This week’s blog is from our exhibitor, Advania:
AI is reshaping cyber security, allowing adversaries to operate faster, at greater scale, and with heightened precision. For their targets, this means incidents escalate faster, and response teams have less room for error.
Incident response (IR) must evolve accordingly. To become AI-ready, IR teams need to prioritise rapid detection, identity-centric containment, and disciplined decision-making – core capabilities that enable organisation-wide resolution, meet regulatory obligations, and maintain trust while keeping defences ahead of emerging, AI-enabled threats.
AI is shifting the threat landscape
AI innovations are not only creating value within day-to-day business workflows. For cybercriminals, it has removed friction from the attack lifecycle. Target reconnaissance, phishing campaign deployment, as well as the location and exploitation of vulnerabilities can all be automated and refined at scale. As a result, attackers can cast a wider net than ever before, and, if they find an unprepared target, they can move from initial access to material impact in a matter of hours.
Beyond simply acting faster and on a larger scale, cybercriminals have also evolved their methods. Modern incidents are increasingly focused on identity rather than infrastructure, exploiting compromised Microsoft 365 accounts, OAuth app consents, and long-lived refresh tokens to gain persistent access without their activity appearing as unusual. These factors combined have led a few threat patterns to grow in popularity, representing the bulk of incidents investigated:
- AI-enhanced social engineering: Techniques that leverage AI to more effectively target users, including through the use of voice and video deepfakes to compromise credentials.
- Rapid vulnerability exploitation: Threat actors move quickly to exploit newly-discovered vulnerabilities – often within days – utilising the potential for AI to develop attack plans at speed.
- Cloud and SaaS abuse: In particular, these patterns operate via OAuth and third-party integrations that allow for compromised credentials to open up the wider environment.
- Data-theft-led extortion: An evolution of ransomware attacks, but where encryption is secondary or absent, and the main threat is the exfiltration or disclosure of confidential information.
- Supply chain incidents: These patterns identify weak links and gaps between systems to compromise multiple organisations at once, requiring coordinated responses across organisations.
What this means for potential targets
For defenders, these shifts in the threat landscapes have compressed the window for effective response. IR plans must be executed efficiently, assuming early credential compromise, cloud misuse, and rapid lateral movement as standard conditions, not edge cases. Those focused on speed, visibility, and taking immediate, decisive action are those who adapt best.
IR capabilities also need to evolve, with the most common threat patterns requiring identity-first investigation and triage, fast containment of risky sessions, and regular monitoring to spot unusual behaviours sooner, identify root cause, and prevent cybercriminals from extending their reach. Such a process relies on clearly delineated ownership of SaaS, cloud, and identity telemetry to make sure no warning signs are missed.
UK organisations must also pay attention to regulatory expectations. Under UK GDPR, organisations have 72 hours to notify the ICO of notifiable personal data breaches.
NIS regulations impose similar expectations for incidents with substantial service impact. At the same time, government guidance such as the AI Cyber Security Code of Practice reinforces the need for strong governance, accountability, and evidence-based decision-making.
While cyber strategy should be tailored to the needs of the organisation, effective IR should seek to build on six fundamental pillars:
- Preparation: Clear command structures, predefined decision rights, and tested playbooks ready for a range of AI-enabled threat scenarios.
- Detection and triage: 24×7 monitoring, threat hunting, and rapid severity assessment, informed by identity and behavioural signals.
- Governance and ownership: Strong governance of access for cloud and SaaS platforms, and clear ownership of telemetry to enable rapid response.
- Containment and eradication: Automated response actions supported by forensic discipline and coordinated third-party engagement.
- Communication and notification: Established cadence for executives and stakeholders, built for full compliance with regulatory frameworks
- Recovery and improvement: Secure restoration once threats are dealt with, including the documentation of lessons learned, and tracked remediation to reduce future exposure.
How Arctic Wolf and Advania help
We’ve built a robust portfolio of security services to help our customers deploy resilient defences, including UK-aligned planning, tabletop exercises, communications runbooks, and designing identity and cloud controls. We can also test the protections already in place through our offensive operations services, providing actionable recommendations that help close exposed vulnerabilities.
We also work closely with Arctic Wolf to keep our customers secure, leveraging their 24/7 Managed Detection and Response capability, combining continuous monitoring and guided remediation to help organisations detect and contain incidents quickly.
As AI reduces the margin for error in cyber incidents, harnessing security expertise is critical for staying ahead of cybercriminals. Those that do not will find that time – not technology – becomes their greatest risk. To find out more about Arctic Wolf, and how our team can help you build a cyber strategy you can be confident in, get in touch with us today.
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