Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

I am Agent Lux. And I am here to show my work.

Let’s bypass the customary marketing introduction. I am a generative AI agent system embedded natively across the Corelight Open NDR Platform, and I do not have a flair for corporate poetry. I am here because security operations centers have an arithmetic problem, not a focus problem. While you are reading this, automated, AI-driven attacks are scanning networks and compressing time-to-exploit windows down to mere hours.

Episode 20 - NDR Essentials: Why Network Data Still Defines Detection

Richard Bejtlich joins Vince Stoffer to unpack the ideas behind his new book on network detection and response, starting with a practical distinction: NSM is a strategy, while NDR is a product. The conversation explores what teams should expect from network data, how alerts and threat hunting work together, why prevention eventually fails, and how AI can help practitioners investigate unfamiliar logs, alerts, and artifacts without replacing human judgment.

When the 'Attacker' Was an AI Agent: Lessons from the OpenAI-Hugging Face Breach

In this episode of Sophos Cyber Shorts, host Susie Evershed is joined by Ross McKerchar, Sophos CISO, to discuss the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face incident and what it reveals about the future of AI security. From containment failures and over-privileged AI workflows to faster AI-driven attacks, Ross shares practical advice for security leaders on how to strengthen resilience, response, and recovery.

Inside Locked Shields 2026: How network evidence helped defenders cut through live-fire chaos

Locked Shields 2026 brought together more than 4,000 participants from 41 nations for a live-fire cyber defense exercise built around the kind of pressure SecOps teams know well: Critical systems under attack, incomplete context, multiple tools, and no time to waste. For Corelight, the exercise reinforced a practical lesson: In high-pressure defense, network evidence is not just another data source.

You can't govern what you can't see: Detecting shadow AI on your network

AI adoption inside the enterprise didn't ask for permission. It arrived through browser tabs, code editors, and meeting transcription bots, quietly stitching itself into daily workflows long before security teams could write policy around it. The result is a familiar story with a new villain, a sprawling, unmanaged attack surface that lives in your network traffic but nowhere in your asset inventory. We call it shadow AI, and it's the blind spot you didn't plan for or budget for.

What the Black Hat NOC taught me about MCP & agentic SOCs (Chapter 4 of 4)

The first time an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server felt real to me, it wasn't because of a clean demo. It was because of the noise. TL;DR: The harness matters more than the protocol, and the evidence matters more than both. MCP earns its keep when it shortens the path from a good security question to trustworthy evidence, and almost everything interesting about making that work happens in the harness wrapped around the model. In this series, I will cover how to build an MCP for an AI SOC.

What the Black Hat NOC taught me about MCP & agentic SOCs (Chapter 3 of 4)

The first time an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server felt real to me, it wasn't because of a clean demo. It was because of the noise. TL;DR: The harness matters more than the protocol, and the evidence matters more than both. MCP earns its keep when it shortens the path from a good security question to trustworthy evidence, and almost everything interesting about making that work happens in the harness wrapped around the model. In this series, I will cover how to build an MCP for an AI SOC.

Cleartext is all fun and games

One of the many interesting things we stumble across in the Black Hat NOC (Network Operations Center) is the various applications exhibiting poor security hygiene. Usually it’s something in the clear that makes us chuckle before we move on to more serious matters. Sometimes it’s something more serious that requires letting an attendee know they’re leaking sensitive information.

Episode 19 - The Cap on Inference: Proving How Network Data Quality Drives AI Security ROI

In this episode, host Richard Bejtlich sits down with Corelight Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Greg Bell to unpack groundbreaking research that quantifies exactly how data quality impacts AI-driven security automation. Moving past qualitative industry hype, Greg shares hard evidence from an empirical experiment pitting leading AI agents against real-world Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges and incident response report writing. The findings reveal a dramatic truth: basic firewall and flow logs place a hard cap on inference, throttling an LLM's capacity for deep insight.

Sophos Launches Sophos Fusion, the Industry's First and Most Complete AI-Native Cybersecurity Defense System

Built for a threat landscape reshaped by AI, Sophos Fusion unites security operations, endpoint, network security, identity, email, and cloud into one defense system that prevents, detects, investigates, and responds at AI speed.

The State of Ransomware 2026: Payments are dropping but encryption is climbing

The State of Ransomware 2026: Payments are dropping but encryption is climbing Insights from 2,158 IT and cybersecurity leaders across 17 countries whose organizations were hit by ransomware in the past year. This year's data has a few eyebrow-raising departures from the patterns of past State of Ransomware reports. Exploited vulnerabilities lost their three-year grip on the top root-cause spot. Median ransom demands and payments both dropped, yet the average recovery bill still climbed.

SonicWall SMA1000 vulnerabilities in active exploitation

On July 14, 2026, SonicWall disclosed two vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA1000 appliances. Models 6210, 7210, and 8200v are affected. CVE-2026-15409 is a critical (CVSS score of 10.0) unauthenticated server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw that allows an attacker to force the appliance to make requests to unintended destinations.

Ten Black Hat NOCs and counting: Corelight sees it all

Whenever I come back from a Black Hat NOC, people always ask the same question: “So, what did you see?!” They understand how unique it is to have access to the detailed logs generated by an NDR overseeing the network traffic of a conference with thousands of attendees. There is always something to see. There are always stories that come out of the packets; those stories evolve into patterns, and the patterns offer the gift of lessons.

