To the hard-working professionals who staff a typical security operations center (SOC), stopping a relentless tide of cyber threats can feel like holding back the ocean with a bucket. Their jobs are often made more difficult by a combination of staff shortages and the sheer volume of data they have to deal with. It’s not unusual for human analysts to be pushed to the edge. Enter Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) It is a cybersecurity force multiplier.
Embracing a SOAR integration strategy begins with adding new tools to the stack. But it doesn’t stop there. SOAR becomes the central nervous system capable of connecting disparate security products into a more cohesive, high-speed defense tool.
DarkOwl, a leader among SOAR providers, suggests that there are three core capabilities that make SOAR essential to modern cybersecurity:
1. Seamless Security Orchestration
The SOAR acronym starts with orchestration because it lays the foundation for everything else. Security orchestration is necessary when you consider that analysts waste a significant amount of their time jumping between firewall consoles, ticketing systems, etc. We call this swivel-chairing in the industry. Orchestration solves this problem by acting as a universal translator.
SOAR integration actually allows disparate tools to talk to each other through a centralized point and unified workflows. Here’s an example: when an SIEM flags a suspicious login, the SOAR platform can automatically dig into user history. It can check the login IP against darknet data. All this can be done automatically in a fraction of the time it would take a human analyst.
2. Automated Alert Triage and Enrichment
If you think most wasted time is related to analysts swivel-chairing, think again. Analysts actually waste more time on triage because they are frequently left chasing ghosts. Solving this problem is one of the most significant contributions of SOAR integration. As such, SOAR has an incredible ability to combat alert fatigue.
The modern SOC is often buried under a massive mountain of low-level alerts. Many of those alerts generate false positives that only waste time. On the other hand, automated enrichment handled by a SOAR platform does all the heavy lifting. It handles initial triage so that when an alert comes in, human analysts don’t have to deal with it right away.
Instead, the SOAR platform automatically:
- Extracts relevant indicators.
- Compares the indicators against threat intelligence databases.
- Assigns a risk score based on comparison and analysis.
With this level of automation in play, an alert has already been validated and contextualized long before an analyst actually sees it. If an alert is determined to be a known false positive, the platform can even close the ticket automatically. The noise of a false positive is silenced so that analysts never hear it. In the end, analysts are able to focus on high-priority tasks.
3. Rapid Incident Response
Finally, SOAR providers design their platforms to reduce incident response time as much as possible. The goal is to limit dwell time by increasing the speed at which responses occur. This is accomplished through automated playbooks – predefined, step-by-step logic flows designed around particular threat types.
Imagine a typical phishing attempt. An automated playbook can instantly quarantine the suspected email, search logs for any users who might have already, clicked an embedded link, reset credentials, and isolate any infected workstations. It all happens in seconds rather than hours. Best of all, a human analyst never lifted a finger.
SOAR providers like DarkOwl are making some incredible platforms capable of transforming the SOC. SOAR itself acts as a force multiplier that turns regular security analysts into superheroes.
