As ISJ and MIRA Technologies look ahead to the webinar, ‘The Shift from Passive Security to Proactive Infrastructure Protection’, Digital Content Editor, Eve Goode, speaks exclusively with Stelian Ilie, CEO.
Why is reactive security no longer enough to protect critical infrastructure?
By the time a purely reactive system tells you something is wrong, the damage is often already done.
Reactive security is built around responding after an event: an alarm goes off, a camera catches an intruder who is already inside or an IT team discovers a breach weeks after the attacker got in. That model made sense when threats were slower and more predictable. It doesn’t hold up today.
Three things have changed. First, threats have become faster and more sophisticated – drones, coordinated intrusions and automated cyber-attacks can unfold in minutes. Second, infrastructure is far more interconnected; a single weak point can cascade across an entire network.
Third, the physical and digital worlds have merged: someone can now cause physical harm through a keyboard or open a door to a cyber-attack by walking into a facility. If you’re only reacting, you’re always one step behind an adversary who has already chosen the time, the place and the method.
Reactive security still matters – you always need to be able to respond well. But on its own it leaves you managing consequences instead of preventing them. For critical infrastructure, where the cost of a successful attack can be measured in blackouts, contaminated water or lives, that’s too much risk.
What does a proactive approach to infrastructure protection look like in practice?
A proactive approach is about seeing threats early and acting before they become incidents. In practice, that starts with awareness. Instead of waiting for an alarm, you’re continuously monitoring the perimeter, approaches to a site and the digital network – looking for the early indicators that something is developing.
Concretely, it means detecting a person loitering near a fence line long before they attempt to climb it, identifying an unauthorised drone while it’s still on approach or flagging unusual activity on the network before it turns into a full breach.
It means understanding your own vulnerabilities – running assessments and testing your defences the way an attacker would – so you fix the gaps first.
And it means having clear, rehearsed procedures so that when the system raises an early warning, the right people know what to do. The prevention of security intrusions plays the most important role in incident management.
The mindset shift is from, “What do we do once something happens?” to, “How do we make sure we see it coming and stop it first?”
How can combining different detection technologies create stronger, layered security?
No single sensor sees everything and every technology has conditions where it’s weaker.
A camera is powerful but can be blinded by fog, glare or darkness. Radar sees through weather and covers long distances but doesn’t give you a clear picture of what it’s tracking. Fence sensors detect someone touching the perimeter but not someone approaching it. Acoustic and radio-frequency sensors can pick up a drone that cameras might miss. Each one has a blind spot.
The strength comes from layering them so they cover for each other. Radar detects movement far out, a camera automatically turns to identify what it is and a fence sensor confirms if the perimeter is breached – all feeding the same picture. This is often described as defence in depth. An intruder might fool one sensor, but fooling all of them at once is far harder.
Layering also cuts false alarms, which is one of the biggest problems in security. When two or more independent technologies have to agree before an alert is escalated, you filter out the wind-blown branch or the passing animal and focus your team’s attention on real threats.
The result is a system that is both more sensitive and more trustworthy. The same applies on the cybersecurity side, where network monitoring, endpoint protection and access controls reinforce one another.
What role can AI play in detecting and responding to threats more quickly?
AI’s biggest contribution is turning a flood of data into clear decisions.
A large site can generate more camera feeds, sensor readings and network events than any human team could possibly watch in real time. AI can monitor all of it continuously and pick out the things that actually matter.
On the detection side, AI is very good at recognising patterns and anomalies – distinguishing a person from an animal, spotting a vehicle behaving unusually, identifying a drone by its signature or noticing that network traffic has suddenly deviated from its normal baseline.
Register for the upcoming webinar, ‘The Shift from Passive Security to Proactive Infrastructure Protection’, to learn more: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8179519244253430104
This is what makes early warning possible: catching the subtle signs a person might miss until it’s too late. On the response side, AI can prioritise alerts, filter out noise, suggest the right course of action and even trigger automatic responses for well-understood threats all in seconds.
The important point is that AI works best alongside people, not instead of them. It handles the scale, the speed and the boring; humans provide the judgement, context and accountability. Used that way, AI compresses the time between something happening and someone doing something about it.
How do command and control platforms help teams bring all this information together?
A command and control platform is the place where everything comes together into a coherent picture. Without one, teams are stuck watching a wall of separate screens: one system for cameras, another for radar, another for access control, another for cyber-alerts. It falls to a human operator to mentally stitch it all together under pressure. That’s slow, and it’s where things get missed.
A good command and control platform – sometimes called a PSIM – integrates those feeds into one interface. It shows the whole site on a single map and correlates related events; a radar track, a camera image and a fence alarm about the same intruder appear as one incident, giving the operator full context at a glance.
Crucially, it guides the response. When an alert comes in, the platform can present step-by-step procedures, notify the right people and coordinate action.
Increasingly, these platforms bridge the physical security and cybersecurity worlds too, so a network intrusion and a physical breach can be seen and managed together. That matters because modern attacks often combine the two.
Can you share a real-world example of how a proactive approach has helped protect critical infrastructure?
A good illustration is the protection of a large electrical substation – the kind of unmanned, remote site that is essential to the grid but historically guarded by little more than a fence and a padlock.
Consider a utility that moved from a reactive setup to a layered, proactive one. In the old model, the first sign of trouble was usually an outage or vandalism discovered after the fact – copper theft, sabotage or someone tampering with equipment – found only when a technician arrived the next day. In the new model, radar and thermal cameras monitor the approaches around the clock.
When a person or vehicle enters the outer zone late at night, the system detects them at the tree line, an AI analytic confirms it’s a human rather than wildlife and cameras automatically lock on and track the movement. The command and control platform correlates these signals into a single verified alert and pushes it, with live video, to a remote monitoring centre while the same platform watches the site’s network for any parallel cyber-tampering.
The operator now has verified awareness within seconds and can speak through on-site audio, dispatch a patrol and alert police while the intruder is still outside the fence. The incident is prevented rather than investigated. That’s the essence of the proactive, converged approach: layered detection, AI to sort signal from noise and a command and control platform to unify it all – protecting a site that no one is physically standing next to, before harm is ever done
‘The Shift from Passive Security to Proactive Infrastructure Protection’
Protecting infrastructure today is less about building higher walls and more about seeing further and acting sooner. By combining complementary detection technologies, using AI to turn data into early warning and unifying everything through command and control, teams can move from cleaning up after incidents to preventing them – and treat threats as the connected challenge they have become.
Register for the webinar now
Register for the upcoming webinar, ‘The Shift from Passive Security to Proactive Infrastructure Protection’, to learn more: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8179519244253430104