Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter vs Oriana: 2026 Comparison
Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter is a commercial threat hunting tool by Black Hills Information Security. Oriana 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.
Security teams with mature Windows environments and existing SIEM investments should evaluate Oriana for threat hunting workflows that don't require vendor lock-in. Its free, open-source approach to Windows event correlation means you're not paying per-endpoint or per-query, and the 176 GitHub stars signal a community actively catching edge cases in anomaly detection. Skip Oriana if your team lacks Windows Event Log expertise or needs guided investigation workflows; this is a data source optimizer, not a managed hunting service.
