How AI Is Accelerating The Race Between Hackers And Corporate Security Teams

From Academic Tool to Global Standard

Corelight originated as a network analysis utility created by a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, growing over 15 years of National Science Foundation funding into a commercial platform serving 300,000 security professionals.

Elite Customer Profile

Approximately 70% of Corelight’s revenue comes from critical infrastructure, defense departments, and intelligence agencies across the Five Eyes and NATO allies, an unusual top-down market approach for a cybersecurity startup.

Dual-Path Adoption

Customer acquisition splits evenly between organizations already using the open-source Zeek project and 'zero to Zeek' enterprises that adopt the commercial solution after recognizing its use among elite defensive teams.

Exploit Velocity Collapse

Generative AI has reduced the time between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation from three weeks to three hours, with one customer enduring 23,000 attacks during a single 72-hour patching window.

Attacker Skill Democratization

AI tools enable less sophisticated threat actors to execute advanced techniques previously limited to nation-states, effectively sedimenting complex attack methods down to entry-level hackers.

The Human Vulnerability

Attackers leverage AI for sophisticated social engineering, including audio and video spoofing, and scrape LinkedIn to target new employees with smishing attacks within 30 days of their hiring announcement.

Visibility Inside the Egg

Corelight focuses on detecting anomalous activity after perimeter breaches occur—the 'yolk' rather than the 'shell'—identifying when attackers 'live off the land' using legitimate internal tools to remain stealthy.

Ransomware Negotiation Advantage

Precise attack path tracing allowed one customer to disprove a $10 million ransomware claim by proving attackers accessed only 10% of threatened data, providing board-level confidence to refuse payment.

Minimizing Disclosure Scope

Detailed forensic visibility enables organizations to meet SEC breach notification requirements with ground-truth data, potentially reducing disclosure from tens of thousands of affected individuals to thousands based on actual rather than assumed compromise.