## The Needle in the Digital Haystack In today's enterprise environments, SOC analysts face a relentless flood of network traffic—legitimate business communications intermingled with potentially malicious actors operating at unprecedented scale. Traditional signature-based IDS solutions have become glorified pattern-matchers, helpless against zero-day exploits and novel attack vectors that bypass known fingerprints. The experiment detailed below emerged from a practical need: could machine learning effectively separate signal from noise in packet captures, providing actionable intelligence without overwhelming incident response teams? ## Tech