Inside the SOC: AI-powered DNS defense against ransomware
Cisco, Thursday, May 14th, 2026
In the modern security operations center (SOC), the biggest challenge isn't always a lack of data - it's the lack of meaning. Analysts are often drowning in telemetry, trying to distinguish the calculated movements of a threat actor trying to blend in with normal traffic from the noise of a global network.
Compounding this challenge is that many traditional security tools attempt to prevent threats based on what they have already seen, not on what could potentially happen. The complexity of a ransomware attack, unfolding through multiple stages, highlights many of the challenges SOC teams face every day.
For an analyst, these events are often fragmented. If the SOC isn't configured to understand threat patterns, they appear as separate alerts in separate dashboards, forcing the human to manually stitch together the 'who,' 'what,' and 'where.'