How does SOAR Improve Incident Response?

How SOAR Enhances Incident Response Processes?

SOAR Use Cases in Incident Response

Conclusion

How does SOAR Improve Incident Response?

Incident Response
Security Orchestration Automation and Response

Posted on: July 19, 2021

Every organization nowadays is on the radar of threat actors. Therefore, everyone needs to be prepared and know the importance of an incident response framework and the consequences of not having the right solutions in place. The lack of a robust security framework can delay the incident response, impacting the organization’s goals. Every organization needs to understand and learn about incident response, which can be streamlined with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technology. SOAR tools enhance incident response by quickly qualifying and remediating alerts, helping organizations reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) through advanced automation workflows.

How SOAR Enhances Incident Response Processes?

SOAR enables organizations to undertake more effective and efficient incident response and benefits them in unique ways.

Actionable Threat Intelligence

SOC teams constantly deal with heaps of information. The use of advanced SOAR platforms can help them sort through the piles of data. SOAR platforms can ingest threat intelligence and connect the dots with relevant threats, events, or incidents in real-time. This relieves the SOC teams and provides actionable and contextual intelligence to incident response teams, helping them accelerate the incident response process.

Standardized Processes and Streamlined Operations

Automation relieves security teams of monotonous, repetitive tasks. With the help of an advanced SOAR platform, these tasks can be incorporated into playbooks that formulate the SOAR incident response steps. Every component of SOAR helps to streamline security operations. While security orchestration helps collect data from disparate sources, security automation aids in the management of low-priority alerts and incidents by using automated playbooks. On the other hand, the incident response element simplifies event handling, reducing the dwell time of the attack and its overall impact.

Reduced MTTD and MTTR

Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) are important parameters that play a critical role in incident response. The longer the time to detect and respond to an incident, the more severe the damage can be, hence greater the impact on your organization. By leveraging an advanced SOAR tool, you can reduce both MTTD and MTTR. Security orchestration can minimize MTTD by providing contextualized reports on every incident, empowering security teams to spend less time collecting information and focus more on the alert investigation. On the other hand, security automation lowers MTTR by automatically responding to alerts and incidents in real-time, expediting incident response.

Faster Response Time

While the security orchestration element of a SOAR system helps collect a wide range of alerts from multiple tools, security automation enables the response to alerts without any human intervention. By contextualizing the threat data and automating the decision-making process, security teams can speed up the alert handling process and incident response.

Easy Integration

A modern-day SOAR platform has the capability to integrate with various security tools and technologies such as vulnerability and risk management, SIEM and log management, network security, and others. If the integration of these tools into your SOAR platform is easy, you can quickly respond to any threat or incident.

Lowered Costs

By integrating a SOAR platform into its security framework, an organization can experience significant savings on reporting, playbook creation, alert handling, analyst training, and several other aspects.

Automated Reporting and Metrics Capabilities

SOAR platforms save the time invested in manually creating the incident metrics by equipping security teams with automated reporting. By allowing security teams to automatically generate reports, organizations can easily receive metrics for every reporting period and simplify their incident process.

Improved Collaboration

Advanced SOAR platforms are powered by cyber fusion technology that fosters security collaboration among different teams. This technology brings together different internal security teams such as SOC, threat hunting, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and other teams to collaborate and deliver an effective cyber incident response.

SOAR Use Cases in Incident Response

Malware Management

With SOAR solutions at your disposal, you can lower the risk of malware infection. This can be done by tracking and monitoring every malware-related activity, including mitigation and containment measures and analyzing crucial detection parameters for indicators of compromise (IOCs) and threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

Incident Management

An advanced SOAR tool can assist you in delivering 360-degree response by helping you manage incident triage, investigation, and actioning within an automated response workflow powered by cyber fusion-enabled collaboration between your internal security teams. Eventually, a SOAR solution reduces false alarms and analyst fatigue with streamlined post-detection and incident triage methods powered by data enhancement, correlation, and enrichment processes.

Vulnerability Management

Monitoring vulnerabilities becomes easy with a SOAR tool. It lets you create a single database of vulnerabilities, allowing you to track, mitigate, and correlate threat actors, malware, incidents, and assets to proactively neutralize any further exploitation. You can keep a step ahead of threat actors by tracking, managing, and responding with in-depth threat visibility into their TTPs exploitation methods, and IOCs through a dedicated action-oriented threat actor database.

Connect the Dots

Using a SOAR tool, you can obtain contextual intelligence on intricate threat campaigns, discover potential attacker trajectories, and determine hidden threat patterns by connecting the dots between isolated threats and incidents. Moreover, an advanced SOAR tool comes with a feature of threat actor tracking engine which allows you to identify and track threat actor footprints by mapping their TTPs against reported incidents using MITRE’s ATT&CK Navigator.

Customized Playbooks

By leveraging a SOAR tool, security teams can handle multiple incidents/threats from a single dashboard. They can ingest threat intelligence, streamline workflow automation, and manage complex threat campaigns to reduce false alarms, noise, and overall MTTR. Furthermore, security teams can use a vast library of out-of-the-box SOAR playbooks and customize them to automate responses to sophisticated attacks. An advanced SOAR tool lets security teams create custom dashboards and reports, enabling them to track critical metrics and trends relevant to threats, incidents, assets, and other related attributes.

Conclusion

SOAR solutions automate incident response that reduces human intervention, allowing security teams to manage their budget for other critical business operations. Automated SOAR incident response establishes business continuity and reinstates business operations post incidents as quickly as possible. Therefore, you need to choose a SOAR tool that offers comprehensive and fully automated incident management, enabling security teams to respond to incidents in a collaborative environment and in a timely fashion.

Schedule a free demo to learn more about SOAR and how it can enhance incident response.