Primary Use Cases That SOAR Tools Must Support

You don’t buy a car just because you like its color. You need to narrow down several other considerations before purchasing a car, like the seating capacity and performance specifications. Similarly, before choosing a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform, you need to first understand your requirements and then the use cases of that platform. Secondly, you need to look for a SOAR vendor that supports a wide variety of use cases and can easily meet your demands.

If you are looking for a robust SOAR product, you must dig around and learn about a wide range of use cases that can address different security processes and threats. This year, Aite Group has listed the most well-established use cases among SOAR customers in its Impact Report.

Endpoint quarantine

Security alerts generated from endpoints are monotonous and manually responding to them is time-consuming. This hinders SOC teams’ ability to focus on high-risk alerts. A SOAR platform helps SOC teams enrich these alerts by leveraging threat intelligence feeds and endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. Once the SOAR platform detects the network port where a suspicious device is located, it alerts the SOC team to disable that port/device. Endpoint quarantine allows SOC teams to prevent an alert from becoming an incident.

Forensic investigation

It is important for organizations to gather forensic evidence after an incident occurs. Often, forensic investigation becomes a wearisome task. An advanced SOAR solution offers the capability to automate forensic information collection from disparate sources and track the actions taken by the SOC team.

When an incident is detected, the SOC team can start the incident response process by leveraging the SOAR tool to collect the required data throughout the incident response process. This data can be utilized by the SOC team from a centralized dashboard. After the collection process, the SOC team can analyze and correlate the collected information with isolated threats and incidents to identify the trajectory of potential adversaries and create threat patterns. As a final step, an action can be created in the SOAR platform to provide remediation steps and document all the lessons learned. Once all the investigation processes are completed, the incident can be closed.

Kill processes

SOC teams often struggle when it comes to suspending suspicious or blocked processes on critical devices. By using an advanced SOAR platform, they can kill processes without having to jump between systems. Security analysts can automatically look for and kill suspicious processes detected in an alert. This kills the process identifier without disrupting the host. As a result, SOC teams can quickly obtain automated threat elimination with greater accuracy.

**Malicious traffic **

Suspicious network traffic can be an outcome of incoming requests or a malicious file’s attempt to connect to a forbidden resource. If malicious network traffic goes undiscovered, it can directly impact an organization’s security posture. With the help of a SOAR platform, you can use the machine power to automatically identify and kickstart response against malicious network traffic. When a SOAR platform detects suspicious network traffic, it sends an alert to the SOC team, providing contextual information about relevant threats. Consequently, it suspends malicious network traffic, preventing further associations from the traffic source.

Patch management

Using a SOAR tool, you can automate infrastructure scanning to search for vulnerabilities, verify the vulnerability via intelligence feeds, obtain patches, open change tickets, and finally apply a patch to remediate. Once a missing patch is identified, a SOAR platform initiates automated remediation to patch the system. SOC teams can monitor and apply automated patch management, minimizing their organizations’ risk profile and the possibility of an attack.

Phishing attack

The primary goal behind phishing attacks is to trick victims into revealing sensitive information. A SOAR platform lets you automate the manual investigation of malicious emails by automating email triage workflow, URL reputation identification, and IP source tracing. By leveraging a SOAR platform, security teams can automate about 90% of their tasks related to detecting and responding to phishing emails. A SOAR platform can detect phishing emails in a fraction of seconds thereby, reducing the overall mean time to response (MTTR).

Ransomware attack

With the help of a SOAR tool, ransomware incidents can be contained in their initial stages. First, a ransomware alert can be received via a security information and event management (SIEM) tool, and an incident can be automatically created and investigated. Subsequently, a SOAR platform can collect the host and user data, and correlate it with prior investigations. Furthermore, a SOAR platform can trigger containment actions before the ransomware disseminates and impacts an organization’s network.

Threat hunting

In today’s complex threat landscape, continuous threat hunting is important for an organization. Threat hunting entails searching, identifying, and isolating threats that can affect an organization’s IT infrastructure. With the help of a SOAR platform, threat hunting processes can be automated to detect suspicious malware, domains, and other indicators of compromise (IOCs), expediting the hunting process and allowing analysts to focus on handling critical tasks.

**The bottom line **

The key focus of a SOAR solution is to orchestrate and automate manual security processes, and organizations must focus on automating processes that will yield the most value. You need to choose a SOAR solution that can support a broad spectrum of use cases. This will allow you to unleash the full potential of a SOAR platform.

The Aite Impact Report provides a comprehensive market analysis covering the SOAR market, history, direction, and different vendors. The report does not endorse any particular vendor; however, it provides insights into the market, vendors, and their product categories and capabilities to its clients, helping them make informed decisions about buying a SOAR product.

Access the Aite SOAR report from here.

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