Security Operations | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Attack Surface Management (ASM) tools promise reduced risk. What they usually deliver is more information.  Security teams deploy ASM, asset inventories grow, alerts start flowing, and dashboards fill up. There is visible activity and measurable output. But when leadership asks a simple question, " Is this reducing incidents? " the answer is often unclear.  This gap between effort and outcome is the core ROI problem in attack surface management, especially when ROI is measured primarily through asset counts instead of risk reduction.  The Promise vs. The Proof Most ASM programs are built around a reasonable idea: you can't protect what you don't know exists. As a result, teams focus on discovery: domains and subdomains, IPs and cloud resources, third-party infrastructure, and transient or short-lived assets.  Over time, counts increase. Dashboards are trending upward. Coverage improves.  But none of those metrics directly answer whether the organization i...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into security operations quickly, but many practitioners are still struggling to turn early experimentation into consistent operational value. This is because SOCs are adopting AI without an intentional approach to operational integration. Some teams treat it as a shortcut for broken processes. Others attempt to apply machine learning to problems that are not well defined. Findings from our 2025 SANS SOC Survey reinforce that disconnect. A significant portion of organizations are already experimenting with AI, yet 40 percent of SOCs use AI or ML tools without making them a defined part of operations, and 42 percent rely on AI/ML tools "out of the box" with no customization at all. The result is a familiar pattern. AI is present inside the SOC but not operationalized. Analysts use it informally, often with mixed reliability, while leadership has not yet established a consistent model for where AI belongs, how its output should be valida...

Modern security teams often feel like they're driving through fog with failing headlights. Threats accelerate, alerts multiply, and SOCs struggle to understand which dangers matter right now for their business. Breaking out of reactive defense is no longer optional. It's the difference between preventing incidents and cleaning up after them. Below is the path from reactive firefighting to a proactive, context-rich SOC that actually sees what's coming. When the SOC Only Sees in the Rear-View Mirror Many SOCs still rely on a backward-facing workflow. Analysts wait for an alert, investigate it, escalate, and eventually respond. This pattern is understandable: the job is noisy, the tooling is complex, and alert fatigue bends even the toughest teams into reactive mode. But a reactive posture hides several structural problems: No visibility into what threat actors are preparing. Limited ability to anticipate campaigns targeting the organization's sector. Inability to adjust defenses...

Cloud security is changing. Attackers are no longer just breaking down the door; they are finding unlocked windows in your configurations, your identities, and your code. Standard security tools often miss these threats because they look like normal activity. To stop them, you need to see exactly how these attacks happen in the real world. Next week, the Cortex Cloud team at Palo Alto Networks is hosting a technical deep dive to walk you through three recent investigations and exactly how to defend against them. Secure your spot for the live session ➜ What Experts Will Cover This isn't a high-level overview. We are looking at specific, technical findings from the field. In this session, our experts will break down three distinct attack vectors that are bypassing traditional security right now: AWS Identity Misconfigurations: We will show how attackers abuse simple setup errors in AWS identities to gain initial access without stealing a single password. Hiding in A...

Most people know the story of Paul Bunyan. A giant lumberjack, a trusted axe, and a challenge from a machine that promised to outpace him. Paul doubled down on his old way of working, swung harder, and still lost by a quarter inch. His mistake was not losing the contest. His mistake was assuming that effort alone could outmatch a new kind of tool. Security professionals are facing a similar moment. AI is our modern steam-powered saw. It is faster in some areas, unfamiliar in others, and it challenges a lot of long-standing habits. The instinct is to protect what we know instead of learning what the new tool can actually do. But if we follow Paul's approach, we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of a shift that is already underway. The right move is to learn the tool, understand its capabilities, and leverage it for outcomes that make your job easier.  AI's Role in Daily Cybersecurity Work AI is now embedded in almost every security product we touch. Endpoint protection platfor...

Vulnerability management is a core component of every cybersecurity strategy. However, businesses often use thousands of software without realising it (when was the last time you checked?), and keeping track of all the vulnerability alerts, notifications, and updates can be a burden on resources and often leads to missed vulnerabilities.  Taking into account that nearly 10% of vulnerabilities were exploited in 2024, a multitude of possible – detrimental – breaches could occur if immediate remediation doesn't take place. Businesses need a service that delivers relevant and actionable vulnerability information as soon as possible, saving your business valuable time and resources. Traditional vulnerability management products are often expensive and come with a suite of services, many of which are not needed by businesses, especially those on a budget. A Smarter Way to Track Vulnerabilities SecAlerts is streamlined, easy-to-use, affordable and works in the background 24/7. It ma...

