SOAR Security Use Cases to modernize Your SOC with Progressive Automation and Orchestration

Effective SOAR use cases assist cybersecurity team quickly identify potential threats & minimize risk and improve the effectiveness of security operations (SecOps).

A SOAR (Security Operations and Response) Security Platform is designed to target and neutralize security threats quickly, effectively and before they become a major concern. SANS institute understands and it recently conducted a research that only 31% of organizations have people dedicated to the task of either hunting down new threats or anti-virus software development.

What are the three key capabilities of SOAR Security?

Security orchestration

Security automation

Security response

When it comes to managing incidents, streamlining response procedures, and bettering defense against threats, SOAR should be a tool you consider. SOAR has the ability to automate decision-making processes for its three components, namely Orchestration, Automation, and Response, to increase speed and accuracy.

One key trait of automation is that it helps reduce the amount of decision fatigue that investigators endure by making resources more readily available.

Let’s learn about top 10 use cases of SOAR that involves must-know security automation recommendations for security and risk management leaders.

SOAR Use Case #1: Threat Hunting

Threat hunting as a practice involves collecting indicators of compromise from as many sources as possible, analyzing them, and defining the threat intelligence to be used for defining security monitoring parameters within an SIEM or NGFW.

The threat hunting through an organization’s networks, endpoints and large datasets of information, for critical security threats, is an exhausting process and complex.

An important part of threat hunting is correlation. If you find a similarity in two pieces of information it might lead you to your goal.

In the constantly evolving cyber security landscape, there is no time to wait around for an attack happen. In order to be safe from potential security threats, one must adapt and update constantly.

The best way to do this is by remaining proactive rather than reactive. Threat hunting is a critical part of a security operations center’s (SOC) job. It means finding and tracking down potential threats.

SOAR security capabilities allow security teams to hunt for threats in a far more efficient and effective way. This enables them to free up time and resources which can then be used to focus on other critical threats of the business. Third-party tools are the most common when scanning for any possible vulnerabilities, but it’s important to remember that even though they provide a service, third-party tools themselves may have privacy concerns associated with them – this is why specialized professional teams work with open source or in-house designed solutions which offer real privacy control.

SOAR Use Case #2: Case Management

Soar was developed with security analysts in mind, so they don’t have to worry about the frustration of juggling multiple systems to cope with an incident.

The SOAR case management functionality allows security analysts to create reports that are easy to read and simple enough to understand, on a dashboard, for them to view all data or components related to a cyber security incident.

When faced with the difficult task of tracking and monitoring multiple cyber security incidents, SOAR’s case management system allows teams to compile detailed information across across ticketing systems, SIEM and other tools – on a single platform by redirecting alerts from different security applications on to this one source of truth.

A SOAR platform enables your security team to focus on high-priority security events while also automating and dealing with the low-priority security events that may still end up consuming much of your time. The SOAR platform essentially acts as a Safety Manager for ALL of your organization’s operations, not just operations under the control of the Information Technology (IT) department.

This means that your whole team can deal with security concerns without having to spend too much time on mundane things like log analysis, threat monitoring and incident response.

SOAR Use Case #3: Threat Intelligence Coordination Automation

Analysis of indicators of compromise allows security researchers to look for recognizable patterns that could potentially reveal the existence of a threat. This will enable them to defend their network or system from similar cyber attacks in the future .

Example Indicator(s) of comprises are collected from:

• logins
• Threat intelligence feeds (both Private Threat Intelligence Feeds and Open-source intelligence OSINT)
• malware analysis tools
• Network detection and response
• IP addresses
• SIEM platforms
• RSS feeds
• domain names etc.

Cyber Threat intelligence is a valuable addition to any cyber security team and must be analyzed by cyber security analysts working in the various domains of cybersecurity. Incidence response or SIEM tools can vouch for the same.

SOAR platforms aggregate and surface alerts from disparate tools in a single location, but they can also detect suspicious patterns that emerge across it.

SOAR platforms can act as aggregators for different tools, coordinating, streamlining and pooling alerts into one unified dashboard.

What’s already there is augmented with the addition of newly-discovered IOCs that emerge across these many tools consistently. Rather than viewing alerts or IOCs in disparate prompts or windows or monitors, they are transparently visible within one screen.

