attackbased

Attackbased is a term used in cybersecurity discourse to describe an approach that grounds security research, design, and assessment in attacker behavior and objectives. Rather than focusing solely on specific vulnerabilities, attackbased methods prioritize modeling attacker goals, sequences of actions, and the conditions that enable them. This perspective informs threat modeling, defensive design, and testing by aligning controls with the steps an attacker would realistically take to achieve impact.

In practice, attackbased thinking is applied through attacker-centric threat models, attack simulations, and red-team exercises, often using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to map techniques to defenses. It supports risk prioritization by evaluating how effective a given control is against probable attack chains and by identifying gaps in detection and response capabilities.

Variants of the approach include attack-based threat modeling, attack-based testing, and attack-centric defense strategies. Critics note that constructing accurate attacker models can be challenging and that overemphasis on known techniques may miss novel tactics; thus, attackbased methods are typically combined with general risk assessment and anomaly detection strategies.

Origin and usage: The term is not a standardized industry taxonomy but appears across security literature and practitioner guides as a guiding principle. It is employed by security teams to structure security program design around attacker behavior, enabling proactive defense, faster incident response, and targeted control deployment.

See also: MITRE ATT&CK, kill chain, threat modeling, red team, defense-in-depth, attack surface.