Every day, security teams face the same problem—too many risks, too many alerts, and not enough time. You fix one issue, and three more show up. It feels like you're always one step behind. But what if there was a smarter way to stay ahead—without adding more work or stress? Join The Hacker News and Bitdefender for a free cybersecurity webinar to learn about a new approach called Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction (DASR) —a method that helps security teams close gaps before attackers even find them. Most tools today only tell you what's wrong. They scan, report, and give you long lists of problems. But they don't help you fix them fast enough. The truth is, the attack surface keeps changing—new apps, cloud systems, remote devices, misconfigurations. It never stops. Attackers only need one open door. And that's why traditional defenses often fail—they react too slowly. Meet DASR: A Smarter Way to Stay Safe Dynamic Attack Surface Reduction (DASR) changes how we defend. Instead o...

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise for improving cyber defense and making the lives of security practitioners easier. It can help teams cut through alert fatigue, spot patterns faster, and bring a level of scale that human analysts alone can't match. But realizing that potential depends on securing the systems that make it possible. Every organization experimenting with AI in security operations is, knowingly or not, expanding its attack surface. Without clear governance, strong identity controls, and visibility into how AI makes its decisions, even well-intentioned deployments can create risk faster than they reduce it. To truly benefit from AI, defenders need to approach securing it with the same rigor they apply to any other critical system. That means establishing trust in the data it learns from, accountability for the actions it takes, and oversight for the outcomes it produces. When secured correctly, AI can amplify human capability instead of replacing it t...

Scaling the SOC with AI - Why now?  Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are under unprecedented pressure. According to SACR's AI-SOC Market Landscape 2025 , the average organization now faces around 960 alerts per day , while large enterprises manage more than 3,000 alerts daily from an average of 28 different tools . Nearly 40% of those alerts go uninvestigated , and 61% of security teams admit to overlooking alerts that later proved critical. The takeaway is clear: the traditional SOC model can't keep up. AI has now moved from experimentation to execution inside the SOC. 88% of organizations that don't yet run an AI-driven SOC plan to evaluate or deploy one within the next year. But as more vendors promote "AI-powered SOC automation," the challenge for security leaders has shifted from awareness to evaluation. The key question is no longer whether AI belongs in the SOC, but how to measure its real impact and select a platform that delivers value without introducing signi...

The SOC of 2026 will no longer be a human-only battlefield. As organizations scale and threats evolve in sophistication and velocity, a new generation of AI-powered agents is reshaping how Security Operations Centers (SOCs) detect, respond, and adapt. But not all AI SOC platforms are created equal. From prompt-dependent copilots to autonomous, multi-agent systems, the current market offers everything from smart assistants to force-multiplying automation. While adoption is still early— estimated at 1–5% penetration according to Gartner —the shift is undeniable. SOC teams must now ask a fundamental question: What type of AI belongs in my security stack? The Limits of Traditional SOC Automation Despite promises from legacy SOAR platforms and rule-based SIEM enhancements, many security leaders still face the same core challenges: Analyst alert fatigue from redundant low-fidelity triage tasks Manual context correlation across disparate tools and logs Disjointed and static detect...

Artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity on both sides of the battlefield. Cybercriminals are using AI-powered tools to accelerate and automate attacks at a scale defenders have never faced before. Security teams are overwhelmed by an explosion of vulnerability data, tool outputs, and alerts, all while operating with finite human resources. The irony is that while AI has become a dominant theme in cybersecurity, many enterprises still struggle to apply it effectively within their programs.  The problem isn't access to information, as teams already have more data than they can process. It's cutting through the noise and focusing on what truly matters. AI is crucial here. Not only can it make security teams more efficient, it can generate insights that would be impossible to gather at scale or in real time without machine assistance. If adversaries are already weaponizing AI, then defenders must embed it into their strategies as well or risk falling further behind in a fi...

Penetration testing is critical to uncovering real-world security weaknesses. With the shift into continuous testing and validation, it is time we automate the delivery of these results. The way results are delivered hasn't kept up with today's fast-moving threat landscape. Too often, findings are packaged into static reports, buried in PDFs or spreadsheets, and handed off manually to already-overloaded IT and engineering teams. By the time remediation begins, days or even weeks may have passed since the issues were first discovered. As we explored in our recent article on how automation is redefining pentest delivery , static, manual processes no longer cut it. Security teams need faster insights, cleaner handoffs, and more consistent workflows if they want to keep pace with modern exposure management.  That's where automation makes the difference, ensuring findings move seamlessly from discovery to remediation in real time. Where Should You Start? Knowing automation matters...

