global attack surface grid (GASG).” For organizations already leveraging deception platforms like CounterCraft, this is validation of what we’ve known for years.
Understanding Gartner’s Preemptive Cybersecurity Framework
Gartner defines preemptive cybersecurity as technologies that “use advanced AI and machine learning (ML) to anticipate and neutralize threats before they materialize.” This framework includes three core capabilities:
- Predictive threat intelligence
- Advanced deception
- Automated moving target defense
The emphasis on deception technology in Gartner’s preemptive cybersecurity model is intentional. Detection and response (DR) solutions have dominated security budgets for two decades, but they operate on a fundamentally reactive premise: wait for the attack, detect it, respond to it. In an era where AI-enabled attackers move at machine speed, this approach is obsolete.
Manion warns that “DR-based cybersecurity will no longer be enough to keep assets safe from AI-enabled attackers. Organizations will need to deploy additional countermeasures that act preemptively and independently of humans to neutralize potential attackers before they strike.”
Why Gartner Says Deception Technology Is Central to Preemptive Security
Deception technology exemplifies preemptive cybersecurity because it changes the threat actor’s calculus. Rather than defending the perimeter and hoping your detection mechanisms catch breaches in progress, deception platforms create active defensive environments that engage, deceive, and gather intelligence on attackers before they reach production assets.
Here’s how deception aligns with Gartner’s preemptive cybersecurity principles:
1. Anticipation Over Reaction
Traditional security tools wait for indicators of compromise (IoCs). Advanced deception platforms deploy decoys, lures, and breadcrumbs throughout your environment, anticipating attacker behavior patterns and steering threats away from critical assets. When an attacker interacts with a deceptive asset, you gain actionable intelligence before any real damage occurs.
2. Threat Neutralization Through Engagement
Gartner’s framework emphasizes neutralizing threats before they materialize into breaches. Deception technology accomplishes this by consuming attacker time and resources while your security team observes their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This is active threat manipulation that buys your team critical time and intelligence.
3. AI-Driven Automation
The MITRE Shield active defense framework has long recognized deception as a key component of cyber defense operations. Modern deception platforms leverage machine learning to automatically adapt decoy environments, generate realistic traffic patterns, and identify subtle attacker behaviors that escape human observation. This automation is essential as Gartner predicts CVE counts will exceed 1 million by 2030, a 300% increase from today’s approximately 277,000.
Source: Gartner (September 2025) https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-09-18-gartner-says-that-in-the-age-of-genai-preemptive-capabilities-not-detection-and-response-are-the-future-of-cybersecurity
The Death of One-Size-Fits-All Security Solutions
CounterCraft’s approach to combating ransomware is specific, actionable threat intelligence powered by deception. The goal is early detection of intent, not post-incident analysis.
Gartner’s analysis predicts “a shift from broad, one-size-fits-all DR security platforms toward more targeted and effective preemptive cybersecurity solutions.” This trend strongly favors specialized technologies like deception platforms over monolithic security suites.
Why? Because effective deception requires deep understanding of:
- Your specific environment architecture: What does “normal” look like in your network, cloud infrastructure, and applications?
- Your threat actor profiles: Are you targeted by nation-state actors, ransomware gangs, or opportunistic attackers?
- Your industry-specific attack patterns: Healthcare organizations face different threats than financial services or manufacturing companies
Generic EDR or SIEM platforms struggle to provide this level of contextual awareness. Deception technology platforms excel precisely because they’re designed to be customized to your unique threat landscape while maintaining scalability and ease of deployment.
CounterCraft’s Alignment with Gartner Preemptive Cybersecurity
For years, CounterCraft has been building the exact capabilities that Gartner now identifies as the future of cybersecurity. Our deception platform preemptively engages with threat actors, gathering intelligence that enables security teams to understand attacker motivations, capabilities, and objectives before launching containment operations.
