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What Is Active Defense?

Active Defense is a cybersecurity strategy that shifts defenders from passive monitoring to proactive disruption. It focuses on detecting adversaries earlier; during reconnaissance, credential harvesting, and lateral movement, before they execute payloads or cause damage.

Key differences from traditional detection:

  • Uses deception and identity threat detection to reveal attacker intent, not just behavior
  • Generates high-fidelity alerts based on interaction with decoys—not signatures or baselines
  • Detects stealthy techniques like valid credential misuse or log-free movement

Strategic advantages:

  • Interrupts attacks before impact, reducing dwell time and escalation risk
  • Enhances visibility during the attacker’s decision-making process (OODA loop)
  • Equips defenders to act earlier, with greater confidence and less alert fatigue
Why Active Defense Now?
Get Inside the Attacker’s Decision Loop

The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) has long defined success in fast-moving conflict. Active Defense applies this mindset to cybersecurity. Instead of waiting for post-breach detection, Acalvio enables defenders to:

  • Observe attacker reconnaissance and credential misuse early
  • Orient around real threats, not false positives
  • Decide with precision, based on intent—not noise
  • Act while the attacker is still mapping the terrain

Traditional defenses let attackers complete their OODA loop. Acalvio interrupts it.

AI-Driven Deception For Active Defense

Identity Threats
  • Attackers abuse credentials to move undetected through AD, Entra ID (Azure AD), and federated cloud identity systems.
Cloud Movement & Exposure
  • Cloud-native attacks pivot through APIs, misconfigurations, ephemeral workloads, and identity misuse—often without logs or agents.
Ransomware Escalation Paths
  • By the time ransomware triggers an alert, damage is done. The threat begins with recon, credential harvesting, and staging
Unmonitored OT & Edge Assets
  • Industrial and unmanaged systems can’t support traditional detection and often become invisible entry points.
Targeted Honeytokens

How Deception Elevates Active Defense

Attackers slip through the cracks of traditional tools. Deception shuts those cracks—turning guesswork into confirmed intent and giving defenders the upper hand at every phase of Active Defense:

  • Confirms threats: Decoy interaction provides unambiguous signals
  • Detects early: Surfaces recon, credential misuse, and lateral movement
  • Reduces noise: Delivers low-volume, high-confidence alerts
  • Exposes intent: Reveals attacker objectives, not just behaviors
  • Disrupts execution: Forces attackers to adapt or abandon their plan
  • Speeds response: Enables faster, more decisive action in the OODA loop
AI-Driven Deception Operationalizes Active Defense
From Theory to Practice—at Enterprise Scale

Acalvio integrates AI throughout the deception lifecycle:

  • Uses pattern recognition and clustering to map network neighborhoods
  • Auto-generates tailored deception per endpoint, subnet, and identity store
  • Triage signals into high-fidelity alerts to reduce analyst fatigue
  • Captures TTPs directly from attacker behavior

Deception doesn’t just detect—it disrupts. And at scale, it shapes the attacker’s next move before they make it.

AI-Powered Deception Patents and Leadership

AI-Powered Deception: Patented for Precision, Built for Scale

Acalvio has operationalized deception at enterprise scale by embedding AI into every stage of deployment and management. Our patented innovations automate and accelerate detection with unmatched precision:

  • Pattern recognition & clustering to map network neighborhoods
  • Recommendation engines to configure deception per endpoint and subnet
  • Alert triage algorithms to surface only high-fidelity signals
  • Behavioral analysis to extract attacker TTPs in real time
  • AI-powered investigation accelerators to reduce SOC workload

And now, with Copilot, Acalvio’s LLM-powered engine, decoy naming and content are automatically generated—tailored by industry, context, and threat surface.

FEATURE: AI
Patent #
Status
SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR DETECTING AND TRACKING ADVERSARY TRAJECTORY
9,961,099
Issued
CONTEXT-AWARE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM AND METHODS FOR DEPLOYING DECEPTION MECHANISMS
9,853,999
Issued
SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR IDENTIFYING SIMILAR HOSTS
9,836,512
Issued

ShadowPlex Cybersecurity Platform for Active Defense

ShadowPlex turns your environment into an early warning system—using deception to reveal attacker intent across identity, cloud, and infrastructure.

Designed for adversary engagement, not just alerting, it helps you detect, disrupt, and outpace threats before they escalate.

Outmaneuver. Disrupt. Dominate. Acalvio Active Defense in Action.

Smarter Coverage, Automatically

AI maps your environment and deploys deception tailored to each endpoint, subnet, and identity system—ensuring precise, dynamic coverage without manual effort.

Signals You Can Trust

Decoy interactions generate high-fidelity alerts tied to adversary intent—not anomalies—giving defenders early, unambiguous warning during recon and lateral movement.

Speed Without Sacrifice

AI accelerates detection and investigation, reducing SOC fatigue while exposing attacker TTPs that inform faster, more confident response.

Frequently Asked Questions

It’s a strategy focused on detecting and disrupting adversaries earlier—during recon, staging, and movement—not just after damage begins. It fills the detection gap between prevention and response.

Because attackers don’t wait for your tools to catch up. Many use valid credentials and operate without generating logs. Active Defense gives you intent-driven signals that fire before traditional controls react.

Gartner outlines five: deception, ITDR (Identity Threat Detection and Response), attack surface management (ASM), threat exposure management, and proactive threat hunting—all focused on earlier detection and control.

Deception is the only detection layer based on adversary intent. When an attacker touches a decoy or honeytoken, it’s a confirmed signal—not a behavioral guess.

Through ShadowPlex. It uses AI to deploy decoys across cloud, identity, and OT—then feeds high-fidelity alerts into your existing SOC stack for early, scalable defense.

Schedule a Call with Us Today
Schedule a Call with Us Today

The GigaOm Radar Report

GigaOm Radar for Deception Technology Report recognizes Acalvio’s ShadowPlex platform as a well-rounded AI-powered solution. See how Acalvio compares to other deception technology solutions. Prepare your defenses.

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