As AI-enabled threats accelerate in speed and scale, mission defense increasingly depends on seeing risk sooner — before adversaries gain a foothold or disrupt operations. For the Department of the Air Force and its mission partners, earlier network visibility gives cyber teams a decisive advantage: the ability to identify what is connected, detect suspicious behavior faster, and act before threats become mission-impacting incidents.

This session shows how foundational network intelligence — DNS-layer visibility, asset context, threat intelligence, and automated policy enforcement — strengthens mission network defense across hybrid, cloud, and distributed environments. Using real mission-network scenarios, attendees will see how these capabilities surface early indicators of compromise — malicious destinations, command-and-control activity, phishing, malware, and data exfiltration — while advancing Zero Trust and Comply to Connect objectives.

Rather than focusing on infrastructure alone, the session demonstrates how agencies can turn everyday network activity into actionable security intelligence: reducing manual workload, accelerating response, and improving operational resilience. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for moving from reactive defense to earlier, more automated, and more assured cyber operations — and a clearer view of how visibility at the network layer counters AI-era adversaries before the breach.

Why you should attend and what you’ll learn:

- See what's connected and how it behaves — gain visibility into users, devices, workloads, and network activity to expose risk before it escalates.

- Detect threats earlier at the DNS and network layer — surface malicious destinations, command-and-control, phishing, malware, and data exfiltration before adversaries establish persistence.

- Strengthen Zero Trust and Comply to Connect — use asset and network context to enforce policy and validate what's allowed to operate on the mission network.

- Automate response to move from reactive to assured operations — reduce manual workload, accelerate action, and connect security, network, and operations data to improve mission outcomes.