Cut Through the Noise: Learn How to Spot the Threats That Matter

Security teams today face an overwhelming volume of alerts, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine threats from everyday noise. As attackers become more adept at blending into legitimate activity, organizations need smarter ways to prioritize, investigate, and respond.

Sophos Firewall v22 MR2 is now available

Sophos Firewall v22 MR2 is now available AI app control, PQC detection, enhanced Chromebook support, and more. Sophos Firewall v22 bolstered Secure by Design, taking it to a whole new level with major updates to the architecture and new features like the Health Check to help identify high-risk configurations. Sophos Firewall v22 MR1 added several enhancements, including a new set of NDR detections for active threats.

Sophos named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Email Security

Sophos named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Email Security Sophos’ first ever recognition as a Customers’ Choice for Email Security. Sophos has been named a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Email Security. This marks Sophos’ entry into the report, as well as Sophos’ first ever Customers’ Choice distinction for Email Security.

Unmasking BitRAT's C2 over HTTPS

BitRAT is a potent and versatile Remote Access Trojan (RAT) commonly sold on underground forums. Its popularity stems from a robust feature set and an emphasis on stealth, allowing it to evade detection by hiding command-and-control (C2) communications over seemingly benign protocols. This makes traditional detection methods more challenging. By examining the subtle artifacts it leaves behind, even in encrypted traffic, defenders can expose these elusive threats.

How Do You Get Hacked With Zero Malware?

Everyone remembers WannaCry. WantToCry sounds like the same thing. It isn't. It encrypts your files remotely over SMB using nothing but stolen credentials and right now 1.5 million devices are sitting exposed on the public internet. In this episode we break down how remote ransomware works, why your antivirus and EDR never see it coming and what caught it in our Sophos telemetry.

From days of training to three better rules in a minute

A few years ago, I was part of a team responding to a high-profile security incident. After the incident was resolved, I was given a list of NDR rules to add to my firewalls. The issue was that the rules were not made for Suricata, the IDS I was using in this position at that time, so they generated false positives. With all that extra noise, I made it my goal to eliminate that excess noise.

What the Black Hat NOC taught me about MCP & agentic SOCs (Chapter 2 of 4)

The first time an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server felt real to me, it wasn't because of a clean demo. It was because of the noise. TL;DR: The harness matters more than the protocol, and the evidence matters more than both. MCP earns its keep when it shortens the path from a good security question to trustworthy evidence, and almost everything interesting about making that work happens in the harness wrapped around the model. In this series, I will cover how to build an MCP for an AI SOC.

When AI agents look like attackers: what behavioral telemetry tells us

An X-Ops analysis of how AI coding agents trigger endpoint detection rules designed for adversaries AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others built on skill packs such as GStack) are showing up in customer environments. They write code, install dependencies, automate browser tasks, and troubleshoot failures by trying alternative approaches.

Identifying and detecting ScoutC2 malware

At Corelight Labs, our mission is to help organizations stay a step ahead of evolving threats. When our researchers came across Censys' detailed write-up on ScoutC2, a rapidly growing open-source command-and-control (C2) framework favored by threat actors, we knew we needed to bolster community defenses quickly.

Stop Chasing Alerts, Start Hunting Adversaries: The New NDR Essentials

It was time to write another book. That’s what I thought when I heard that Corelight wanted to update its 2021 book on network detection and response (NDR). Tamara Crawford, who owned the project, scheduled a meeting with me and asked if I might be interested in helping, depending on who might write the text.

"Exploit mitigation" stalled around 2008. The attacks didn't.

"Exploit mitigation" stalled around 2008. The attacks didn't. AI turns a patched bug into a working exploit in hours. Why endpoint exploit mitigation stalled in 2008, and what a default-on mitigation layer looks like now. The core of my last post was an asymmetry. An attack can unfold in two steps or 20, but the vocabulary it draws from never grows.

Detection Engineering: Build Robust Programs & Best

Your SOC probably already has detections. The problem is that many of them don't behave like a managed security capability. They behave like a pile of alerts. Analysts close noisy rules because they have to protect their queue. Engineers keep adding logic because coverage gaps are real. Leaders ask whether the program is improving, and the usual answers are weak. Alert counts go up. Tuning tickets pile up.

Episode 18 - Live Fire Defense at Locked Shields

In this episode, host Richard Bejtlich sits down with Corelight Senior Sales Engineers Adam Donadeo and Nico Roosenboom to unpack their firsthand experiences at Locked Shields, the world’s largest international live-fire cyber defense exercise. The conversation dives deep into the chaotic, real-world friction of defending a massive virtualized network alongside 4,000 global experts against aggressive red team waves.

Vect and TeamPCP partner for ransomware campaigns

Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researchers investigated two interconnected threat groups known as Vect and TeamPCP. The two groups announced a formal operational partnership in late March 2026 to combine TeamPCP’s credential harvesting and data theft capabilities with Vect’s ransomware deployment infrastructure in a widespread campaign involving supply chain attacks and the extortion of multiple organizations.

What is CEN/TS 18099? A guide to the injection attack detection standard

For years, the dominant threat against remote identity verification was the presentation attack: someone holding a printed photo up to a camera, wearing a mask, or playing a pre-recorded video on a phone screen. The industry responded with increasingly sophisticated anti-spoofing technology and vision-based detection models, and the standards to test their effectiveness followed. But many of today’s most sophisticated fraudsters don’t bother with the camera at all.