Arctic Wolf launches Cipher, AI-powered security assistant beta

Arctic Wolf has announced the introduction of Cipher, an AI security assistant developed in collaboration with Anthropic, designed to provide customers with enhanced access to security insights within the Arctic Wolf Aurora Platform.

Cipher is integrated into the Aurora Platform's architecture, which reportedly processes more than 8 trillion security events on a weekly basis. The assistant offers instant answers, contextual enrichment, and actionable summaries, all informed by the operational experience of Arctic Wolf's AI-enabled global security operations centres (SOC).

The company describes Cipher as the latest addition to its Alpha AI portfolio, which is a suite of AI technologies intended to deliver AI-driven SOC intelligence. Alpha AI taps into the full extent of the Aurora Platform, aggregating telemetry from endpoint, network, cloud, and identity sources. The data fuels Arctic Wolf's security data lake, which underpins the platform's real-time threat detection and response capabilities.

With increasing demand on security resources, Arctic Wolf states that Cipher is intended to assist teams who may lack the time, tools, or expertise to rapidly convert data into actionable insights. By making these insights accessible, the company believes Cipher can assist customers to investigate incidents more quickly, gain clearer context on alerts, and make informed decisions on priorities and response.

According to the company, Cipher's development benefits from over a decade of experience drawn from its global SOC, incorporating millions of hours of human-reinforced learning. This knowledge base is intended to inform Cipher's responses, helping to streamline investigations and improve the quality of information available to security teams.

Cipher has been designed to work as a seamless extension of the Concierge Security experience previously established for Arctic Wolf customers. While dedicated Concierge Security Teams continue to offer expert guidance, Cipher provides a 24/7 self-service alternative, allowing users to access insights, context, and recommendations whenever they are required.

Dan Schiappa, President, Technology and Services at Arctic Wolf, commented on the launch: "Cipher marks a defining moment in the evolution of security operations. Through a combination of the scale of our data lake and our Alpha AI technologies, we're empowering every security team to operate with the speed, insight, and confidence of the world's best analysts, on demand and at scale."

He added, "As a fully integrated part of the Aurora Platform, Cipher gives customers new, intuitive ways to interact with their security data, whether that's summarising alerts, exploring vulnerabilities, or identifying incident trends. It's about delivering flexibility and control, without ever compromising trust or accuracy."

Differentiating Cipher from other general AI-based security solutions, Arctic Wolf highlights its open XDR architecture, which allows the AI assistant to interact with hundreds of different security and IT tools. This integration is designed to deliver context-rich and actionable insights by analysing signals from a broad range of technologies and attack surfaces. The company claims this approach enables organisations to benefit from an AI experience that reflects the full complexity of their operational environments.

Cipher was developed with input from Anthropic, an AI firm focused on safety and research. The collaboration aimed to ensure the integrity and privacy of customer data while leveraging Anthropic's advanced large language model technology to provide responsive and accurate insights.

Michael Gerstenhaber, Vice President of Product at Anthropic, said: "Arctic Wolf's breadth and depth of data, thanks to their open platform, make them positioned to bring generative AI to security operations in a meaningful and effective way. We're proud to support Cipher's development and excited to see how it empowers security teams with instant, reliable access to the intelligence they need."

Cipher is being introduced to Arctic Wolf customers as a beta release.