Since we launched the Aurora Agentic SOC, we’ve shared a lot about how our AI agents detect, triage, and investigate threats. Response is equally important, because it’s where all of the work in managed detection and response (MDR) pays off for you.
Not every investigation ends in a response action. Some confirm that an alert is harmless, and others wrap up without anything to contain. When an investigation confirms a real threat, we can stop it with Active Response, a capability of Aurora Managed Detection and Response that works across your email, identity, endpoint, and network tools.
In those moments, speed makes a real difference. The faster we contain the account or device an attacker is using, the less time they have to move deeper into your environment. That’s why response in the Aurora Agentic SOC pairs AI agents that investigate at machine speed with a human in the loop analyst who approves every high-impact action.
Response is What Stops an Attack
Detecting an attack doesn’t end it. An attacker who gets into your environment is working toward a goal, such as encrypting your systems, stealing data, or using a compromised mailbox to defraud your customers. That work keeps going until someone cuts off the account, device, or connection the attacker is using.
Most attackers don’t strike the moment they get in. They spend time moving between systems, giving themselves higher levels of access, and copying data first. Each of those steps is a chance to stop them, and Active Response uses that window to cut off the attacker before they reach their goal.
Containing the right account or device early helps keep an attack from turning into data loss or a business outage, so your team can stay focused on running the business. That’s the job of Active Response.
What Active Response Does
Active Response works through integrations with the security and IT tools you already run. It covers four technology types and dozens of first- and third-party tools, all connected through the Open Data Pipeline of our Aurora Superintelligence Platform. Here’s what we can do in each area:
- Email: We can delete or quarantine a malicious message and block the sender, which helps stops a phishing campaign before it spreads across your organization.
- Identity: We can disable a compromised account, sign the user out of every active session, or force a password reset. Each of these are designed to lock out an attacker who’s trying to use stolen credentials.
- Endpoint: We can isolate a laptop or server from the network, quarantine a malicious file, or stop a running process. We do this through the Arctic Wolf Agent, Aurora Endpoint Security, or the endpoint tools you already use.
- Network: We can block a malicious IP address at your firewall or web application firewall and block a malicious website at your secure web gateway. That helps keep attacker infrastructure away from your network and your users.
Fast Investigations Make Fast Response Possible
Before we can contain a threat, an investigation has to confirm it’s real, identify which accounts and devices are involved, and work out how the attacker got in. Those answers tell us which response action to take, so the faster they arrive, the faster containment can begin.
In the Aurora Agentic SOC, AI agents do that work. When a detection fires, our Swarm of Experts™ opens a case and assigns it to specialized agents that handle triage, investigation, threat intelligence, and the context of your environment. Instead of one analyst working through each data source in turn, those agents work on the case at the same time. The result is a finished investigation with the evidence, the scope of the threat, and a recommended response action, ready for an analyst to review.
Why Humans Play a Key Role in Active Response
A fast recommendation still needs a careful decision, because response actions can disrupt your business. Disabling an account locks someone out of their work, and isolating a device cuts it off from the rest of the network. If that happens to an executive’s laptop or a business-critical server by mistake, the disruption can be worse than the threat itself.
Crimson Tide is one of my favorite movies, and it’s how I think about the way we run Active Response, because a human has to validate the call before anything high-impact happens. The story takes place on a U.S. nuclear submarine that receives what looks like an order to launch. The captain wants to fire, and the executive officer isn’t convinced. Neither one can launch on his own authority, because the U.S. military requires both officers to agree before it takes its most destructive action.
Response actions aren’t nuclear launches, but the same logic applies. In the Aurora Agentic SOC, high-impact response actions require human approval. When the evidence points to containment, an oversight agent called the Swarm Judge reviews the findings and recommends an action. The case then goes to a human analyst with the evidence attached. That analyst can approve the recommendation, reject it, or ask for more evidence before anything happens.
Our AI Trust Engine™ reinforces that line. It’s the set of guardrails that keeps agents working within the kinds of cases they’ve been tested and validated on. When a case falls outside that experience, or the actions they are approved to take, the agents hand it to a human expert instead of guessing.
Trust Behind Every Response
Trust in a response comes from experience. We run the world’s largest commercial agentic security operations center (SOC) and resolve 200,000 investigations each week, so our agents and analysts have seen how attacks unfold and which actions stop them. More than 1,000 security experts validate our agents’ work every day, and what they learn from each case feeds back into how our agents handle the next one. That experience stands behind every response decision we make for your business.
We don’t keep a human in the loop because our agents lack expertise. No one, agent or person, is right 100% of the time, so the two work together on every high-impact decision. Agents bring the speed to act early, and people bring the extra layer of judgment to act carefully. Agents investigate, humans decide when to use Active Response, and together they help stop attacks before they disrupt your business.
