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At this year’s Hunt Club, I had the opportunity to sit down with AJ Wiggin, Security Operations Manager at Gamma, to discuss one of the biggest challenges facing security teams today: defending against AI-powered attacks.
As attackers use AI to automate reconnaissance, generate malicious code, and accelerate attack execution, security teams have less time than ever to detect, investigate, and respond. According to AJ, keeping pace requires understanding how attacks unfold, gaining visibility into how systems communicate, and using AI to compress detection, investigation, and response.
“We have to be faster than the attackers because they are going to condense that dwell time so much faster.”
Our conversation explored why traditional approaches are struggling to keep up, why network and identity visibility have become foundational, and how AI-powered correlation helps security teams connect the full attack story to stop attacks before they escalate.
Why Siloed Approaches Fall Short
For many organizations, security operations have become increasingly difficult as environments grow more complex. AJ highlighted that knowing what is in the environment is only one part of the challenge. Understanding how users, machines, AI agents, service accounts communicate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is even harder, especially when organizations rely on multiple security technologies, legacy documentation, and years of operational knowledge spread across different teams.
Many security tools generate alerts only after attackers have already taken action. While they may detect individual events, they often lack the context needed to understand the complete attack. As a result, security teams spend valuable time piecing together what happened instead of responding earlier in the attack lifecycle.
The Importance of Network + Identity Visibility
Attackers don’t simply appear inside an organization. They move across identities, devices, cloud services, and networks as they progress through the attack lifecycle.
AJ highlights that understanding how systems communicate is becoming increasingly important as environments become more distributed across multi cloud and attackers move faster.
“Attackers don’t just arrive in your environment. They have to move across the network.”
Having visibility into network communication, workloads, and user activity provides the foundation for detecting malicious behavior earlier in the attack chain.
AI-Powered Correlation and Context Changes the Investigation
Rather than presenting analysts with isolated alerts, AI-powered correlation helps security teams connect telemetry across identities, networks, and cloud environments into a complete attack story.
AJ described how analysts want more than an alert. They need the surrounding context, including what happened before the alert, what happened afterwards, and the full attack story. Bringing together that telemetry and context helps security teams investigate incidents more effectively, understand the blast radius, and respond with greater confidence.
How Gamma Uses Vectra AI
For AJ, the value of Vectra AI is bringing together the visibility and context needed to defend against modern attacks. By correlating network, identity, and cloud signals, Vectra AI helps security teams understand how attackers move through their environment, reconstruct the full attack story, and compress detection, investigation, and response as AI-powered attacks continue to accelerate.
As attackers leverage AI to execute attacks faster, defenders must also use AI to investigate and respond at machine speed. Combining comprehensive visibility with AI-powered correlation and context enables security teams to understand attacker behavior earlier, investigate faster, and proactively stop attacks before they escalate.
Key Takeaways
AI is reshaping both attacks and defenses. As attack timelines continue to compress, security teams need more than faster alerts.
AJ’s perspective highlights three priorities for modern security operations:
- Use AI to compress detection, investigation, and response so defenders can keep pace with AI-powered attacks.
- Gain comprehensive visibility across network, identity, and cloud to understand how attackers move through the environment.
- Correlate signals into the complete attack story so analysts can investigate faster, understand impact, and respond with confidence.
Learn more about defending against AI-powered attacks
Discover why AI-powered attacks require a new approach and how AI-powered Network Detection and Response helps security teams stay ahead.
Read: AI-Powered Attacks Are Here. But So Is AI-Powered NDR to Stop Them.
Explore the Vectra AI Platform
See how Vectra AI combines network, identity, and cloud signals with AI-powered correlation to help security teams compress detection, investigation, and response.
Explore the Vectra AI Platform