Investor Lawsuit Over CrowdStrike Outage Dismissed
A judge has ruled that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate intent to defraud investors.
The post Investor Lawsuit Over CrowdStrike Outage Dismissed appeared first on SecurityWeek.
A judge has ruled that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate intent to defraud investors.
The post Investor Lawsuit Over CrowdStrike Outage Dismissed appeared first on SecurityWeek.
You read the “AI-ready SOC pillars” blog, but you still see a lot of this:

How do we do better?
Let’s go through all 5 pillars aka readiness dimensions and see what we can actually do to make your SOC AI-ready.
#1 SOC Data Foundations
As I said before, this one is my absolute favorite and is at the center of most “AI in SOC” (as you recall, I want AI in my SOC, but I dislike the “AI SOC” concept) successes (if done well) and failures (if not done at all).
Reminder: pillar #1 is “security context and data are available and can be queried by machines (API, Model Context Protocol (MCP), etc) in a scalable and reliable manner.” Put simply, for the AI to work for you, it needs your data. As our friends say here, “Context engineering focuses on what information the AI has available. […] For security operations, this distinction is critical. Get the context wrong, and even the most sophisticated model will arrive at inaccurate conclusions.”
Readiness check: Security context and data are available and can be queried by machines in a scalable and reliable manner. This is very easy to check, yet not easy to achieve for many types of data.
For example, “give AI access to past incidents” is very easy in theory (“ah, just give it old tickets”) yet often very hard in reality (“what tickets?” “aren’t some too sensitive?”, “wait…this ticket didn’t record what happened afterwards and it totally changed the outcome”, “well, these tickets are in another system”, etc, etc)
Steps to get ready:
Where you arrive: your AI component, AI-powered tool or AI agent can get the data it needs nearly every time. The cases where it cannot become visible, and obvious immediately.
#2 SOC Process Framework and Maturity
Reminder: pillar #2 is “Common SOC workflows do NOT rely on human-to-human communication are essential for AI success.” As somebody called it, you need “machine-intelligible processes.”
Readiness check: SOC workflows are defined as machine-intelligible processes that can be queried programmatically, and explicit, structured handoff criteria are established for all Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) processes, clearly delineating what is handled by the agent versus the person. Examples for handoff to human may include high decision uncertainty, lack of context to make a call (see pillar #1), extra-sensitive systems, etc.
Common investigation and response workflows do not rely on ad-hoc, human-to-human communication or “tribal knowledge,” such knowledge is discovered and brought to surface.
Steps to get ready:
Where you arrive: The “tribal knowledge” that previously drove your SOC is recorded for machine-readable workflows. Explicit, structured handoff points are established for all Human-in-the-Loop processes, and the system uses human grading to continuously refine its logic and improve its ‘recipe’ over time. This does not mean that everything is rigid; “Visio diagram or death” SOC should stay in the 1990s. Recorded and explicit beats rigid and unchanging.
#3 SOC Human Element and Skills
Reminder: pillar #3 is “Cultivating a culture of augmentation, redefining analyst roles, providing training for human-AI collaboration, and embracing a leadership mindset that accepts probabilistic outcomes.” You say “fluffy management crap”? Well, I say “ignore this and your SOC is dead.”
Readiness check: Leaders have secured formal CISO sign-off on a quantified “AI Error Budget,” defining an acceptable, measured, probabilistic error rate for autonomously closed alerts (that is definitely not zero, BTW). The team is evolving to actively review, grade, and edit AI-generated logic and detection output.
Steps to get ready:
Where you arrive: well, you arrive at a practical realization that you have “AI in SOC” (and not AI SOC). The tools augment people (and in some cases, do the work end to end too). No pro- (“AI SOC means all humans can go home”) or contra-AI (“it makes mistakes and this means we cannot use it”) crazies nearby.
#4 Modern SOC Technology Stack
Reminder: pillar #4 is “Modern SOC Technology Stack.” If your tools lack APIs, take them and go back to the 1990s from whence you came! Destroy your time machine when you arrive, don’t come back to 2026!
Readiness check: The security stack is modern, fast (“no multi-hour data queries”) interoperable and supports new AI capabilities to integrate seamlessly, tools can communicate without a human acting as a manual bridge and can handle agentic AI request volumes.
Steps to get ready:
Where you arrive: this sounds like a perfect quote from Captain Obvious but you arrive at the SOC powered by tools that work with automation, and not with “human bridge” or “swivel chair.”
#5 SOC Metrics and Feedback Loop
Reminder: pillar #5 is “You are ready for AI if you can, after adding AI, answer the “what got better?” question. You need metrics and a feedback loop to get better.”
Readiness check: Hard baseline metrics (MTTR, MTTD, false positive rates) are established before AI deployment, and the team has a way to quantify the value and improvements resulting from AI. When things get better, you will know it.
Steps to get ready:
Where you arrive: you have a fact-based visual that shows your SOC becoming better in ways important to your mission after you add AI (in fact, you SOC will get better even before AI but after you do the prep-work from this document)
As a result, we can hopefully get to this instead:

The path to an AI-ready SOC isn’t paved with new tools; it’s paved with better data, cleaner processes, and a fundamental shift in how we think about human-machine collaboration. If you ignore these pillars, your AI journey will be a series of expensive lessons in why “magic” isn’t a strategy.
But if you get these right? You move from a SOC that is constantly drowning in alerts to a SOC that operates truly 10X effectiveness.

