Vectra AI

Vectra AI is a cybersecurity company specializing in AI-driven threat detection and response across network, cloud, identity, and SaaS environments. Its Cognito platform uses advanced machine learning models trained on attacker behavior to detect active cyberattacks in progress, enabling security operations teams to identify and stop threats before they cause damage.

The core philosophy of Vectra AI is that attackers always leave behavioral fingerprints regardless of the tools and techniques they use. By analyzing network metadata, cloud logs, identity events, and SaaS activity with AI models trained on years of real-world attack data, Vectra can detect attacker behaviors such as command and control communication, lateral movement, privilege escalation, reconnaissance, data exfiltration, and ransomware staging, even when attackers use legitimate tools and encrypted channels to evade traditional signature-based controls.

The Cognito Detect module analyzes all network traffic in real time, applying over 100 AI-powered behavioral detection models to identify threats. Unlike signature-based intrusion detection systems that look for known patterns, Cognito models learn the normal behavior of each host and account in the environment and flag deviations that indicate malicious activity. The AI scores each threat by urgency and certainty, prioritizing the alerts that require immediate attention and reducing the noise that causes analyst fatigue.

Cognito Stream provides a continuous, enriched stream of network metadata that security teams can feed into their SIEM, data lake, or custom analytics platform. The metadata includes information about hosts, protocols, DNS queries, file transfers, authentication events, and detected threats, providing a rich source of intelligence for threat hunting and investigation.

Vectra Attack Signal Intelligence is the AI engine that correlates individual detections across hosts, accounts, and time to identify coordinated attacks. By connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated events, Attack Signal Intelligence surfaces the full scope of an attack and reduces the number of alerts analysts need to investigate from thousands to dozens.

Vectra CDR (Cloud Detection and Response) extends coverage to Microsoft 365, Azure AD, and other cloud services, detecting identity-based attacks, OAuth abuse, insider threats, and cloud misconfigurations that traditional network monitoring cannot see. The unified view across on-premises network and cloud environments is critical for detecting hybrid attacks that move between these domains.

The Recall module enables security analysts to perform retrospective threat hunting by querying the rich metadata archive that Vectra stores. Analysts can pivot from a current detection to historical data, understanding how long an attacker has been present and what they accessed, enabling comprehensive incident response and accurate damage assessment.

Vectra AI integrates with leading SIEM, SOAR, and EDR platforms including Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, IBM QRadar, and CrowdStrike, fitting naturally into existing security operations workflows and enabling automated response actions when threats are confirmed.