AI for Good: Securing Networks in the Age of Autonomous Attacks
Summary
summary
Introduction
You’re operating networks at a time when attackers aren’t relying solely on human operators anymore—they’re using autonomous AI to do the work for them. A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers used AI to automate major portions of cyberattacks, running campaigns in which an AI system performed nearly all the intrusion work with minimal human oversight.
Attackers guided an AI model to scan for vulnerabilities, penetrate environments, query internal data, and extract information almost entirely on its own. Humans were minimally in the loop at inflection points, while the AI executed tasks at a speed and scale no human team could match. That’s not a glimpse of the future; it’s already happening.
If you haven’t already gotten one, this is your wake-up call. AI-scaled, machine-speed reconnaissance magnifies the impact of misconfigurations. Autonomous exploitation pressures your detection systems. Agentic AI and distributed, cloud-first architectures create new attack surface opportunities for an AI-driven adversary to probe without rest.
But the same leap in capability that empowers attackers can empower you. When AI is used for good to intentionally analyze telemetry, identify anomalies, triage incidents, and guide immediate response, it becomes an operational advantage. That’s the purpose of Kentik’s Network Intelligence Platform and the capabilities built into Kentik AI Advisor. They help you counter AI-driven threats by giving you machine-speed visibility, reasoning, and recommendations grounded in your own network telemetry.
Using Kentik AI Advisor to help you do more
As networks spread across data centers, clouds, WAN circuits, fabrics, and global routing paths, the volume of telemetry exceeds what any human team can reasonably process. Kentik AI Advisor becomes the partner that helps you bridge that gap. Instead of manually parsing dashboards, AI Advisor interprets your intent in natural language, creates an investigative plan, runs the necessary analyses across flow, routing, cloud paths, device metrics, logs, and synthetic tests, and then explains what’s happening in a clear and direct way.
AI Advisor goes beyond simple chatbot-style querying. It thinks and reasons like an engineer. If you ask why latency spiked in a specific geography, it doesn’t just show you charts. It checks historical trends, looks for BGP route changes, evaluates upstream provider performance, correlates device-level indicators, compares synthetic test results, and delivers a grounded explanation you can validate. Every step is transparent, with data you can inspect and validate to build trust.
To improve the accuracy and relevance of its recommendations, you can add your internal knowledge. With natural language runbooks, you describe your troubleshooting steps the way you would to a colleague. AI Advisor then converts that description into an executable plan that it follows during incidents. This customized network context teaches the AI Advisor how your environment is structured. From your site names, prefixes, maintenance windows, VIP segments, to internal terminology, it thinks about your network the way your team does.
The result is a dramatic increase in operational speed and capacity. Routine triage becomes faster. Investigations become more consistent. Knowledge bottlenecks fade. And your team can focus on higher-value work rather than manually stitching data together.
Being proactive before attacks hit
Autonomous attackers excel at scanning for weaknesses you might not even realize exist. That makes proactive security posture management essential. With Kentik’s platform, you can uncover misconfigurations in routing, cloud networking, or edge connectivity before they become vulnerabilities. AI Advisor can detect subtle issues such as an unexpected BGP path, an overly permissive cloud ACL, or a misrouted VPC connection. These are the kinds of openings an AI-driven adversary can exploit instantly.
Threat hunting also becomes far more powerful when you have full context telemetry, assisted by AI Advisor, with the ability to explore the network holistically, pivoting from flow anomalies to routing changes to device metrics to uncover potential blind spots. You can follow patterns that look like lateral movement, identify suspicious outbound destinations, or trace previously unseen ASNs that suddenly begin receiving traffic.
Compliance and governance form another critical layer. Many compromises succeed because the network drifts away from the intended design. The Kentik Network Intelligence platform and AI Advisor help you continuously validate segmentation, routing policies, cloud boundaries, and security controls. You gain the confidence that your infrastructure behaves according to policy, even as it evolves and scales.
Staying ahead of hostile automation requires eliminating the mistakes and oversights these tools thrive on. Kentik provides the visibility and intelligence to stay proactive instead of reactive.
Responding quickly and confidently when an incident occurs
When something malicious does occur, every second counts. Attacks driven by autonomous systems can escalate quickly, switching strategies or targeting new surfaces while your team is still gathering data. Kentik’s real-time telemetry and AI Advisor-guided investigation give you the ability to understand what’s happening and why without delay.
If a sudden surge of traffic appears, AI Advisor helps you immediately determine whether it’s legitimate growth, an operational anomaly, or a DDoS attack. If an API endpoint begins behaving oddly, AI Advisor can help you understand upstream and downstream dependencies, examine routing changes, and highlight patterns that look like command-and-control communication. The ability to reason across contexts, including cloud, WAN, edge, and service providers, means you’re not guessing.
Once you understand the situation, Kentik helps you take swift action by integrating with your mitigation strategies. Whether you need to trigger DDoS defenses, adjust routing, or isolate a cloud segment, you’re making decisions based on full knowledge, not incomplete snapshots.
Even after an attack is contained, your job isn’t finished. You still need to understand what happened, how it unfolded, and what needs to change to document the security incident and prevent it from happening again. Attacks evolve rapidly and often leave minimal traces; strong investigation and forensic capabilities become essential to restoring trust, improving resilience, and informing leadership.
With Kentik’s Network Intelligence platform, you gain access to a complete, enriched view of historical network behavior. Instead of relying on sampled data or partial logs that miss critical patterns, you can review full-fidelity flow records, routing changes, device metrics, cloud paths, and synthetic tests exactly as they occurred. This lets you trace an attack from the earliest reconnaissance steps to lateral movement and exfiltration attempts, reconstructing the adversary’s behavior with precision.
Adding AI Advisor is your force multiplier. It organizes the investigation into clear steps, shows its reasoning, and provides interpretations with citations to data that you can validate. This not only reduces the time to produce a complete analysis but also strengthens the accuracy and consistency of your security incident investigation and documentation.
In the era of machine-speed attacks, your response must match the pace. Kentik gives you the clarity and intelligence needed to respond before network resilience or customer experience is affected.
Your wakeup call answered
The rise of autonomous AI-driven attacks shows how dramatically the threat landscape continues to evolve. Adversaries now operate at a speed and scale that can overwhelm manual processes, exploit misconfigurations faster than teams can detect them, and adapt dynamically to defenses. But the story doesn’t end there.
Kentik’s Network Intelligence Platform and AI Advisor give you a way to counter those threats using AI for good. They amplify your team’s capabilities, provide real-time intelligence across the entire network, accelerate investigations, harden your infrastructure, and help you respond before damage is done.
In a world where attackers are upgrading to autonomous AI, your defenses need to evolve too. With Kentik, you gain the visibility, insight, and speed to stay ahead and protect your networks with confidence.
