Adversaries move in hours. Manual forensics still takes days. Once an intrusion or insider incident is confirmed, every hour spent collecting and sorting evidence by hand is an hour the adversary can use to move, stage data, and dig in. Closing that gap is the job CORE was built to do.
CORE, the Sphinx Cyber Forensic Operations and Resilience Engine, is Sphinx’s own suite of automation, orchestration, and AI-enabled forensic tools, built in our MAX Factory. It takes the expertise of our cleared forensic and counterintelligence analysts, encodes it once, and then runs it on every case.
Why Manual Forensics Falls Behind
Forensic investigations are not slow because analysts lack skill. They are slow because the mechanical work of collection and triage grows with the environment. Evidence lives on endpoints, in email, in logs, and in memory, and each source has to be acquired, parsed, and placed in context before it can inform a decision. Done by hand, that work spends the analyst’s time on assembly instead of judgment — and the investigation runs days behind an adversary operating in hours.
Expertise Encoded Once, Applied Every Time
CORE starts from a simple premise: the methods experienced analysts use on a strong investigation should not have to be rebuilt by hand on the next one. CORE captures those methods in automation and orchestration, so every case benefits from the same discipline, at machine speed.
- Automated collection and triage. Evidence is collected and triaged across endpoints, email, logs, and memory, so analysts start with organized, prioritized evidence instead of a queue of raw artifacts.
- AI-assisted leads, traced to the evidence. Lead generation is tied to counterintelligence and insider threat indicators, and every finding is traced back to the source evidence that produced it.
- Detection from investigation. Detection rules are generated straight from investigation findings, rapidly moving from a new adversary technique to production-ready detection coverage.
- Fully air-gap capable. Your data and AI models never leave your network.
Traceable by Design
Nothing reaches an analyst as an unexplained conclusion. Each AI-assisted lead arrives with the trail needed to verify it, and analysts stay in the decision loop on the calls that matter. Evidence is handled to prosecution standards from first acquisition, so speed never comes at the cost of what the evidence can later support.
From Response to Resilience
Every investigation makes the next intrusion faster to catch. Because findings feed directly into detection rules, forensic response stops being a dead end and becomes an input to defense. And because CORE is fully air-gap capable, that loop runs inside mission networks and sensitive enterprise environments without sending evidence anywhere it should not go.
Timeline and Scoping in Hours
What drives containment is a reconstructed timeline of adversary activity and a clear picture of which systems are affected. With collection and triage automated, analysts get to that timeline and scoping in hours, not days. Containment decisions get made while they can still get ahead of the adversary, rather than after the adversary has already adapted. Attribution, containment decisions, and evidence handling remain with the analyst — CORE does the collection and correlation; the analyst decides what it means.
Mission Networks and the Enterprise
CORE applies to IC and DoD mission networks and to commercial enterprises alike. The operating constraints differ, but the underlying problem is the same: once an incident is confirmed, the defender is racing the adversary’s clock, and manual forensics is too slow to win that race.
The Result
With CORE, complex forensic data collection and triage time is reduced by 95%. CORE comes standard with every Sphinx Helix engagement. Machine speed. Human judgment.
See how this service fits your mission.
Reach our team to scope an engagement.