The hardest problem in a security operations center is not catching threats. It is the volume.
A midsize company can throw off tens of thousands of alerts a day, most false, a few real, and an analyst has to tell which is which under a clock that never stops. The genuine attack gets missed not because no one saw it, but because no one could read fast enough.
Software is now taking on that first read, at a scale and speed that changes the math.
The work that suits software is exactly the work that drowns people: sort the queue, pull the context around each alert, run the first pass, summarize what happened.
The point is not to remove the analyst. It is to replace the endless queue with a short list worth judging. That is a useful way to read this year's winners.
Most of the volume dies in triage, deciding what is even worth opening, and several winners start there. Radiant Security won in SOC automation for separating the alerts that need an analyst from the ones that do not.
Command Zero won for an AI-assisted platform that moves an investigation forward without making an analyst chase every log by hand. AirMDR won for an agentic SOC, AI agents running the routine work at a volume no human team can match.
Some of the work starts earlier, before an alert exists. PRE Security, named one of the year's Most Innovative companies, won for AI-native predictive security operations: using weaker, earlier signals to flag likely trouble first. Predictive is an easy word to say in this market, and whether it beats a well-written rule comes down to the data.
When something real lands, the race shifts to response. Binalyze won in security automation for gathering forensic evidence and acting on it fast enough to matter mid-incident. BreachRx won for agentic AI incident response, automating the scramble a breach sets off: the steps, the notifications, the obligations teams usually chase by hand.
ANY.RUN sits closer to analyst acceleration than orchestration, recognized for interactive malware analysis, a safe place to detonate a suspicious file, and watch what it does without a long forensic slog.
The shift is less about replacing analysts than freeing them.
Let the machine take the first read and the routine response, and keep people on the calls that carry risk. The test is simple: does the tool cut the queue, or just add another dashboard? The winners point at a SOC where the machine reads the noise and the human decides what counts, the direction that makes the volume workable, not the only one.
The complete list of 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards winners is live at awards.thehackernews.com/winners/2026.
Part of The Stars Briefing, our editorial series on the trends behind the 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards, a program The Hacker News runs. This piece analyzes where the field is moving and uses the winners as examples. It is not a product review.