Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adversaries are evolving faster than defenders can respond, and they're weaponizing AI to accelerate their attacks. We’ve seen “living-off-the-land”, lateral movement, and the abuse of legitimate administrator tools enable hackers to hide in plain sight, diluting the effectiveness of traditional detection methods. Meanwhile, defenders are nervously trying to keep up with the accelerating pace of AI-empowered threats hitting them at machine speed.

Corelight Sensor v29.1 and Fleet Manager v29.1.1 fundamentally expand what a Corelight Sensor delivers. The release turns existing network evidence into a shared source of truth for SecOps, NetOps, triage, and forensic investigation. Network performance monitoring and asset classification unlock new value from traffic you're already collecting.

Every packet flowing through a Corelight sensor contains both security-relevant data and performance-relevant data. Until now, Corelight has focused exclusively on extracting security value from network traffic: connection logs, protocol analysis, and threat detections. But the same traffic that reveals lateral movement also reveals TCP latency. The same DNS queries that surface potential C2 channels also reveal resolution timing.

There is a saying you will hear from veterans in the Black Hat Network Operations Center (NOC): “Threat hunting on the Black Hat network is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles." With dozens of training classes running live exploit chains, capture-the-flag traffic, and researchers probing every corner of the internet, our Corelight sensors generate a rich set of Zeek logs, many of which can look suspicious in varying degrees.

The threat is coming from inside the organization. It is coming from a laptop farm three states over, routed through a proxy, and operated by a threat actor sitting on the other side of the globe. We are witnessing a massive shift in how adversaries breach organizations. They no longer need to spend weeks probing your external firewalls or crafting the perfect zero-day exploit. Instead, they simply update their resumes, pass your interview process, and your IT department ships them a corporate device.

Long gone are the days where usernames were all you needed to secure a network. The same is true for your Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts trying to investigate a threat. "Who is jdoe05 and why are they logging into this server?" is a critical question to answer during an investigation, one that neither NDR (Network Detection and Response) nor EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) can answer directly. Enter the Identity Provider (IdP).