TL;DR: Cisco just dropped a tactical nuke in the cybersecurity game—introducing Agentic AI across its XDR platform and Splunk integration. This isn’t your average automation—it’s autonomous, reasoning AI capable of rapid threat triage, forensic breakdowns, and real-time defense. If you’re in the cyber trenches, this is your new digital commander.
🧠 Agentic AI Enters the Battlefield
Cisco has officially joined the Agentic AI arms race with its latest weaponized upgrade to its Extended Detection and Response (XDR) suite—powered by Splunk. At the RSAC Conference in San Francisco, Cisco pulled back the curtain on its Instant Attack Verification module—a feature designed to autonomously investigate and verify cybersecurity threats in real time using large language models (LLMs) with actual decision-making power.
This isn’t ChatGPT glued onto a dashboard. This is LLMs on steroids—designed to act, think, and triage like a SOC operator under siege.
🔍 What Makes Agentic AI So Ruthless?
Agentic AI systems aren’t just reactive—they’re proactive and autonomous. They parse, prioritize, and escalate real-world threats without human babysitting. As Denise Shiffman, Cisco’s SVP of Networking Strategy, puts it:
“Agentic AI systems can manage complex tasks, interact with IoT, cloud, analytics software—hell, they operate like digital field agents.”
They break the boundaries of static datasets and interact directly with telemetry sources like Cisco Firewall, Secure Network Analytics, and Secure Endpoint, feeding real-time intelligence into automated threat response.
⚙️ Cisco’s Weaponized Upgrades – What’s New in XDR?
🧩 Instant Attack Verification
Think of it as an AI-powered SOC analyst that never sleeps—instantly verifying alerts using multi-agent coordination. What used to take hours now takes less than 20 seconds.
🛠️ XDR Forensics
Cisco’s forensics engine now includes enriched endpoint telemetry—giving blue teams near-instant context on compromise vectors, suspicious behaviors, and historical anomalies.
🧠 XDR Storyboard
A visual narrative of complex attack chains. Picture MITRE ATT&CK meets a CSI-style breakdown—designed for analysts to digest an entire kill chain in under a minute.
📊 Confidence Scoring
The system now ranks incidents by severity using AI-calculated confidence metrics—ensuring high-risk events surface faster and louder.
🔓 Open Source AI with Cybersecurity in Its DNA
In a flex of AI transparency, Cisco has birthed Foundation AI, building a Meta Llama 3.1-based model called foundation-sec-8b. It’s pre-trained on cyber-specific datasets, including:
- CVE/CWE repositories
- MITRE ATT&CK threat maps
- Red team playbooks
- NIST, OWASP compliance docs
- Cloud and infrastructure security guides
Led by Yaron Singer, formerly of Robust Intelligence, this project crushes closed-box models with laser-focused reasoning built for actual security operations, not marketing decks.
The kicker? It’s compact enough to run on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU—making deployment in air-gapped and edge environments a reality.
🤝 ServiceNow + Cisco = AI SecOps Voltron
In a tactical alliance, Cisco and ServiceNow are fusing their AI powers. First stop: ServiceNow SecOps x Cisco AI Defense, merging telemetry, governance, and response under one umbrella. Expect better zero-trust enforcement, faster AI-driven playbooks, and unified visibility across the security stack.
Launched in January, Cisco AI Defense already includes:
- VPN-as-a-Service
- Secure Web Gateway
- ZTNA
- Cloud Access Broker
- Firewall-as-a-Service
- Digital Experience Monitoring
Now, with ServiceNow in the mix, response automation just went global.
🧨 The CyberDark Take
For Red Teams:
Better get creative. These agentic systems are faster than most mid-level SOCs and can flag false positives in milliseconds. Your usual lateral movement tricks? Busted.
For Blue Teams:
You just got upgraded. Faster alert validation, instant forensics, and smarter playbook automation. This isn’t just another SIEM update—this is a strategic shift.
For CISOs and SOC leads:
Cisco’s leap into agentic AI means fewer analysts, faster insights, and deeper coverage. Combine this with open source reasoning models, and you’ve got a customizable, scalable defense architecture.
🛡️ Final Word
Cisco’s deployment of Agentic AI in its XDR platform is a glimpse into the next frontier of cyber defense—where autonomous systems coordinate, verify, and respond at machine speed. For defenders, it’s a godsend. For attackers, it’s a storm on the horizon.
CyberDark will be watching.
