by Kyle Alspach, via CRN
Following a massive wave of frontier AI advances this year that have largely served to make life more challenging for cyber defense teams, the launch of CrowdStrike's new SafeMind agentic system represents a highly welcome shift toward using the technology to reduce the burden on defenders, top solution and service provider partners told CRN.
'An Advantage We Didn't Have Before'
From what has been disclosed so far about CrowdStrike SafeMind, its ability to feed findings discovered by offensive models directly into defensive operations appears to be a major advancement, according to Jordan Hildebrand, global cyber practice director at St. Louis-based World Wide Technology, No. 10 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 for 2026.
"Finally, we're leveraging offensive operations to feed the defenders, the defense operations," Hildebrand said.
In truth, "I think that is what's supposed to happen in a perfect organization. You have threat hunting, which feeds detections. You have the red team, which feeds the blue team," he told CRN. "That's what's supposed to happen. And if we can do that—in a machine-speed sense—I think it puts us at an advantage that we didn't have before."