Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter vs anew: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter is a commercial threat hunting tool by Black Hills Information Security. anew is a free threat hunting tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best threat hunting fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter
Security teams in SMB and mid-market companies that lack dedicated threat hunting staff will get immediate value from AC-Hunter's network-focused detection engine, which identifies compromised assets and lateral movement without requiring deep log parsing expertise. The tool maps directly to NIST CSF 2.0's continuous monitoring and adverse event analysis functions, meaning you get detection and characterization built in rather than bolted on. Skip this if your organization is already running mature SIEM-based hunting workflows or needs visibility across endpoints and cloud; AC-Hunter's strength is purely network-layer anomalies, which is both its speed advantage and its scope limitation.
Threat hunters who need to rapidly ingest and deduplicate indicator lists during active investigations will appreciate anew's simplicity; it does one thing,append new lines while filtering duplicates,without the overhead of heavier log aggregation platforms. At 1,552 GitHub stars with a free pricing model, it's proven useful enough for teams already comfortable managing their own pipelines rather than relying on managed threat intelligence platforms. Skip this if you need built-in enrichment, correlation, or SOAR integration; anew is a Unix utility, not a detection platform.
