When Attackers Move at AI Speed, How Can Your SOC Keep Up?  

Artificial intelligence is changing the cybersecurity landscape at an unprecedented pace. While enterprises are using AI to improve efficiency, cybercriminals are finding new ways to automate attacks, refine phishing campaigns, and scale their operations.

What once required significant time and technical expertise can now be accomplished faster and with fewer resources. 

For SOC and MSSP teams, this means more suspicious activity to investigate, more indicators to validate, and growing pressure to distinguish genuine threats from background noise.

The challenge is particularly relevant for organizations in the United States and Europe, which remain among the most targeted markets for cyberattacks. 

As attackers become faster and more adaptable, security teams face an uncomfortable reality: How do you investigate threats effectively when the time available to understand them keeps shrinking? 

A Growing Threat Landscape: Why the US and Europe Need to Stay Alert 

The United States and Europe remain major targets of cybercrime, ransomware, and attacks against critical infrastructure. Recent government reports highlight the scale of the challenge. 

The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, released in April 2026, recorded over $20 billion in reported internet crime losses in the US, a 26% increase from 2024.

More than one million complaints were filed, with phishing, spoofing, and extortion among the most common. 

In Europe, ENISA’s 2026 Threat Landscape identifies ransomware as the EU’s most impactful cyber threat, with public administration among the most targeted sectors.

CERT-EU also reported an increase in threat actors targeting EU institutions and their ecosystem, from 110 in 2024 to 174 in 2025, highlighting increasingly sophisticated social engineering, including AI-generated phishing and deepfakes. 

For enterprises, the implications are clear: attackers are becoming more adaptable, while security teams face growing volumes of suspicious activity and less time to investigate. 

SOCs and MSSPs need to do more than detect attacks to stay ahead. They must understand suspicious indicators, connect related threats, and find reliable answers before incidents escalate. 

The Investigation Bottleneck: Getting Answers Before Threats Escalate 

For SOC analysts, identifying a suspicious indicator is often just the start of an investigation. 

An unfamiliar IP appears in network logs. An employee receives an unexpected attachment. A security tool flags a potentially malicious URL.

Each alert raises familiar questions: Is it malicious? Has it appeared in previous attacks? Is it linked to a known threat actor or campaign? And what should happen next? 

Without enough context, analysts can lose valuable time switching between tools, checking intelligence sources, and correlating findings manually. 

The challenge is even greater for MSSPs investigating activity across multiple customer environments. High alert volumes and the need to validate indicators individually can quickly create operational bottlenecks. 

ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup helps accelerate these investigations. 

By searching suspicious IP addresses, domains, URLs, and file hashes, analysts can quickly assess reputation and access available intelligence, including malicious classifications, related threats, and historical observations.

Rather than starting from scratch, they can use existing context to guide their investigation. 

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For example, a lookup on an IP associated with suspicious outbound traffic may reveal previous malicious activity or links to known campaigns. This helps analysts prioritize alerts and determine where to focus their efforts. 

Still, reputation alone cannot establish whether an indicator is malicious. A newly registered domain may have no history, while a suspicious file may require deeper analysis. TI Lookup is therefore a starting point for investigation, not a final verdict.  

Beyond the Indicator: Understanding What a Threat Actually Does 

Knowing that a file or URL is suspicious is useful. Understanding its behavior is even more valuable. 

Static indicators provide an initial assessment, but they don’t reveal what happens when a file executes or a URL is accessed.

Does it establish persistence, communicate with external infrastructure, or download additional payloads? These details help analysts assess a threat’s potential impact. 

An interactive sandbox like the one offered by ANY.RUN provides a controlled environment to analyze suspicious files and URLs, observe execution behavior, and investigate network communications without exposing production systems. 

Connecting sandbox analysis with Threat Intelligence Lookup adds another layer of context. The powerful new capability called Related Threat Context presented in ANY.RUN’s sandbox helps analysts explore connected threat activity and related analyses, linking observed behavior to known indicators, campaigns, and malicious infrastructure.

By investigating suspicious IPs or domains identified during execution, analysts can uncover additional connections and potential threats that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

For SOC teams, it means deeper investigations and better-informed decisions. And for MSSPs, it provides additional context across customer environments. 

The goal is not just to confirm malicious activity, but to understand how a threat operates and what analysts should investigate next. 

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Staying Ahead, Not Just Catching Up: The Importance of Continuous Threat Intelligence 

Even a thorough investigation provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing threat landscape. Malicious domains emerge, infrastructure gets replaced, and threat actors adapt.

Intelligence that was relevant yesterday may not be enough for tomorrow’s investigations. 

Threat intelligence feeds help SOC and MSSP teams keep pace by providing continuously updated information on malicious IPs, domains, URLs, file hashes, and emerging threats.

Fresh intelligence can help analysts recognize suspicious activity earlier and enrich investigations without relying entirely on manual lookups. 

For instance, ANY.RUN’s internal analysis found that up to 30% of unique malicious indicators observed in Interactive Sandbox sessions had already been identified by ANY.RUN and were available in Threat Intelligence Feeds. 

This finding highlights the practical value of continuously updated intelligence: when these indicators appear in an organization’s telemetry, security systems can potentially match them against TI Feeds before analysts begin a manual sandbox investigation.

This gives SOC teams an opportunity to identify known malicious activity earlier and prioritize their response. 

Continuously updated feeds also help MSSPs monitor multiple customer environments and maintain visibility into emerging threats. 

Turning Threat Intelligence into an Everyday SOC Advantage 

Having access to threat intelligence is one thing. Making it useful across everyday security operations is another. 

SOC teams need to connect intelligence gathering, investigation, and response without adding complexity. Indicators flagged during routine monitoring should be easy to investigate, enrich with context, and escalate when necessary. 

A practical workflow can bring these capabilities together: 

• Check indicators with TI Lookup: Investigate suspicious IP addresses, domains, URLs, and file hashes to establish their reputation and identify known malicious associations. 
• Dig deeper with sandboxing: When an indicator requires further examination, analyze suspicious files or URLs in an interactive sandbox. Explore execution behavior and related threat context to uncover additional indicators and potential attack connections. 
• Keep intelligence current: Use threat intelligence feeds to stay informed about emerging malicious infrastructure, campaigns, and indicators that may affect the organization or its customers. 
• Make informed decisions: Combine lookup results, behavioral analysis, and updated intelligence to prioritize investigations and determine appropriate response actions. 

For MSSPs, this approach can also help standardize investigation processes across multiple customer environments.

Analysts gain a more consistent way to validate indicators, investigate suspicious activity, and work with relevant threat context, even when managing high volumes of alerts. 

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Conclusion 

AI will continue to change the speed and scale of cyberattacks, and security teams shouldn’t expect the pressure on their operations to ease.

For enterprises in the US and EU, maintaining strong security visibility requires more than simply detecting suspicious activity. It requires understanding what lies behind it. 

Behavior analysis and continuously updated threat intelligence give SOC and MSSP analysts different but complementary ways to investigate threats, uncover context, and make informed decisions. 

Attackers may be moving at AI speed, but with the right intelligence and investigation capabilities, your SOC doesn’t have to fall behind. 

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