Active Countermeasures AC-Hunter vs Zscaler Threat Hunting: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

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.

Zscaler Threat Hunting

Enterprise and mid-market security teams that lack in-house threat hunting capacity should pick Zscaler Threat Hunting for access to 24/7 expert hunters who analyze 400+ billion daily transactions from your existing secure web gateway, eliminating the blind spot most SOCs have on web traffic attack chains. The service covers NIST DE.CM and DE.AE effectively, meaning detection and analysis are the strength; incident response and recovery get less attention, so pair this with a capable IR program. Skip this if your organization needs threat hunting to also drive your incident response workflows end-to-end; the value here is pure hunting and escalation, not post-breach remediation.