Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms help collect and browse data from multiple sources, manage threats, and automate incident response. SOAR typically offers three core capabilities:
- Orchestration via threat and vulnerability management
- Security operations automation
- Security incident response
SOAR solutions employ a combination of human insights with machine learning to analyze collected data, offering security insights and prioritizing incident response actions. They are working together with, and in some cases replacing, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems.
Why Is SOAR Security Important?
Cyberthreats are growing in sophistication and attacks are becoming more frequent. This means organizations must develop efficient and effective ways to address security operations. SOAR is transforming the way security operations teams manage, analyze, and respond to alerts and threats.
Today’s security operations teams face multiple challenges:
- They have to manually process thousands of alerts every day, which creates operational inefficiencies and leaves room for human error.
- There are too many manual, error-prone processes.
- They use multiple, isolated legacy security tools, which reduces productivity.
- They must correlate between multiple heterogeneous systems and filter out noise.
- There is a severe, global shortage of cybersecurity skills, meaning that teams are anyway short on time and resources.
These challenges mean that analysts have to decide which alerts to take seriously and respond to, creating the risk that important incidents will be overlooked. In addition, security analysts are often overworked and suffer from alert fatigue, which also hurts their ability to effectively respond to important incidents. All these factors cause threats and incidents to slip past defenses and increase the risk of security breaches.
This makes it important to have a system such as SOAR, which allows organizations to coordinate and automate their alerting and response processes. By eliminating mundane tasks that consume most of a security analyst’s time, security operations teams become more efficient at handling and investigating incidents, improving the overall security structure of the organization.
Benefits of SOAR Tools
The objective of SOAR tools is to simplify cybersecurity and make security programs more convenient. Security teams often recognize that SOAR tools make their operations easier, with some even insisting that the job would be impossible without them.
In addition to security automation and orchestration, SOAR tools leverage AI, machine learning, human insights, and threat intelligence to streamline the incident response process. They can enhance infosec workloads, facilitating professionals who balance multiple responsibilities. By automating routine tasks, SOAR reduces the time an administrator spends on addressing security issues—this frees up time for handling other complex problems.
Reducing MTTD and MTTR for Threats
SOAR tools automate threat detection, allowing organizations to streamline their existing methods for detecting and responding to security events. This SOAR capability helps teams reduce the meantime to detect (MTTD) and the meantime to repair (MTTR) security issues. While reducing the time detection and response time is an important achievement, implementing SOAR solutions demands continuously reviewing the technologies involved.
SOAR tools use advanced monitoring technologies, providing a smart way to minimize MTTD and MTTR. Faster detection and repairing often translates to fewer breaches and the associated costs and legal consequences.
Covering the Cybersecurity Skill Shortage
There has long been a major cybersecurity skills shortage, with many HR and recruitment teams struggling to find suitable candidates for many security jobs. Some observers insist that this shortage is too large to address, and there are not enough skilled personnel for the industry’s needs. Automation is the natural solution for addressing the acute shortage and outsourcing some responsibilities.
SOAR tools enable security professionals to automate repeatable tasks and reduce their workloads. By limiting the human interaction required, employees can focus their time and energy on complex, critical security functions.
Minimizing Human Error with Automated Patch ManagementÂ
Patch management is a critical application maintenance responsibility for IT teams. However, teams often overlook and neglect it due to its tedious and time-consuming processes. If an organization fails to patch issues quickly, the security vulnerabilities can become more serious and costly.
SOAR tools can facilitate patch management and increase its efficiency in two ways. First, SOAR can monitor and apply patches automatically, eliminating the need for human interventions in tedious tasks. An organization can integrate a SOAR platform into its config management system, simplifying the patch management automation effort.
The second way SOAR tools can help is by unlocking data from a vulnerability management system and making it available to knowledgeable team members. While vulnerability management systems typically store this data within the exclusive reach of security teams, a SOAR platform can provide the necessary permissions for other technologists to access and analyze security information.
Key Uses Cases of SOAR Technology
Here are common SOAR use cases:
Automated Phishing Investigation and Remediation
SOAR platforms can automate phishing investigations through a playbook that parses out indicators and distinguishes between malicious phishing attempts and false positives. The playbook can enrich predefined indicators and further analyze them to triage and determine the required response actions.
Automated SOAR responses can investigate false positives, block malicious indicators, block sender’s email addresses, add indicators to a SIEM watchlist, keep a threat quarantined for further investigation, and delete emails from other mailboxes.
Threat Hunting with SOAR
SOAR provides various threat hunting features. It helps identify various threats, including malware and malicious domains. It helps free up time for security teams to tackle critical threats, helping teams identify and prioritize threats before they can escalate.