Predictive Threat Intelligence Through Deception
When attackers interact with CounterCraft decoys, they reveal their playbooks. This is real-time, environment-specific intelligence about actors actively targeting your organization, not theoretical threat intelligence extracted from dark web forums or vendor feeds. This predictive capability allows security teams to:
- Identify vulnerability exploitation attempts before they reach production systems
- Understand which data sets or systems attackers are pursuing
- Map attacker infrastructure and tooling for proactive blocking
- Feed threat intelligence back into other security controls for enhanced prevention
Advanced Deception as Active Defense
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has increasingly emphasized deception as part of its cybersecurity framework guidance, recognizing that passive defense is insufficient against sophisticated threats. CounterCraft’s platform implements deception at multiple layers:
- Network deception: Fake systems, services, and network segments that appear identical to production assets
- Credential deception: Honey tokens and breadcrumbs that lure attackers down false paths
- Data deception: Convincing but fabricated data sets that waste attacker time while revealing their objectives
- Cloud deception: Decoy cloud workloads and containers that protect modern infrastructure
This multi-layered approach creates a hostile environment for attackers while remaining completely transparent to legitimate users: the kind of preemptive capability Gartner describes.
Integration and Specialization
Gartner emphasizes that “no single vendor can effectively address the entirety of the GASG” and that “partnerships and interoperability between specialized solutions will become even more crucial.” CounterCraft was designed with this philosophy from the ground up.
Our platform integrates seamlessly with existing security infrastructure through:
- SIEM integration for consolidated alerting and analysis
- SOAR platform connectors for automated response workflows
- Threat intelligence platform (TIP) feeds for bidirectional intelligence sharing
- EDR/XDR integration to provide context for endpoint events
This interoperability allows organizations to enhance their existing security investments with preemptive capabilities rather than replacing entire security stacks: a more realistic and cost-effective path forward.
The Autonomous Cyber Immune System Vision
Gartner’s laying out an ambitious endgame here. Gartner introduces the concept of an Autonomous Cyber Immune System (ACIS) as “the ultimate evolution of preemptive cybersecurity for the complex, rapidly growing, GASG.” While ACIS remains an aspirational framework, deception technology represents one of the most mature implementations of its core principles.
Manion notes that “the proactive and adaptive power of the ACIS is unequivocally the future of digital defense.” Deception platforms already operate with significant autonomy:
- Automatically deploying decoys based on network topology changes
- Dynamically adjusting deception scenarios based on observed attacker behaviors
- Self-tuning alert thresholds to minimize false positives
- Continuously evolving decoy environments to maintain authenticity
As AI and machine learning capabilities advance, deception platforms will become even more autonomous, adapting in real-time to novel attack techniques without human intervention, a key characteristic of Gartner’s ACIS vision.
The Economic Case for Gartner Preemptive Cybersecurity
Beyond technical superiority, Gartner’s prediction reflects changing economics in cybersecurity. As breach costs continue to escalate (IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report pegs average costs at $4.88 million per incident), organizations recognize that spending more on prevention and preemption costs far less than dealing with breach aftermath.
Deception technology offers exceptional ROI, and the math is straightforward. Unlike many detection tools that generate endless false positives, deception produces high-fidelity alerts. If someone is interacting with a decoy, it’s malicious by definition. This means your security team spends time investigating actual threats instead of chasing ghosts. Catching attackers earlier in the kill chain also dramatically reduces containment costs, because you’re stopping them before they exfiltrate data or deploy ransomware.
The operational efficiency gains matter too. Deception platforms require minimal tuning compared to signature-based detection tools that need constant updating as new threats emerge. And the intelligence you gather from deception doesn’t just stop attacks in one place. It informs better security decisions across your entire program, from firewall rules to user training priorities.
Preemptive Cybersecurity and Deception Technology
Gartner’s prediction that preemptive cybersecurity will dominate spending by 2030 seems like a distant timeline, but in cybersecurity procurement cycles, that’s two or three budget planning cycles away. Organizations that begin their preemptive security journey now will have mature capabilities when this shift accelerates. Those waiting until 2029 will scramble to catch up while advanced adversaries exploit the gap.
The vindication of deception technology in Gartner’s preemptive cybersecurity framework reflects a fundamental truth that security practitioners have known for years: you can’t defend what you can’t see, and you can’t defeat what you don’t understand. Deception technology makes threats visible and understandable before they strike your production environment.
As Manion concludes, “Ignoring the shift brought by AI-driven cyberthreats poses a significant and escalating risk.” Your organization should adopt active defense proactively, before learning hard lessons through painful breaches.
Ready to Lead the Preemptive Cybersecurity Shift?
CounterCraft has been pioneering advanced deception technology since before Gartner declared it the future of cybersecurity. Our platform delivers the preemptive capabilities, threat intelligence, and automated defense mechanisms that will define security operations in 2030: available to you today.
If you’re ready to move beyond reactive security and implement the preemptive cybersecurity capabilities Gartner recommends, we should talk. The future of security is deception.
