Cisco XDR Just Changed the Game, Again

The Confidence Gap in SecOps Is Real, and It’s Time to Close It

Over the past year I’ve spoken with hundreds of CISOs and SOC leaders and no matter the organization’s size or industry there is a recurring theme: Security teams aren’t struggling with a lack of data, they’re struggling with a lack of clarity.

Alerts are easy, but actions are hard. Speed alone is no longer enough. What teams need now are smarter systems—solutions that reduce noise, validate threats, automatically investigate, and confidently guide response.

At RSA Conference 2025, we’re unveiling our next set of AI-driven innovations built to do exactly that. These aren’t just new features. They represent a new foundation, one designed to help every analyst move from signal to clarity and trust your automation to actually work for you; acting with conviction when it matters most.

Prioritize Verdict Clarity to Enable Confident, Timely Action at Scale

When we talk about security maturity, speed and coverage are no longer sufficient to trust the automation or respond quickly with confidence. Confidence comes from having clarity and knowing decisively the next steps and the outcome they will deliver. What sets teams apart today is how quickly they are able to comprehend what happened and how confident they can be that their next action is their best action. In the middle of a fast-moving incident, can your analysts validate alerts to determine the severity of threat? or quickly skip an alert that is a false positive but begs for attention? Can they clearly explain the unfolding story of an attack to an exec or an auditor or even to another security expert? Can they act confidently with weak signals when they still have a shot of containing an outbreak and know they’re right?

Raising confidence across SecOps means more than closing the technical gaps between detection, investigation, and response. It means closing the cognitive gap, giving teams the certainty to act without hesitation. At Cisco, that’s our focus. We’re building solutions that fuse data, context, and automation into trusted, explainable decisions and actions.

Four Breakthroughs That Drive Clear Verdict, Decisive Action at AI Speed

At RSAC, we’re introducing a new wave of capabilities in Cisco XDR that will turn this vision into reality. These innovations give every analyst the confidence to act, no matter what their experience or team size. They mark a shift from manual investigation to Agentic AI-augmented decision-making, where signals are not just detected but investigated and understood with supporting evidence. These capabilities are setting a new standard for modern security operations, enabling teams to move from uncertainty to clarity and from hesitation to confident, decisive action.

Instant Attack Verification

One of the most impactful new capabilities we’re introducing is Instant Attack Verification. It is designed to solve the core problem security teams face every day: too many alerts with insufficient investigation leading to not enough clarity/ certainty/ confidence. Cisco XDR now automatically analyzes each alert to determine whether it poses a real threat. We are using Agentic AI to investigate across multiple vectors, correlate behaviors, derive context, and fuse risk signals across your environment.

The result is automated detection and response for the most common attacks. Machine learning, machine reasoning, and LLMs combine to trigger multiple AI agents acting on different parts of the investigation lifecycle. Each investigation has a clear verdict. This is then used to trigger pre-built playbooks in Cisco XDR or Splunk SOAR to respond instantly with or without human intervention depending on each organization’s processes. XDR does not create more alerts when it validates a threat but works like your AI agent to eliminate alerts. It either classifies each alert as false positives or triggers a pre-built response. Instant Attack Verification reduces false positives, reduces alert fatigue, speeds up investigation, and triggers trusted playbooks to work on alerts at machine speed. No noise. No guesswork. Just a clear verdict. Decisive Action. All at AI speed.

Attack Storyboard

The Cisco XDR Attack Storyboard is a breakthrough advancement, leveraging AI-driven investigations that help analysts comprehend an entire attack in under 30 seconds. This isn’t just a visualization—it’s an investigation experience. Cisco’s AI constructs a dynamic Attack Graph, mapping events to MITRE ATT&CK tactics along an unfolding attack timeline and summarizing each step so anyone—from SOC analysts to non-security, IT professionals —can instantly grasp what happened, what it means, and what to do next.

It’s clarity at machine scale: AI plans and guides the investigation, highlights root causes, and surfaces recommended containment and remediation steps—so decisions are made faster, with more confidence. For auditors and executives, the storyboard delivers audit-ready narratives in plain language, turning technical complexity into understandable, actionable insight. Delivering a confidence inspiring clear verdict with decisive action.

