Strengthening modern detection with Open NDR and integrated threat intelligence

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.

Responding to these increasingly common attacks requires better insight into network behavior, aligned with high-quality threat intelligence, that can keep pace with the speed at which adversaries attack you. Without the right network evidence and real-time intelligence flowing into your detection infrastructure, your team is left drowning in false positives and chasing ghosts while real threats slip through undetected. Put another way, modern threat detection requires better forensic-grade data correlated with high-quality threat intelligence to enable defenders to move at the speed of AI-enabled threats.

Operationalizing threat intelligence, network evidence, and multi-layered detections

High-quality threat intelligence is most valuable when it’s integrated and operationalized into your detection workflow. Cross-referencing stale or incomplete intelligence against the historical logs streaming in from across the SOC doesn't stop active threats. It just creates more work and frustration across the team.

This is where an effective NDR can help rationalize and simplify the detection workflow. Corelight’s Open NDR Platform provides ground-truth evidence of everything happening on your networks and has been praised for identifying emerging and even unknown threats that traditional monitoring tools can’t see. By transforming raw network traffic across IT, cloud, and OT environments into correlated, contextual evidence, Corelight can tell you exactly what’s happening. Think of it as a powerful flight recorder delivering immutable network evidence. When this network evidence is effectively correlated with high-quality threat intelligence, your SOC has a powerful tool to counter the AI-empowered adversaries that we’re seeing more often. Coreight has been enriching Zeek-based logs with industry-leading threat intelligence, as well as endpoint and vulnerability data, to supercharge our multi-layered detection engine, which includes supervised ML, unsupervised anomaly detection, behavioral analytics, and, of course, signature-based techniques. Fueling this advanced detection platform with the highest-quality network data allows security teams to identify and prioritize real threats faster and with more certainty than ever before.

For the threat intelligence layer, Corelight has curated an ecosystem of industry-leading threat intelligence partners, including CrowdStrike, Mandiant, MISP, LevelBlue (aka AlienVault OTX), Securonix ThreatQ, Tor, and Analyst1, among others, and supports open standards, such as STIX/TAXII and YARA, that enable integrations with additional vendors. Integrating and operationalizing IOCs, Suricata rules, and YARA rules from these third-party sources into the detection workflow means that we’re automatically enriching Corelight logs with contextual data in real time at the point of observation, directly at the sensor.

This powerful combination of high-fidelity, ground-truth network evidence and high-quality threat intelligence enables customers to conduct faster, more complete investigations and achieve higher productivity across the SOC. Your team can stop chasing false positives and start focusing on what matters.

The flexibility to bring your own threat intelligence

With hundreds of commercial and open-source intel feeds available, Corelight’s open design gives you the flexibility to integrate the feeds that suit your business best. In addition to supporting popular intelligence standards out of the box, Corelight provides native integration with a variety of vendor feeds, including:

• CrowdStrike Falcon Adversary Intelligence, including real-time IOCs and detection rules that reflect the latest adversary tactics
• Mandiant (Google) Threat Intelligence, providing context on threat actor behaviors and motivations
• Securonix ThreatQ, strengthening intelligence-led security operations with the context analysts need to respond with confidence
• Open threat intelligence platforms like MISP and LevelBlue (AlienVault OTX), enabling community-driven intelligence
• Corelight Threat Intelligence, powered by CrowdStrike and included as part of the Corelight platform
• Threat intelligence platforms like Analyst 1 Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) and Securonix ThreatQ, designed to aggregate, analyze, and operationalize threat intelligence
• Open standards support for STIX/TAXII and YARA, future-proofing your integrations with emerging threat intelligence providers

Because we offer an ecosystem of integrated intelligence partners, you avoid the cost and complexity of building and maintaining these integrations yourself. We make setup easy with just a few clicks in the Corelight Fleet Manager Connector page, and once they’re connected, the intelligence is automatically routed to your Corelight Sensors and into your detection workflow. This not only gives you better visibility into live network threats but also helps threat hunters, who now have richer correlated data to apply to historical network telemetry. The result is considerable improvements in threat detection effectiveness and efficiency.

And Corelight's open design and growing ecosystem mean you're not locked into a proprietary approach. You maintain the flexibility to adapt as your threat landscape and technology stack evolve.

