No matter how big or small an organization is, each one of them needs an effective and fully operational cyber security operations center (SOC) team. With today’s complex cybersecurity threats always lurking to cause damage, SOC teams must unlock their full potential to stay ahead of them. Automation driven by security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology can help SOC teams reduce time invested in low priority tasks and eliminate false positives, enabling them to focus on threats facing the organization.
Why Do SOC Teams Need SOAR Automation?
Alerts and reported incidents take tremendous manual efforts, especially when the majority of them are false positives. Even after leveraging some technology, SOC teams experience alert fatigue. SOAR automation minimizes this by helping SOC teams in data enrichment and collection of relevant evidence.
SOAR automation helps SOC teams streamline security processes and displace tedious tasks that include enriching data, reviewing false positives, and manually responding to threats. This also involves sending notifications or communicating with users, which is a time-consuming task. Apart from streamlining different security processes and making SOC teams more productive, SOAR automation results in consistent workflows and processes, greater time savings, increased efficiency gains, better visibility, and decreased MTTD.
Another major concern for SOC teams is phishing threats, which makes up for a large number of cases. However, SOC teams can easily tackle it by leveraging SOAR technology. For instance, if a phishing incident surfaces as a false positive or benign, the case is automatically closed by a SOAR solution. If the phishing threat includes a macro or malicious link, or an executable file, an automated workflow by an advanced SOAR solution can flag it for further review by a security analyst.
Benefits of SOAR Automation
The ability to automate processes and workflows provides several benefits to SOC teams such as:
IOC Collection
One of the areas where SOC teams get involved is the further investigation of an incident. Once SOAR pulls relevant IOCs, it connects with a SIEM solution to collect evidence regarding the user. The IOCs can be collected from recent web history, devices in play, and other relevant details. Subsequently, a security analyst can review the information to act on the required response.
Data Enrichment
A SOAR solution can compare the details with other incidents via feeds to enrich the data. It can subsequently move false positives to a closed state, which already reduces more than half of the required time out of the process. Moreover, automation can enrich the data by extracting evidence such as relevant URLs and information about the user. Lastly, if the user reports or triggers an incident, the SOAR system can automatically reach out to the user via email or SMS.
Automated Response
Once a security analyst finds whether an incident is a threat, he/she can run automated playbooks to take appropriate responses. Furthermore, SOAR tools can handle the process of blocking a malicious URL or deleting an email automatically.
Knowledge Base
Finally, other security teams or SOC team members can take lessons from a case or incident. Moreover, SOAR can collect the relevant data and put it in a knowledge base.
Conclusion
Organizations must understand how their SOC teams can tap their full potential, strengthening their security posture. SOAR technology can help SOC teams leverage every resource and function in full steam.
