Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter vs PacketWatch Managed Threat Hunting: 2026 Comparison

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.

PacketWatch Managed Threat Hunting

Mid-market and enterprise security teams without dedicated threat hunting staff should pick PacketWatch Managed Threat Hunting for access to senior analysts who actively search your network instead of waiting for alerts to surface. The service covers NIST DE.CM and DE.AE functions through continuous monitoring and anomaly analysis across network traffic and user behavior, catching persistence mechanisms and IOCs that standard detection tools miss. Skip this if your organization has in-house hunt teams with bandwidth, or if you need the service to drive incident response and forensics; PacketWatch prioritizes proactive hunting over post-breach investigation.