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With the growing penetration of financial technology, financial firms and banking institutions have seen a rise in the volume of cyber-attacks in recent years. Cyber criminals are using more sophisticated techniques to beat traditional passive defences. The purpose of this paper is to explore, analyse and recommend various active cyber defence strategies and techniques that can be implemented by organizations in financial sector to secure and safeguard their assets and cyber space.

This paper adopts a secondary research approach on the various techniques that can be used effectively to adopt active cyber defence strategy.

Based on the existing strategies and techniques available and those being currently developed, this paper proposes a holistic approach that can be adopted by banks and financial institutions to secure their cyber space. This involves a combination of active and passive cyber defence techniques and effective threat intelligence.

The following paper has been checked for plagiarism and is within the acceptable standards for publishing in this journal. Appropriate references have been duly cited, and the formulation of the final recommendation is the original work of the authors.

This paper proposes an approach to deal with malware and botnets, which in recent years have become one of the major threats in the cyber world. These malicious pieces of software can cause harm not only to the infected victims but also to actors at a much larger scale. For this reason, defenders, namely, security researchers and analysts, and law enforcement have fought back and contained the spreading infections. However, the fight is fundamentally asymmetric.

In this paper, the authors argue the need to equip defenders with more powerful active defence tools such as malware and botnets, called antidotes, which must be used as last resort to mitigate malware epidemics. Additionally, the authors argue the validity of this approach by considering the ethical and legal concerns of leveraging sane and compromised hosts to mitigate malware epidemics. Finally, the authors further provide evidence of the possible success of these practices by applying their approach to Hlux, Sality and Zeus malware families.

Although attackers have neither ethical nor legal constraints, defenders are required to follow much stricter rules and develop significantly more intricate tools. Additionally, attackers have been improving their malware to make them more resilient to takeovers.

By combining existing research, the authors provide an analysis and possible implication of a more intrusive yet effective solution for fighting the spreading of malware.

In the last a few years a number of highly publicized incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against high‐profile government and commercial websites have made people aware of the importance of providing data and services security to users. A DDoS attack is an availability attack, which is characterized by an explicit attempt from an attacker to prevent legitimate users of a service from using the desired resources. This paper introduces the vulnerability of web applications to DDoS attacks, and presents an active distributed defense system that has a deployment mixture of sub‐systems to protect web applications from DDoS attacks. According to the simulation experiments, this system is effective in that it is able to defend web applications against attacks. It can avoid overall network congestion and provide more resources to legitimate web users.

Examines national, local and European policy responses to defence cuts by considering a case study of the defence‐dependent region of Devon and Cornwall. It is shown that in the absence of a coherent national government policy and the constraints on local authority finance, European programmes have played an important role in assisting the process of local restructuring. Moreover, the process of bidding for European funds has fostered local cooperation and generated a considerable amount of information concerning the local defence sector.

This study aims to explore the antecedents and outcomes of brand community engagement (BCE) in the context of social media-based brand communities (SMBCs). Moreover, the mediating role of brand evangelism between BCE and brand defence and between BCE and brand resilience is examined.

The data was collected using a questionnaire-based survey from 201 active members of various SMBCs. Partial least square based structural equation modelling is used to test the proposed conceptual model.

The results suggest that brand identification and brand prominence are the antecedents of BCE. BCE positively influence brand evangelism and brand defence. Furthermore, the finding suggests that brand evangelism mediates the relationship between BCE and brand defence and also between BCE and brand resilience.

The sample for this study involves respondents active on different SMBCs, which may constrain uniformity in respondents’ experiences.

The insights provided by this study are useful in enhancing BCE with the SMBCs. The study highlights the role of brand evangelism in actively endorsing and defending the brands. The brand manager can promote brand evangelistic behaviour through meaningful engagement with SMBCs.

The study contributes to the literature of brand community engagement by focussing on its antecedents and outcomes in SMBCs. Further, this study adds to the branding literature by connecting two crucial streams of brand research: BCE and brand evangelism. The study also explores the mediating role of brand evangelism. It enhances the understanding of consumer-brand relationships in the context of SMBCs.