Incident Response with SOAR
SOAR offers many incident response capabilities to help automate the entire incident response lifecycle, from ingestion, through analysis, detection, triaging, investigation, threat hunting, and containment. Here is how this process works:
- Data ingestion—SOAR platforms ingest security events data from multiple sources—internal and external.
- Threat detection—the platform enriches the collected data, analyzes it, and uses detection playbooks to identify new threats.
- Triaging—SOAR platforms triage alerts automatically, eliminating false positives and letting security teams automate incident response playbooks.
- Automated response—the platform triggers automated responses as needed. For example, it can block an IP address on an IDS system or firewall, terminate user accounts, and isolate compromised endpoints from the network.
SOAR provides security teams with the information and time needed to investigate threats proactively. It supports their efforts through automated threat hunting playbooks and helps measure and optimize teams’ MTTD and MTTR by pushing security alerts in minutes.
Vulnerability Management
SOAR solutions help ensure that security teams remain updated on current vulnerabilities. It provides the information needed to apply the appropriate risk mitigation measures. Here is how this process typically works:
- A vulnerability management tool notifies the SOAR platform of a potential threat.
- The SOAR platform correlates data from the vulnerability management tool with information collected from other security tools. It provides security teams with the information needed to respond to critical vulnerabilities immediately.
- The SOAR platform queries the vulnerability management tool for further diagnosis. It uses these insights to calculate the risk and priority level of the detected vulnerability.
SIEM vs SOAR
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems have been around for years, while SOAR is a newer technology. Both solutions aggregate security data from different sources, but do so in different ways. SIEM captures a huge volume of log and event data from existing infrastructure component sources, while SOAR captures specific data that can be used to respond to an incident.
When comparing SOAR and SIEM, SIEM only provides alerts. It is then the responsibility of the incident responder to determine the investigation path and react to the incident. SOAR, by contrast, can automate investigation path workflows and significantly reduce the time required to process alerts.
While SIEM and SOAR may seem to be competing solutions, in reality most vendors provide them together. Gartner’s definition of a next-generation SIEM includes SOAR, and most SIEM vendors have followed this guidance, providing SOAR as an inseparable part of their solutions.
SOAR Best Practices
Implementing SOAR tools is just the first step towards strengthening your security capabilities. Realizing the full benefit of SOAR requires utilizing the tools and maximizing their value. The following are some ways to make the most of your SOAR solution.
Set Measurable Goals
First, you need to establish clear SOAR objectives. Every organization deals with different threats and risk priorities depending on its size, sector, and location of operations. Additional factors influencing your strategy may include industry standards and IT infrastructure complexity. While threat detection and analysis are essential for all IT organizations, your specific security setup will be unique.
For example, a company that relies heavily on connected on-prem devices would address threats differently from one that relies on cloud-based remote workers. A company with a Linux-based infrastructure might experience fewer malware attacks than one that uses Windows (more malware targets Windows).
Identify the most pressing threats for your organization and ensure you deploy your SOAR solution in a suitable way to address these threats.
Use Security Playbooks
Security playbooks are a major building block of security automation, allowing security teams to define various security incident response procedures. Playbooks help accelerate response by eliminating the need to devise solutions manually for each new threat. They also enable software tools to carry out a fully automated response without the involvement of human security engineers.
Playbooks cannot manage all types of threats—for example, sophisticated threats still require human analysis and response. However, you can increase the efficacy of your SOAR strategy by leveraging security playbooks where possible.
Use a Threat-Driven Approach
Many organizations rely on an alert-driven approach to deal with security threats—this involves individually reacting to each alert. However, a more effective approach is a threat-driven one, whereby you design a SOAR strategy to address threats based on type.
A threat-driven approach is more efficient because it eliminates multiple analysts’ need to respond to similar threats. It lets you group alerts based on threat type, reducing the number of alerts received and streamlining the response.
Ensure Security Tool Integration
A SOAR platform should let you integrate any security tools you choose. Avoid SOAR solutions that limit the tools you can integrate or lock you into a specific vendor. A key advantage of SOAR is to unify all security tools in a central platform.
When choosing a SOAR solution, you first need to identify the appropriate tools for your organization’s needs and ensure the solution supports them. You don’t want to invest in a SOAR product only to find out your preferred tools are incompatible.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving cyber landscape, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms have emerged as a cornerstone for enhancing cybersecurity measures. With cyber threats proliferating in number and sophistication, the manual approach to threat detection and mitigation proves inadequate.
SOAR is the answer to the challenges faced by security operation teams, such as alert fatigue, operational inefficiencies, and the critical shortage of skilled cybersecurity personnel. By offering streamlined threat detection, automated incident response, and cohesive security tool integration, SOAR empowers organizations to remain proactive against cyber threats.
Also read: ForeScout and Carbon Black Integrate to Reduce Business Impact of Cyber Threats
