Page 304 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

How Agentic AI Enhances Proactive Threat Hunting

Agentic AI has some significant benefits for proactive cyber threat hunting:

• Autonomous Threat Discovery: While an organization understands the systems, networks, and
devices it depends on, an agent arm can independently explore through the data sources, network
traffic, system logs, and endpoint activity looking for ignored threats that others have missed in
the various security layers.
• Identification of Dormant Threats: Cyber threat hunting agents are able to discover threats that
are not actively causing damage, but they may trigger if provoked. An agent can accumulate and
analyze the behavioral baseline over time, allowing detection of anomalies that may be an initial
signal of future malicious activity.
• Detection of Emerging Threats: Agentic AI can also learn from what it is exposed to and can
change with changes in attacks. If a system is attacked with a new technique and relevant training
data are available, the agent could detect what others cannot, opening up new avenues of
detection for zero-day exploits and novel malware.
• Reduced Alert Fatigue: As AI agents are triaging and investigating the findings autonomously,
they will discourage the churning of alerts most organizations experience which are predominantly
false positives or low-value alerts. This will allow analysts'' to focus on the important issues they
need to address and other contextual incidents that warrant their attention.
• Continuous Monitoring and Analysis: AI agents are a 24/7 system of monitoring and analysis
of the cyber security environment to identify any threats are being dealt with appropriately.
• Enhanced Threat Intelligence: The insights & findings generated by agentic AI can help
advance understanding of the threat landscape by vastly improving threat intelligence and
informing future security responses.

The Future of Threat Hunting with Agentic AI

Agentic AI is not intended to fully replace human threat hunters. It is designed to complement human
capabilities. With repetitive, time-consuming, and resource-heavy aspects of threat hunting automated
by an AI agent, a human analyst will have more time for strategic thinking, complex analysis, and incident
response.

Agentic AI is progressing toward the future where the defense of our cyber systems becomes preemptive,
adaptive, and resilient against threats that are always evolving. With advancing capabilities, AI agents
will be an increasingly important asset in the protection of digital assets in the face of cyber threats.
Organizations that use agentic AI to perform proactive threat hunting will have a distinct advantage in the
protection of their digital assets against their adversaries.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 304
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