Littlefish & ContraForce boost AI-led threat response

Littlefish Group has partnered with ContraForce, adding AI-led threat investigation and response tools to its Managed Security Operations Centre.

The partnership focuses on security operations for organisations using Microsoft security tools. ContraForce will sit above Littlefish's existing Microsoft-based set-up as a delivery layer, aimed at improving how incidents are investigated, assessed, prioritised and mitigated.

Both companies positioned the move as a response to a growing challenge for corporate security teams as artificial intelligence changes how threats emerge and how quickly they spread. Businesses are trying to use AI in their own operations while also dealing with attackers that use the same technology to move faster and at greater scale.

Under the arrangement, ContraForce's software agents will speed up early-stage incident handling, including triage, context gathering and classification. The process can cut the time needed to identify potential risks from hours to seconds or minutes, allowing analysts to spend more time on decision-making and response.

The system is intended to support analysts rather than replace them. Littlefish described the technology as a way to improve visibility and give teams faster access to relevant information, while keeping human oversight in place for decisions affecting governance, control and accountability.

Security focus

Littlefish provides managed services, cyber security, cloud, data and business technology consulting. It says it supports more than 1 million users globally across public and private sector organisations, operating from offices in the UK and Ireland.

ContraForce focuses on security operations for providers and enterprise security teams running Microsoft security products. Its platform covers incident triage, investigation, response, tuning, ticketing and reporting through software agents governed by procedures defined by the customer or service provider.

The agreement points to a wider shift in the managed security market, as service providers look for ways to handle rising alert volumes without increasing pressure on already stretched analyst teams. As customers add more digital systems and AI tools, security operations centres face higher volumes of telemetry and a growing need to separate serious threats from routine noise.

That pressure is particularly acute for managed providers, which must maintain service standards across multiple client environments with different risk profiles, technical stacks and reporting requirements. The partnership is intended to extend the reach of experienced analysts across those client estates.

Sean Tickle, Head of Cyber Security at Littlefish Group, set out the company's view of AI's role in security operations.

"AI is changing the cyber security landscape on both sides of the equation. Organisations are exploring how it can help them move faster and deliver more value, while attackers are using the same technology to become more sophisticated and harder to detect. We believe the answer isn't to replace people with AI. The real power comes from combining intelligent AI context and workflows with human expertise. AI can process information at incredible speed, but context, judgement and accountability remain essential when the stakes are high. This partnership allows us to give our analysts better intelligence, faster, helping them focus on protecting our customers and enabling them to adopt new technologies with greater confidence," said Sean Tickle, Head of Cyber Security at Littlefish Group.

Analyst role

Littlefish said the new set-up should free cyber specialists to focus on higher-value work, including interpreting triage findings, making response decisions and taking further action when required. It added that time saved in the incident workflow could be redirected towards helping clients improve resilience and reduce risk exposure across their wider operations.

The emphasis on keeping analysts at the centre of response decisions reflects a broader concern in the security industry about accountability when automated systems handle sensitive incidents. Security leaders have been under pressure to show that the use of AI does not weaken auditability or governance, especially in regulated sectors and in environments handling critical systems and data.

Stan Golubchik, Founder and CEO at ContraForce, said the challenge becomes harder as providers scale their services across more customers.

"Running a SOC is one of the most critical services delivered to businesses today, and one of the hardest to run well. At scale it gets harder still, because every client a provider adds brings its own environment, its own alert volume and its own expectations, and the standard has to hold across all of them. This partnership lets Littlefish's SOC put intelligent AI agents alongside their analysts rather than in place of them, cutting the time it takes to separate real threats from noise and act on them. The result is faster and broader coverage for every client Littlefish protects, enabling their analysts to meet AI-driven threats. Littlefish's specialists have always been world-class defenders. What changes now is reach. Their expertise arrives at every incident, for every client, at machine speed," said Stan Golubchik, Founder and CEO at ContraForce.