I have to tell you. Making an attention grabbing title with a boxing analogy without promoting violence and focusing on empowerment that ties with Offensive Cybersecurity measures was a bit tricky.

If you have read my Awareness and Defensive articles, you’ll know that Cyberthreats are a very real thing that exist on the web, considering we live in a highly interconnected digital world.

There are defensive and offensive cybersecurity measures that we can take to protect ourselves.

In a nutshell, defensive cybersecurity is about protecting systems from attacks, offensive cybersecurity is about finding weaknesses and fixing them before they are exploited.

Before we go any further I would like to clarify.

When I first heard the term ‘Offensive Cybersecurity,’ I pictured it as a way to attack bad actors, like throwing a counter-punch in boxing. But here’s the thing: there are two ways to approach it.

Here is the thing.

There are two perspectives to the term Offensive Cybersecurity.

One perspective is quite primal to our nature, which is backed by the old world value system of an “eye for an eye”.

This is the value system some cybercriminals and vengeful people operate under. These cybercriminals are what we call “Black Hat Hackers”. They use these tools with malicious intent.

The other perspective i.e, the perspective which we recommend you follow and use the offensive tactics under the value system of “Continuous Improvement” or “Personal Empowerment”.

With this perspective you are using the offensive tools and tactics that you learn to try and break your own security systems to make it more difficult for the bad actors to breach.

This is considered ethical hacking. The people who use offensive cybersecurity methods and tools in this manner are “White hat hackers”.

Just like social media, offensive cybersecurity tools can be used for good or ill. The choice is yours—are you ready to be part of the solution?

Offensive cybersecurity is about thinking like a hacker—using the same techniques to identify weaknesses and strengthen defenses.

The best way to defend against cybercriminals or malicious individuals is to understand how they think and operate.

The more sophisticated the hacking methods get, the more vulnerable do businesses, governments, and individuals get to breaches and data theft.

When you start thinking like a malicious hacker, you get the benefit of proactively identifying vulnerabilities and fixing them before they’re exploited by malicious actors.

Learning these tools and fully understanding how malicious hackers operate is an eye opening experience.

That is why it is important to never use it without the authorization of the owners of the digital system you are trying to breach.