The Investigative Gap - Why Forensic Context is the SOC’s Greatest Bottleneck
The Investigative Gap - Why Forensic Context is the SOC’s Greatest Bottleneck
The global average cost of a data breach has finally decreased for the first time in five years, falling to $4.44 million (IBM, 2025). However, detection remains a critical failure. According to the 2025 Verizon DBIR, external actors or ransomware groups still disclosed the incident in 82% of cases. This confirms that most organizations only discover a breach when the attacker chooses to reveal it, usually through an extortion demand or a public leak site.
Often we see Security Operations Centers (SOC) and Incident Response (IR) teams trapped in a reactive loop. Traditional tools are designed to alert you once a threat is already inside your wire. By then, the damage is underway. Your analysts are left to manually reconstruct infrastructure relationships using a fragmented mess of spreadsheets and disconnected point tools. This manual scramble is the primary driver of alert fatigue and extended response times.
Every second counts during triage, making tool-hopping a liability. Your team needs immediate clarity into unknown threat infrastructure to end the era of disjointed investigations. Analysts can now access a single, deterministic source of technical context that consolidates enrichment, risk scoring, and correlation into one view. This provides over 100 contextual attributes for any domain or IP, allowing your team to stop chasing tabs and start neutralizing threats. Capabilities include Proprietary Risk Scores to move beyond simple block or allow lists to understand the actual threat level, Automated Clustering to see how a single IP fits into a wider network of malicious assets, and Contextual Depth to understand the logic behind a risk score immediately so you can act with certainty.
Legacy tools often require analysts to perform the heavy lifting of correlation in the heat of a crisis. This is addressed by the Context Graph, which is a foundational engine that pre-correlates changes in the global internet dataset. While an attacker is still building their infrastructure, the Context Graph is already mapping those technical relationships. For example, when an analyst queries an unknown indicator, the platform uses Context Similarity to identify related malicious assets and cluster threats instantly. This allows an IR team to link a single indicator to an entire adversary campaign in seconds, rather than days of manual forensic work.
Operationalizing forensic data before it is weaponized against you changes the math of your security stack. The Context Graph is powered by pre-correlating a massive global dataset, comprising of Passive-Aggressive DNS (PADNS), WHOIS, certificates, traffic sensors, and content hashes. It continuously analyzes benign, gray, and malicious infrastructure to detect adversary “management patterns” rather than just active exploits. By moving the defense line upstream, your team can identify and block attacker infrastructure weeks before a campaign is even launched. This shift from detect and respond to anticipate and prevent is how modern SOC teams reclaim the advantage, moving from reactive to preemptive cyber defense.