Despite the abundance of telemetry at analysts’ disposal, many security operations teams struggle to answer a few basic questions during incident investigation: What happened? What evidence do we have? How do we know we’re seeing it all, in context?
Answering these questions requires teams to go beyond alerts, the most common basis for initial triage. But investigations (and their outcomes) require defensible evidence, not assumptions, which is what alerts tend to offer.
Alerts are becoming less useful as vulnerability discovery accelerates (a.k.a., the Mythos Era). Most organizations can’t investigate the volume of new findings with existing workflows. Even with increased automation, SecOps teams need validated evidence of active exploit and exposure, not more raw telemetry.
As AI expedites both attacks and defense, security teams need to lay the groundwork that allows them to validate findings, understand attacker behavior, and stop suspicious traffic before it results in a breach.
Richard Bejtlich's NDR Essentials: A Practical Guide to Network Detection and Response, published in partnership with Corelight, explores how network detection and response (NDR) helps practitioners navigate the current era of networking. The free guide is an introduction to NDR and a practical resource for teams looking to strengthen threat hunting and AI-assisted investigations.
