Skilled adversaries are using legitimate tools and stolen credentials to blend in. In under a minute, they can go from getting in the door to moving laterally across your environment. And in less time than a lunch break, they can settle in and take root inside your network. They remove evidence of their intrusion and use legitimate tools to evade traditional detection methods and disjointed systems. Meanwhile, attackers are weaponizing AI to overwhelm defenders with speed and scale¹.

Most SecOps teams wield an armada of tools for detecting, investigating, and responding to attacks—but the rapid evolution of threats, fierce competition for cybersecurity talent, and a deluge of false alerts mean too many organizations still find themselves at a major disadvantage. Enter alert fatigue, data silos, the manual effort to stitch together context, missing context despite a proliferation of tools, and an increasing number of battles lost to rapidly evolving ransomware.

1. CrowdStrike Global Threat Report 2025

The future SOC must be unified, proactive, and work at machine speed. AI and automation have to take on the heavy lifting of data correlation and analysis, pattern recognition, and even some decision-making.

What makes AI and automation truly effective is the data that powers them. Network data is the unfiltered, non-repudiable truth of all activity occurring across the digital environment, providing insights that no other source can match.

• Network traffic represents every digital conversation that takes place. If a device or application is talking, it's on the network.
  
  
• Unlike logs, which an attacker can tamper with, network traffic is hard to alter or delete once it is captured, providing a true forensic record of what transpired.
  
  
• Network traffic is the best source for identifying lateral movement, command-and-control, and other advanced attack techniques involving movement across the network.
  
  
• Network data is crucial for spotting deviations from normal behavior. This is essential when modern threats use legitimate tools and accounts (living off the land) to avoid detection.

From automated asset inventory to real-time enrichment and response with deep integrations with SIEM, SOAR, and XDR platforms, ExtraHop RevealX NDR provides the end-to-end view necessary for rapid detection and response.

SOC analysts face a daunting task of investigating hundreds of potential security alerts every day, leading to a diminished ability to identify critical issues. Smart Investigations in RevealX helps analysts prioritize high-risk alerts and automate investigation workflows to accelerate response.