Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Staying ahead of sophisticated attackers requires a security platform that evolves at the speed of the threat landscape. Today’s attackers are AI-enabled, increasing the number of attacks and targeting vulnerabilities more quickly than ever. That's why we are excited to announce the Corelight Sensor v.29 release, a significant step forward in our mission to provide critical detections backed by the world's best network evidence.

For SOC teams, the battle against cyber threats can feel like trying to solve a 3D jigsaw puzzle in a bouncy house with missing pieces and a timer blasting every few seconds. Despite the increase in security spending, most teams still struggle with inefficient investigations, alert fatigue, and the non-stop guessing game of prioritizing threats. That’s why we’re excited about our latest integration with Microsoft Security that we hope will help address these persistently common challenges.

From hunting threats to solving complex problems to coding on a couch, adventures in the Black Hat NOC (Network Operations Center) are always interesting. Over the last few months and several shows, I’ve had the privilege of working with one of the other NOC partners, Cisco, to design and test our first integration between Corelight Investigator and Cisco XDR.

The cybersecurity landscape has fundamentally shifted in the last several years. Adversaries are no longer just using AI to draft phishing emails; they're deploying autonomous AI agents capable of executing end-to-end attack chains, from initial reconnaissance through lateral movement and data exfiltration. Anthropic's1 analysis of recent incidents indicates a rapid acceleration in attacker adoption of agentic workflows, dramatically shortening the time between initial access and impact.

When geopolitical tensions rise, cybersecurity quickly becomes part of the public conversation. Government agencies issue warnings. Security teams increase monitoring. Headlines start asking which organizations could become targets if cyber operations escalate alongside physical conflict. But geopolitical conflict does not suddenly create cyber risk. What it does increase is the likelihood that existing weaknesses will be tested and pre-existing risks could be exposed.

Working at the Black Hat Network Operations Center (NOC) as a data scientist makes me a bit of an outlier (pun intended) among network engineers and hard-core threat hunters.

With the holiday season all wrapped up (pun definitely intended), I finally have time to sit down and digest what we saw in the network traffic at Black Hat Europe 2025 while working alongside the other Network Operations Center (NOC) partners: Arista, Cisco, Jamf, and Palo Alto Networks. As usual, there is a mix of the expected, a dash of the unexpected, and some lessons for newcomers and greybeards alike. Let’s get into it.

I’ve worked as a threat hunter in several Black Hat Security Conference Network Operations Centers (NOCs) across the globe. So I didn’t expect to be surprised by much when signing on to be a part of the NOC for SCinet—a conference that has the “fastest conference network in the world.” And yet I was surprised by just how diverse the SCinet NOC team was, how collaborative the environment was, and how much we were able to achieve with automation in such a short amount of time.

Welcome back to our threat hunting series with Corelight and CrowdStrike. In our previous posts, we armed you with techniques to spot adversaries during Initial Access and how they establish Persistence to maintain their foothold. Now, we're diving into the shadowy dance of Defense Evasion and Lateral Movement.

CVE-2025-20393 is a CVSS 10.0 Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw in Cisco Secure Email Gateways currently being actively exploited by China-nexus groups. A recent advisory from Cisco Talos details how an actor dubbed “UAT-9686” is leveraging this vulnerability to target Cisco Secure Email Gateways (ESA) and Secure Email and Web Managers (SMA). The attack allows threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges and deploy persistence mechanisms.