ExtraHop Security Use Case - See the Entire Attack Surface

Reduce Breach Risk

See and Secure the Entire Attack Surface

Nobody set out to build a fragmented attack surface. It happened one acquisition, one cloud migration, one AI project at a time, and each new environment got instrumented by whoever owned it, using whatever tool they already had. The result is that perceived coverage rarely matches the reality on the ground. The endpoint agent never made it onto the hypervisor. SASE tunnels create a blind spot at the branch. Containers come and go in seconds.

ExtraHop sees all of it. Data center, campus, remote and branch, containers, hypervisors, SASE. We give you one real-time ground truth of every device, identity, workload, and conversation on the network, the instant it happens.

Seize the advantage with ExtraHop NDR

Loading…

Challenges

Growth Outpaces Visibility

Attack surface growth doesn't wait for security to catch up. A cloud migration, an acquisition, a new data center, or a wave of IoT and OT devices can add thousands of assets in weeks, and few teams have a current inventory.

Agent-based tools make it worse: unmanaged devices, agentless systems, and short-lived containers spin up and disappear before anything can be installed. Non-human identities, service accounts, API keys, and AI agents already outnumber human ones roughly 20-to-1, and most tools have no idea how any of them normally behave.

Blog

Professional Services Customer Success Stories: Resolving Device Inventory Pitfalls

Untracked, unmanaged devices became the blind spots attackers exploited first.

Learn more

Opportunities

See Every Source, Wherever It's Hiding

Attackers and blind spots don't care where they hide: inside a container that lives for ninety seconds, across a 400 Gbps backbone moving AI traffic, or inside an encrypted session your tools can't open. Point tools cover one of those places at a time, so the gaps between them are exactly where unmanaged assets and attackers sit undetected. ExtraHop closes all three gaps from one place: a single, passive, out-of-band platform that sees every device, every backbone, and every encrypted conversation without installing anything anywhere.

Learn more about ExtraHop NDR

Inside Every Container

Containers and Kubernetes pods can live for seconds and vanish before an agent could ever be installed, which is exactly why agent-based tools miss them. Meanwhile, Kerberos, the authentication protocol behind nearly every Windows and Active Directory environment, stays a favorite lateral-movement target precisely because it's so widely used. ExtraHop passively decrypts Kerberos and other core protocols at line rate and correlates container activity with identity, so a Golden Ticket forgery or a pod that shouldn't be talking to Active Directory shows up immediately, agent or no agent.

Inside Every Encrypted Channel

Most gateway and NDR tools decode a handful of protocols and treat everything else as opaque traffic to guess at. ExtraHop decrypts and parses more than 90 enterprise protocols, DNS, HTTP, SMB, Kerberos, TLS, and more, into structured records at line rate. So encrypted east-west sessions, AI agent and MCP/LLM traffic, and SASE-encapsulated flows get read, not inferred. That depth turns an encrypted channel from a blind spot into a source of evidence, whether it's on-prem, in the cloud, or inside a container that's already gone.

Across Every Backbone

Enterprise data center backbones now run at 400 Gbps: GPU clusters and agentic workload traffic primarily move east-west, not north-south. But most monitoring tools were built for 10-40 Gbps, so they simply stop seeing anything at true line rate. In this post-Mythos, AI-scale era, that's not just a performance problem, it's an attack-surface problem: whatever your sensors can't keep up with becomes invisible. ExtraHop monitors 400 Gbps+ backbones and AI-factory data centers passively, with no added latency, so scale is never the reason something goes unseen.

Loading…

diagram with One-time view of every device, Identitiy, workload, and conversation.

The network is the foundational knowledge providing context and complete visibility into lateral movements that siloed logs lack.

Solution

One Platform for Every Blind Spot

ExtraHop’s NDR monitors 400 Gbps backbones and AI-factory data centers passively, with zero added latency, and decrypts encrypted east-west traffic, including AI agent, API, and MCP/LLM sessions, at line rate. It catches IoT, OT, short-lived containers, and other non-human workloads that agent-based tools never see, from one console covering data center, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments.

Every device, user, and identity is inventoried the moment it starts talking on the network, agentless, with nothing installed anywhere. When something needs proof, full L2-L7 transaction reconstruction gives packet-level evidence instead of a guess, and Automated Retrospective Detection replays past traffic the moment a new indicator emerges, so you know if you were already exposed.

View capabilities

Blog