SOAR Use Case #4: Vulnerability Management

SOAR security solutions help in improving the security measures in an organization by making sure that your security team is always up to date with the latest threats and vulnerabilities. Otherwise there will be the major danger of the company’s data being compromised and accessed by cyber criminals who may use such information against a business enterprise.

Threats are often discovered outside the network, but it’s the threat intelligence gathering done by other security solutions that can correlate with SOAR’s threat detection / response approach to enable security teams to deliver a comprehensive view of security risks to immediately respond to vulnerabilities.

Applying SOAR does three things to help you deal with security issues faster.

 First, it allows you to triage incoming alerts so that security experts can act on the most pressing vulnerabilities.

 Second, application contexts give you visibility into how vulnerabilities impact not just your network but also your business by looking at historical data and allowing you to compare past attacks to current ones.

And third, it provides intelligence for effective response through self-learning machine learning models embedded directly in the solution that correlate data generated by other security tools and assess attack scenarios based on those models.

SOAR Use Case #5: Automated Phishing Attacks Investigation, Analysis & Response

Recently, phishing emails have become one of the most effective methods for potential cyber criminals to gain access to sensitive information. Phishing email attacks are becoming one of the most critical issues in modern day organizations.

With automatic triage and examination of suspected phishing emails, SOAR security extracts artifacts, analyses email header and content, reduce mean time to resolution, performs incident response processes and potential viruses for further review.

SOAR Security email security provides automatic triage and analysis of suspected phishing emails for users, extracting artifacts from the content to identify key characteristics of the email. In case a suspicious email is identified, it can be automatically examined by the system which will further analyze the syntax and header to determine the characteristics of the email so as to swiftly provide an alert to any user if there is a reoccurring pattern that matches a flag considered malicious. It also means that all suspicious emails can then be analyzed in depth by security professionals to further conduct a manual investigation.

SOAR Use Case #6: Automated Remediation

The way the IOC process works is by using a security analyst to identify malicious activities by comparing malicious indicators stored on a security operation center’s databases to known threats from multiple threat intelligence feeds.

This unified orchestration and automation saves analyst’s significant time and increase efficiency of the SOC team and reduces response time for incidents

SOAR Use Case #7: Incident Response

Incident response is all about having a plan in place to effectively respond to, fix, and recover. It includes providing help after an attack or other incident has already taken place.

The best way to be prepared is to put SOAR Security’s Incident Response Service into action! This helps you patch the gaps in your security system, including things like phishing, malware, denial of service, web defacement, and ransomware.

Incident Response with SOAR security involves dealing with the most common violent radicalization threats, such as phishing, malware, denial of service (DoS), web defacement (the act of changing or destroying public websites/blogs without permission) and ransomware (a malware that locks down your computer in exchange for money).

Going by the working of a SOAR software, a SOAR security platform gathers data from a variety of sources which can be internal or external.

In the next step, security experts perform a thorough inspection of the data. Here they check for any inconsistencies or new threats this information may present based on previous findings using detection playbooks to automate and coordinate workflow processes.

SOAR is an all-in-one automated security incidence response platform that eliminates the need for tedious manual triage (be it automated blockage of an IP address on a IDS system or firewall, or keep compromised endpoint at bay) of security alerts while automating incident response playbooks.

Security teams can proactively hunt down potential security threats, and respond to them in a timely manner using automated threat-hunting playbooks. They can therefore optimize their mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) super quick.

SOAR Use Case #8: Security Orchestration Automation

SOAR Use Case #9: Endpoint Protection

Your security team is working hard to prevent intrusions and attacks at every point, including the endpoint.

However, endpoints produce log data that’s overwhelming and can occupy time and resources well outside the SOC. And let’s face it, it takes a lot of time to manually respond to each false positive or alert your team is alerted to. This will decrease the efficiency of your SOC team members, resulting in less productivity for everyone involved.

SOAR security takes into account all connected nodes/endpoints and prioritize alerts from endpoint devices to help SOC team automate the process of responding to cyber threats and prevent external malicious content from compromising the system.

SOAR Use Case #10: Forensic Investigation