We recently had the opportunity to talk with cybersecurity veteran Erdinç Balcı, whose experience spans from safeguarding financial institutions to spearheading cutting-edge AI defense strategies. Balcı shared his insights on the pivotal role of proactive threat hunting in ensuring uninterrupted business operations:
Cyber threats today are more sophisticated than ever. From advanced phishing schemes and ransomware to system-level vulnerabilities in AI-driven applications, we’re witnessing an era where attackers continually refine their methods, leaving reactive security approaches struggling to keep pace. As someone who began my career in highly regulated financial services and later transitioned into global cybersecurity leadership, I’ve seen first-hand how the stakes have changed. Proactive threat hunting is no longer a luxury—it’s an imperative for any organization that values business continuity and stakeholder trust.
From banking to cybersecurity: A foundation of trust
My early years in the banking sector revolved around safeguarding sensitive data, maintaining operational uptime, and managing risks amid strict regulatory mandates. What that world taught me was a simple maxim: trust is everything, and breaches of that trust can have catastrophic financial, legal, and reputational repercussions.
Translating those lessons into cybersecurity was surprisingly straightforward. Financial institutions, by necessity, adopt a proactive posture in fraud detection: they look for anomalies and suspicious behavior before fraudulent transactions escalate. This mindset—anticipating threats, testing continuously, and staying one step ahead—directly maps onto modern threat hunting strategies.
Proactive threat hunting: The key pillar of modern cyber resilience
Instead of waiting for an alert or a noticeable breach, proactive threat hunting involves actively seeking out vulnerabilities, anomalies, and potential adversaries within your environment. It’s a shift from a reactive model—where defenders scramble after an attack is discovered—to an offensive mindset that unearths threats before they become critical incidents.
Below are core principles of modern threat hunting that I believe every organization should embed into its culture:
Know your system.
- Before hunting threats, understand what your organization’s applications and AI models are truly capable of, as well as how (and where) they’re deployed. This entails mapping out everything from data flows to potential integration points.
- What might be innocuous in one context (e.g., summarizing blog posts) can be high-risk in another (e.g., summarizing private financial records).
Simple attacks still work.
- While academic research often focuses on highly technical exploits (like gradient-based adversarial examples), real-world attackers frequently use straightforward, human-engineered techniques. Clever prompt injections, manipulated inputs, or old-school reconnaissance may be all it takes.
- Threat hunters must test both advanced and “basic” techniques, because a sophisticated platform can still fall victim to simple vulnerabilities left unpatched.
Eye on continuous testing and one-time benchmarks.
- Security is not a one-and-done exercise. It’s easy to rely on a single performance or safety benchmark—but new vulnerabilities are constantly emerging.
- Effective red teaming goes beyond static checklists. By simulating real-world attacker mindsets, you uncover novel flaws that standardized tests often miss.
Utilize automation but retain the human edge.
- Automated scanning can help identify known vulnerabilities or run large-scale tests. However, automation alone isn’t enough to tackle the nuanced threats that evolve daily.
- Human expertise remains irreplaceable, especially when interpreting ambiguous outputs, creating context-specific “jailbreak” prompts, or spotting cultural and behavioral nuances that an algorithm might overlook.
Adopt a break-fix mindset.
- Threat hunting is iterative. You find vulnerabilities, fix them, test again, and keep repeating the cycle. This continuous “break-fix” model ensures that your defenses evolve alongside emerging threats, rather than remaining static.
- In some cases, patching one weakness can inadvertently introduce another, so the process must be ongoing.
Business continuity hinges on proactivity
No organization wants to be in the headlines for a data breach or operational shutdown. A single well-executed attack can devastate brand equity, drain financial resources, and break customer trust. From a business continuity standpoint, proactive threat hunting offers these key benefits:
Spotting threats before they metastasize can spare your organization extensive damage control and downtime. Many industries face tighter regulations. Demonstrating continuous security testing helps maintain compliance and underscores a commitment to protecting stakeholder data.
Breaches are expensive; they involve investigation, legal fees, possible regulatory fines, and remediation. Reducing the likelihood of major incidents can yield significant cost savings in the long run. In highly competitive sectors (finance, healthcare, tech), robust security measures differentiate you from those who only react after being compromised.
Lessons from modern red teaming
Recent industry experiences with large-scale AI products highlight the following takeaways for any proactive threat hunting program:
- System-level attacks can outdo model-level attacks: Attackers often exploit insecure integrations, dependencies, or external APIs. Securing the entire ecosystem—rather than only focusing on the AI model—provides more comprehensive protection.
- New capabilities yield new vulnerabilities: As AI grows more advanced, it can inadvertently offer adversaries fresh ways to cause harm (e.g., automated scam calls, highly persuasive phishing content).
- Security is never “done”: Modern day cybersecurity threats evolve daily, with new malware variants, zero-days, and manipulative AI prompts. An active, cyclical approach is the only way to stay resilient.
Organizations that excel at proactive threat hunting cultivate cross-functional cooperation—IT teams, data scientists, legal experts, and business leaders all need to align. For instance, lessons from regulated industries (banking, healthcare) inform robust data protection strategies, while technologists can adapt modern AI-driven techniques to detect subtle anomalies.
In addition, encouraging knowledge-sharing networks—both internally and across industries—strengthens collective defenses. Cyber adversaries thrive on blind spots and siloed intelligence.
With AI, behavioral analysis, and human creativity at our disposal, organizations can elevate their resilience in ways never before possible. Yet the work is never truly complete. Cyber threats are ever-evolving, and so must our defenses. Proactive threat hunting is about driving constant improvement to protect everything we’ve built—our data, our operations, and, most importantly, the trust of those we serve.
Featured image credit: Pixabay/Pexels
