  The alarming rise in the quantity of malware in the last few years poses a
serious challenge to the security community and requires urgent response.
However, current countermeasures seem to be no longer effective. Thus, it is
our belief that it is now time for researchers and security experts to turn to
nature in the search for novel inspirations for defense systems. Nature has
provided species with a whole range of offensive and defensive techniques,
which have been developing and improving in the course of billions of years of
evolution. The extremely diverse living conditions have promoted a large
variation in the devised bio-security solutions. In this paper we introduce a
novel PROTECTION framework in which common denominators of the encountered
offensive and defensive means are proposed and presented. The bio-inspired
solutions are discussed in the context of cybersecurity, where some principles
have already been adopted. The deployment of the whole nature-based framework
should aid the design and improvement process of modern cyber-defense systems.
