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# AI Now Writes Both Sides of the Cybersecurity War
- URL: https://wire.fourthweb.ai/ai-now-writes-both-sides-of-the-cybersecurity-war/
- Published: 2026-08-14T10:31:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-14T10:31:07.000Z
- Description: The hackers who hack hackers just handed AI its first real job at scale — and the results are already rewriting what "security operations" means.
- Author: Travis Wright
- Tags: Human Imperative, AI Agents, AI Infrastructure, IPO Watch

**The hackers who hack hackers just handed AI its first real job at scale — and the results are already rewriting what "security operations" means.**

### The Summary

- [Black Hat's Network Operations Center used agentic AI to automatically triage 2,543 of 2,593 security incidents](https://www.fastcompany.com/91590086/at-black-hat-ai-is-helping-security-pros-find-threats-and-creating-new-ones?partner=rss&utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=feed&utm%5Fcampaign=rss+fastcompany&utm%5Fcontent=rss), leaving only 50 for human review — at a conference where attendees are actively demonstrating attacks.
- The system combines Corelight network tools, custom-built components, and third-party integrations, queryable via Slack bot, with full audit trails to raw logs.
- This isn't theoretical AI assistance. This is an agent doing the job at the largest gathering of security professionals in the world.

### The Signal

Black Hat is where security professionals go to show off new exploits, test defenses, and sometimes cross lines. The conference Wi-Fi is a needle stack, not a haystack. [Out of 8,892 network issues detected, 2,593 became actionable cases](https://www.fastcompany.com/91590086/at-black-hat-ai-is-helping-security-pros-find-threats-and-creating-new-ones?partner=rss&utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=feed&utm%5Fcampaign=rss+fastcompany&utm%5Fcontent=rss). An [AI agent](https://wire.fourthweb.ai/tag/ai-agents/) handled 98% of them automatically. Only 50 required human judgment.

That's not a pilot program. That's production deployment in the hardest possible environment. The Network Operations Center didn't use AI to assist analysts. It used AI to replace the first two layers of analysis entirely. When James Pope, senior director at Corelight, says "when it works, it's amazing," he's underselling it. What's amazing is that it worked at all in an environment where legitimate security research looks identical to actual attacks.

> "We've taken those detections and rolled them up into what we call agentic triage."

The architecture matters here. Pope's team built a system that combines:

- Existing Corelight network security tools
- Custom-built detection components
- Third-party tools from Splunk and others
- A Slack bot interface for natural language queries
- Complete audit trails to raw logs

That last piece is critical. The system doesn't just spit out verdicts. It shows its work. Every triage decision links back to the actual network logs that triggered it. No black box. No "trust the algorithm." You can interrogate the bot in Slack and trace its reasoning all the way down to packet level if you want.

This is what agentic AI looks like when it's ready for real work:

- It makes decisions autonomously but keeps receipts
- It handles the volume humans can't scale to
- It leaves the genuinely ambiguous calls to people
- It integrates into existing workflows instead of demanding new ones

The implications for security operations are immediate. If an AI agent can successfully triage threats at Black Hat, where every other attendee is running Wireshark and half of them are testing new attack vectors, it can triage threats anywhere. The skill gap in cybersecurity just got less acute. Not because we're training more analysts faster, but because we automated the work that was burning them out.

### The Implication

Every security team running a SOC should be asking why they're still paying humans to do first-level triage. The technology is here. It works in production. It's composable from existing tools. The barrier isn't capability anymore. It's organizational willingness to let agents do the job.

Watch for the second-order effect: as agents handle more of the routine detection and response work, human security analysts either level up into genuine threat hunting and architecture work, or they become redundant. The middle is disappearing fast.

### Sources

[Fast Company Tech](https://www.fastcompany.com/91590086/at-black-hat-ai-is-helping-security-pros-find-threats-and-creating-new-ones?partner=rss&utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=feed&utm%5Fcampaign=rss+fastcompany&utm%5Fcontent=rss)