P.S. Anton, you said “10X”, so how does this relate to ASO and “engineering-led” D&R? I am glad you asked. The five pillars we outlined are not just steps for AI; they are the also steps on the road to ASO (see original 2021 paper which is still “the future” for many).
ASO is the vision for a 10X transformation of the SOC, driven by an adaptive, agile, and highly automated approach to threats. The focus on codified, machine-intelligible workflows, a modern stack supporting Detection-as-Code, and reskilling analysts as “Agent Supervisors” directly supports the core of engineering-led D&R. So focusing on these five readiness dimensions, you move from a traditional operations room (lots of “O” for operations) to a scalable, engineering-centric D&R function (where “E” for engineering dominates).
So, which pillar is your SOC’s current ‘weakest link’? Let’s discuss in the comments and on socials!
Related blogs and podcasts:
Beyond “Is Your SOC AI Ready?” Plan the Journey! was originally published in Anton on Security on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What happens when you ditch the tiered ticket queues and replace them with collaboration, agility, and real-time response? In this interview, Hayden Covington takes us behind the scenes of the BHIS Security Operations Center, which is where analysts don’t escalate tickets, they solve them.
The post Inside the BHIS SOC: A Conversation with Hayden Covington appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
For a while now, the security community has been aware that threat actors are using AI. We’ve seen evidence of it for everything from generating phishing content to optimizing malware. The recent report from Anthropic on an “AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, however, marks a significant milestone.
This is the first time we have a public, detailed report of a campaign where AI was used at this scale and with this level of sophistication, moving the threat from a collection of AI-assisted tasks to a largely autonomous, orchestrated operation.
This report is a significant new benchmark for our industry. It’s not a reason to panic – it’s a reason to prepare. It provides the first detailed case study of a state-sponsored attack with three critical distinctions:
Together, these distinctions show why this case matters. A high-level, autonomous, and successful AI-driven attack is no longer a future theory. It is a documented, current-day reality.
For those who haven’t read the full report (or the summary blog post), here are the key facts.
The attack (designated GTG-1002) was a “highly sophisticated cyber espionage operation” detected in mid-September 2025.

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage
To have a credible discussion, we must also look at what wasn’t new. This attack wasn’t about secret, magical weapons.
The report is clear that the attack’s sophistication came from orchestration, not novelty.
This matters because defenders often look for new exploit types or malware indicators. But the shift here is operational, not technical. The attackers didn’t invent a new weapon, they built a far more effective way to use the ones we already know.
So, if the tools aren’t new, what is? The execution model. And we must assume this new model is here to stay.
This new attack method is a natural evolution of technology. We should not expect it to be “stopped” at the source for two main reasons:
The attack surface is not necessarily growing, but the attacker’s execution engine is accelerating.
While the techniques were familiar, their execution creates a different kind of detection challenge. An AI-driven attack doesn’t generate one “smoking gun” alert, like a unique malware hash or a known-bad IP. Instead, it generates a storm of low-fidelity signals. The key is to hunt for the patterns within this noise:
The detection patterns listed above create the central challenge of defending against AI-orchestrated attacks. The problem isn’t just alert volume, it’s that these attacks generate a massive volume of low-fidelity alerts.
This new execution model creates critical blind spots:
When the attack is autonomous, the defense must also have autonomous capabilities.
We cannot hire our way out of this speed and scale problem. The security operations model must shift. The goal of autonomous triage is not just to add context, but to handle the entire investigation process for every single alert, especially the thousands of low-severity signals that AI-driven attacks create.
An autonomous system can automatically investigate these signals at machine speed, determine which ones are irrelevant noise, and suppress them.
This is the true value: the system escalates only the high-confidence, confirmed incidents that actually matter. This frees your human analysts from chasing noise and allows them to focus on real, complex threats.
This is exactly the type of challenge autonomous triage systems like the one we’ve built at Intezer were designed to solve. As Anthropic’s own report concludes, “Security teams should experiment with applying AI for defense in areas like SOC automation, threat detection… and incident response“.
To defend against this threat, we must be able to test our defenses against it. All offensive security activities, internal red teams, external penetration tests, and attack simulations, must evolve.
It is no longer enough for offensive security teams to manually simulate attacks. To truly test your defenses, your red teams or external pentesters must adopt agentic AI frameworks themselves.
The new mandate is to simulate the speed, scale, and orchestration of an AI-driven attack, similar to the one detailed in the Anthropic report. Only then can you validate whether your defensive systems and automated processes can withstand this new class of automated onslaught. Naturally, all such simulations must be done safely and ethically to prevent any real-world risk.
The Anthropic report doesn’t introduce a new magic exploit. It introduces a new execution model that we now need to design our defenses around.
Let’s summarize the key, practical takeaways:
This report is a clear signal. The threat model has officially changed. Your security architecture, processes, and playbooks must change with it. The same applies if you rely on an MSSP, verify they’re evolving their detection and triage capabilities for this new model. This shift isn’t hype, it’s a practical change in execution speed. With the right adjustments and automation, defenders can meet this challenge.
To learn more, you can read the Anthropic blog post here and the full technical report here.
The post What the Anthropic report on AI espionage means for security leaders appeared first on Intezer.