Running a SOC often feels like drowning in alerts. Every morning, dashboards light up with thousands of signals; some urgent, many irrelevant. The job is to find the real threats fast enough to keep cases from piling up, prevent analyst burnout, and maintain client or leadership confidence. The toughest challenges, however, aren't the alerts that can be dismissed quickly, but the ones that hide in plain sight. These tricky threats drag out investigations, create unnecessary escalations, and quietly drain resources over time. Why Detection Gaps Keep Opening What slows SOCs down isn't the flood of alerts alone but the way investigations get split across disconnected tools. Intel in one platform, detonation in another, enrichment in a third; every switch wastes time. Across hundreds of cases, those minutes add up to stalled investigations, unnecessary escalations, and threats that linger longer than they should. Action Plan That Delivers 3× SOC Efficiency in Threat Detection SOC tea...

AI is changing automation—but not always for the better. That's why we're hosting a new webinar, " Workflow Clarity: Where AI Fits in Modern Automation ," with Thomas Kinsella, Co-founder & Chief Customer Officer at Tines, to explore how leading teams are cutting through the hype and building workflows that actually deliver. The rise of AI has changed how organizations think about automation. But here's the reality many teams are quietly wrestling with: AI isn't a silver bullet. Purely human-led workflows buckle under pressure, rigid rules-based automations break the moment reality shifts, and fully autonomous AI agents risk introducing black-box decision-making that's impossible to audit. For cybersecurity and operations leaders, the stakes are even higher. You need workflows that are fast but reliable, powerful but secure, and—above all—explainable. So where does AI really fit in? The Hidden Problem with "All-In" Automation The push to automate everythi...

The Problem: Legacy SOCs and Endless Alert Noise Every SOC leader knows the feeling: hundreds of alerts pouring in, dashboards lighting up like a slot machine, analysts scrambling to keep pace. The harder they try to scale people or buy new tools, the faster the chaos multiplies. The problem is not just volume; it is the model itself. Traditional SOCs start with rules, wait for alerts to fire, and then dump raw signals on analysts. By the time someone pieces together what is really happening, the attacker has already moved on, or moved in. It is a broken loop of noise chasing noise. Flipping the Model: Context Over Chaos Instead of drowning in raw events, treat every incoming signal as a potential opening move in a bigger story. Logs from identity systems, endpoints, cloud workloads, and SIEMs do not just land in separate dashboards; they are normalized, connected, and enriched to form a coherent investigation. A brute-force login attempt on its own is easy to dismiss. But when enh...

Security leaders are embracing AI for triage, detection engineering, and threat hunting as alert volumes and burnout hit breaking points. A comprehensive survey of 282 security leaders at companies across industries reveals a stark reality facing modern Security Operations Centers: alert volumes have reached unsustainable levels, forcing teams to leave critical threats uninvestigated. You can download the full report here . The research, conducted primarily among US-based organizations, shows that AI adoption in security operations has shifted from experimental to essential as teams struggle to keep pace with an ever-growing stream of security alerts. The findings paint a picture of an industry at a tipping point, where traditional SOC models are buckling under operational pressure and AI-powered solutions are emerging as the primary path forward. Alert Volume Reaches Breaking Point Security teams are drowning in alerts, with organizations processing an average of 960 alerts per ...

Run by the team at workflow orchestration and AI platform Tines, the Tines library features over 1,000 pre-built workflows shared by security practitioners from across the community - all free to import and deploy through the platform's Community Edition. The workflow we are highlighting streamlines security alert handling by automatically identifying and executing the appropriate Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) from Confluence. When an alert triggers, AI agents analyze it, locate relevant SOPs, and perform required remediation steps - all while keeping the on-call team informed via Slack. It was created by Michael Tolan, Security Researcher L2 at Tines, and Peter Wrenn, Senior Solutions Engineer at Tines. In this guide, we'll share an overview of the workflow, plus step-by-step instructions for getting it up and running. The problem - manual alert triage and SOP execution For security teams, responding to alerts efficiently requires quickly identifying the threat ty...

Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platforms keep evolving, giving attackers faster and cheaper ways to break into corporate accounts. Now, researchers at ANY.RUN has uncovered a new entrant: Salty2FA , a phishing kit designed to bypass multiple two-factor authentication methods and slip past traditional defenses.  Already spotted in campaigns across the US and EU, Salty2FA puts enterprises at risk by targeting industries from finance to energy. Its multi-stage execution chain, evasive infrastructure, and ability to intercept credentials and 2FA codes make it one of the most dangerous PhaaS frameworks seen this year. Why Salty2FA Raises the Stakes for Enterprises Salty2FA's ability to bypass push, SMS, and voice-based 2FA means stolen credentials can lead directly to account takeover. Already aimed at finance, energy, and telecom sectors, the kit turns common phishing emails into high-impact breaches.  Who is Being Targeted? ANY.RUN analysts mapped Salty2FA campaigns and fo...