The broader ecosystem advantage

Of course, effective threat detection and response requires more than just the best network data and high-quality threat intelligence. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), vulnerability management, identity management, SIEM, XDR, and incident response tools all play critical roles in your program. But what separates best-in-class programs from the rest is that they're built on a foundation of high-fidelity, forensic-grade data that ensures their monitoring environment is optimized for speed and accuracy.

Most of our customers know that traditional network monitoring, like NetFlow and IDS, falls far short of providing security teams with the details to effectively identify and respond to today’s threats. They’ve seen for themselves how Corelight delivers something fundamentally different with our comprehensive, correlated, and increasingly enriched network data that captures the full context of all network behavior. It is the kind of immutable evidence that makes every downstream tool more effective.

To demonstrate the power of fueling the SOC with better data, we recently ran an experiment where the results even took us by surprise. In it, we built an agentic test environment to measure the success of some of the more advanced LLMs in responding to real-world attack scenarios, using a range of source data. Then we asked agents to compete in a realistic Capture the Flag (CTF) exercise, running dozens of competitions while keeping the language model fixed and changing only the network source data. We found that high-fidelity Corelight logs improved CTF scores by over 350%, compared to NetFlow logs, and by over 60% compared to firewall logs. We also saw that the Corelight data enabled the AI model to answer CTF questions almost twice as fast as the same model working with lower-quality network logs. This proved our hypothesis that data quality has a critical impact on SOC performance, which is further compounded when applying AI models to detection scenarios. You can read more about this experiment in “Data quality defines a ceiling for SOC performance”.

In practical terms, what this means is that when the SIEM or XDR platform receives high-confidence Corelight alerts backed by ground-truth network evidence and enriched with high-quality threat intelligence, relevant endpoint, vulnerability, and identity data, analysts can move quickly and more confidently to contain threats that traditional monitoring tools often miss. And when your incident response team needs to investigate a potential breach, they can trust that they have the forensic-grade evidence they need for faster containment.

But it takes a village, so to speak, and our open architecture helps bring this superior insight to the platforms in your environment. To that end, Corelight natively integrates with a variety of SOC solutions, including SIEM, XDR, SOAR, and SASE platforms, as well as packet brokers, EDRs, vulnerability management solutions, and identity platforms, to help support a detection and response program that makes sense for you. The result is provably better NDR that integrates seamlessly into your environment.

Future-proofing your detection program

This matters even more as vendors consolidate, technologies evolve, and threat actors develop new techniques to ply their trade. In this environment, adaptability is essential.

This is why Corelight's open-source heritage matters. Built on powerful open-source technologies, such as Zeek, Suricata, Sigma, and AI, Corelight offers complete control over data, allowing you to customize, create, filter, and integrate it whenever and wherever you need. With no proprietary data format, your data is fully portable, free to move or share with other systems and platforms. Transparency in detections and an open architecture mean your threat detection program isn't dependent on a single vendor's roadmap or strategic decisions. You maintain the flexibility to integrate new threat intelligence and other relevant third-party sources as they emerge, adopt new security tools as your needs evolve, and adapt your detection logic without ripping and replacing your entire infrastructure.

Corelight's growing ecosystem of strategic technology partners and our openness ensure that your detection program stays current without forcing you into a proprietary platform. You're not betting your security on a single vendor's success; you're building a detection program that can evolve with your business and your threat landscape.

For security leaders making platform decisions, this distinction is critical. The right NDR platform should amplify your existing investments, not replace them. It should integrate with your SIEM, threat intelligence, and EDR, as well as your vulnerability and identity platforms, to adapt to your business strategy, not dictate it.

Conclusion

Modern threat detection requires more than vigilance. It requires visibility into all connected devices, timely, high-quality threat intelligence, and detection infrastructure that integrates seamlessly across your entire security program.

Corelight provides exactly that with an open platform and an expanding ecosystem of integration partners. Powered by our purpose-built, forensic-grade data, multi-layered detection logic, and architectural flexibility, Corelight Open NDR ensures your program stays relevant as threats, technologies, and your business evolve.

In a world where adversaries are hiding in plain sight and deploying AI to accelerate their operations, defenders need to be equally smart about how their environment matures and adapts.

Ready to build a detection program that evolves with the new AI-enabled threat landscape? Explore howCorelight’s Open NDR Platform can deliver the network insight and adaptability to stay one step ahead.