But what if we need to wrangle Windows Event Logs for more than one system? In part 2, we’ll wrangle EVTX logs at scale by incorporating Hayabusa and SOF-ELK into my rapid endpoint investigation workflow (“REIW”)!
The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In part 1 of this post, we’ll discuss how Hayabusa and “Security Operations and Forensics ELK” (SOF-ELK) can help us wrangle EVTX files (Windows Event Log files) for maximum effect during a Windows endpoint investigation!
The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Remember the good ‘ol days of Zip drives, Winamp, the advent of “Office 365,” and copy machines that didn’t understand email authentication? Okay, maybe they weren’t so good! For a […]
The post Stop Spoofing Yourself! Disabling M365 Direct Send appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In this video, John Strand discusses the complexities and challenges of penetration testing, emphasizing that it goes beyond just finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.
The post 5 Things We Are Going to Continue to Ignore in 2025 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Changes to the msds-KeyCredentialLink attribute are not audited/logged with standard audit configurations. This required serious investigations and a partner firm in infosec provided us the answer: TrustedSec. So, credit where […]
The post Enable Auditing of Changes to msDS-KeyCredentialLink appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Recently in the SOC, we were notified by a partner that they had a potential business email compromise, or BEC. We commonly catch these by identifying suspicious email forwarding rules, […]
The post Monitoring High Risk Azure Logins appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

While social engineering attacks such as phishing are a great way to gain a foothold in a target environment, direct attacks against externally exploitable services are continuing to make headlines. […]
The post In Through the Front Door – Protecting Your Perimeter appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Be sure to read PART 1! Metadata and a New-Fashioned Bank Robbery Let’s face it, some cases are just more interesting than others and, when you do incident response for […]
The post OSINT for Incident Response (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Being a digital forensics and incident response consultant is largely about unanswered questions. When we engage with a client, they know something bad happened or is happening, but they are […]
The post OSINT for Incident Response (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Patterson Cake // PART 1 PART 2 In part one of “Wrangling the M365 UAL,” we talked about acquiring, parsing, and querying UAL data using PowerShell and SOF-ELK. In part […]
The post Wrangling the M365 UAL with SOF-ELK and CSV Data (Part 3 of 3) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Patterson Cake // When it comes to M365 audit and investigation, the “Unified Audit Log” (UAL) is your friend. It can be surly, obstinate, and wholly inadequate, but your friend […]
The post Wrangling the M365 UAL with PowerShell and SOF-ELK (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Troy Wojewoda // In honor of Shark Week1, I decided to write this blog to demonstrate various techniques I’ve found useful when analyzing network traffic with Wireshark, as well as […]
The post Welcome to Shark Week: A Guide for Getting Started with Wireshark and TShark appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Tom Smith // At Black Hills Information Security (BHIS), we deal with all manner of clients, public and private. Until a month or two ago, though, we’d never dealt with […]
The post Why Do Car Dealers Need Cybersecurity Services? appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

rvrsh3ll // Introduction This blog post is intended to give a light overview of device codes, access tokens, and refresh tokens. Here, I focus on the technical how-to for standing […]
The post Dynamic Device Code Phishing appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Derek Banks // Living Off the Land Binaries, Scripts, and Libraries, known as LOLBins or LOLBAS, are legitimate components of an operating system that threat actors can use to achieve […]
The post Ssh… Don’t Tell Them I Am Not HTTPS: How Attackers Use SSH.exe as a Backdoor Into Your Network appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Hal Denton // Have you ever been given an encrypted hard drive to perform forensic analysis on? What could go wrong? Probably the first thought rolling through your mind is […]
The post Who’s Bootin’? Dissecting the Master Boot Record appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..