Binary Defense

The Tines 2025 Voice of the SOC Analyst report found that 71% of SOC analysts report burnout and 64% are considering leaving within the year. The SANS 2025 SOC Survey found that satisfaction with generative AI tools ranks last among SOC technologies. Those two numbers tell the same story from different angles. The analyst job is being squeezed between two pressures. The deterministic work is moving to agents, which is good, because that's where most of the burnout was coming from.

A full-featured backdoor with file encryption, drive wiping, and a C2 channel that looks like normal message broker traffic. Meet BLUERABBIT, this Golang-based backdoor, attributed to a likely Iran-nexus threat actor, routes its command-and-control through RabbitMQ (AMQP) for tasking, Redis for state management, and MinIO for S3-compatible data exfiltration.

The AI-orchestrated cyberespionage campaign that Anthropic disclosed in late 2025, the most agentic offensive operation publicly documented, required humans at four to six decision points per campaign. The attackers had every incentive to run the operation fully autonomously. They kept humans in the loop anyway, for the calls that mattered. They knew where the AI couldn't be trusted to decide. That same structural question is the one defenders have to answer.

Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report puts the median time from initial access to handoff to a secondary threat group at 22 seconds in 2025. In 2022, that same median sat above eight hours. What changed is not that attackers got smarter. What changed is that initial access brokers started pre-staging secondary group malware before the handoff, turning what used to be a marketplace transaction into an automated delivery pipeline. The number is a readout on an assembly line, not a creativity contest.

AI is fundamentally changing how we run security operations. I see it inside our own SOC every day. Analysts are going deeper on the work that matters because the routine work moves faster. The agentic wave is the next step in that change, and there's real promise in it. But the way the industry evaluates agentic SOC products hasn't caught up with what those products are doing. That's the gap I want to walk through here. The category is moving fast and the technology is genuinely impressive.

Information stealers continue to be one of the most prolific and damaging malware categories facing organizations today. They are fast, lightweight, and purpose-built to siphon credentials, session tokens, and financial data before defenders have time to respond.

The Difference Between an Alert and a Detection Most of what this attacker did looked completely normal. They authenticated with valid credentials. They accessed systems through a trusted remote support platform. They ran tools that IT administrators use every day. Individually, none of it would have raised a flag worth acting on. That's the point.

The Problem Every SOC Is Living With Every SOC analyst knows the feeling. The queue is full. The alerts keep coming. And the vast majority of them, sometimes 90% or more, turn out to be nothing. False positives are the silent tax on every security operation. They burn time, erode trust in tooling, and create the exact kind of fatigue that lets real threats slip through. It's not a people problem. The analysts are good.

CLEVELAND – March 12, 2026 – Binary Defense, the trusted Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and enterprise defense provider, today announced the launch of NightBeacon, an AI-powered security operations platform built directly into the company's security operations center (SOC).

If you've spent any real time in the security trenches, you know the real enemy isn't just ransomware gangs, nation-state hackers, or relentless botnets. It's the endless grind of spreadsheets, metrics, and boardroom battles. For years, we've marched into those meetings armed with hypotheticals: "Here's what didn't happen because we stopped it." When everything runs smoothly, we're invisible heroes. But let one breach slip through, and suddenly everyone's asking why you didn't prevent it.