Automated Forensics

Imagine if your XDR triggered digital forensics to collect deep evidence on endpoints before you knew you needed it. The new XDR Forensics capability changes the game for SecOps by triggering digital forensics to collect over 350 artifacts on endpoints, including compromised or partially encrypted ones. This evidence, including registry files, memory dumps, activity logs, and hundreds of other pieces of information is mandatory for forensic investigations. This forensic evidence gathering can be triggered based on risk scoring, behavioral analytics, and other signals, or simply through a single click on the incident page.

The evidence is readily available on the incident page, with a side-by-side timeline comparing analysis of the artifacts. Shining light into this “black box” of your endpoints enables you to determine the root cause and next steps with high confidence.

XDR + Secure Access Integration

At RSA, Cisco is setting a new standard for integrated defense. By uniting Cisco XDR with Secure Access, we’re delivering the industry’s first real-time convergence of threat detection and zero-trust enforcement. This isn’t just alerting—it’s active containment. Cisco XDR correlates cross-domain telemetry to uncover threats as they unfold, while Secure Access cuts off compromised users and devices the instant risk is detected.

The result? Analysts get a unified, contextualized view of behavior, access, and asset posture—all in one place. And the moment something looks wrong, the policy adapts automatically to stop the breach in progress.

No silos. No lag. Just protection that thinks, learns, and acts—before attackers move. Clear verdict. Decisive action. AI speed.

Why This Matters: Agentic Makes XDR Elastic

Scaling Your Security Operations From a 2-Person Team to a Global SOC at MSSP Scale

No matter the size or structure of your security team, the value of confidence is universal. Whether you’re running a two-person security team or running a global SOC, Cisco XDR delivers outcomes on that scale.

Small and mid-sized businesses can scale expert-grade, automated, AI-driven, detection, investigation, and response capability without scaling their staff. Enterprise SOCs using Splunk can now take XDR alerts that are AI-validated attacks with clear verdicts, forensic data, and plain-language summaries to enrich SIEM context and trigger SOAR playbooks automatically or accelerate response. For MSSPs, alert fatigue and false positives will be a thing of the past. Instant Attack verification allows operations to scale without compromising quality or control.

This is confidence as a capability—available to every team at every level.

Clear Verdict. Decisive Action. AI Speed. Security That Moves With Your Business

Security leaders are judged by their response, not by the number of alerts they receive. Cisco XDR enables decisive action by providing clear verdicts, confident decisions, and accelerated detection and response.

Here’s what that means in real-world business outcomes:

• Rapid Time to Truth, Reduced False Positives: Cisco XDR’s Instant Attack Verification uses AI to differentiate between real and ignorable threats in seconds, providing clarity and eliminating hours of human validation.
• Decisive Response: Cisco XDR triggers prebuilt playbooks across XDR and Secure Access, isolating compromised users, devices, or workloads in real-time once a threat is confirmed.
• Optimized Analyst Time: By automating the SOC workflow with AI, Cisco XDR empowers analysts to focus on decision-making rather than log analysis.
• Comprehensive Audit-Ready Evidence: Cisco XDR provides plain-language summaries and deep technical insights through automated forensics and attack storyboards, ensuring stakeholders have a complete and rapid understanding of each incident.
• Scalable Elastic Security: Cisco XDR delivers instant clarity, containment, and reduced distractions at AI speed, meeting the needs of both small and large-scale security operations.

This is what modern security demands — not just alerts, but answers. Cisco XDR gives you the verdict you can trust, the action you need, and the speed today’s threats require.

Join Us at RSAC and Experience the Difference

If you’re tired of alerts that raise more questions than answers, you’re ready for AI that does more than just assist. It’s time to experience what trusted automation really looks like. Cisco XDR is built to raise the confidence of your entire SecOps team, from the first signal to the final response.

Join us at RSAC 2025, Booth N-5845, or register for our RSAC Highlights webinar on May 20^th to see how Cisco XDR turns noise into clarity and alerts into action.

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