Hackers are a relentless lot. They are determined to maximize their loot, every time. By just looking at the stats, 2020 seems to be the year of vulnerabilities. The threats are growing, and it’s indeed appalling to see organizations struggling to find ways to tackle these terrifying threats. These risks need faster identification and resolution to prevent any collateral damage. The collective force of SOAR and SIEM can help in overcoming this challenge.
Strength of SOAR
SOAR is the acronym for Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response. It brings together incident response platforms, security orchestration & automation, and threat intelligence platforms under one roof. Be it threat and vulnerability management, incident response, or automating security operations, SOAR is the one that stands out. It is the go-to technology for security teams to fix any vulnerabilities, sanctify workflows, improve collaboration, ensure a faster response, automate processes, report generation, and workflows.
A SOAR platform automates the discovery and ranking of threats by collating threat data from multiple sources. It must be an integral part of security operations. With its automation abilities, SOAR can complement the SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) functions by minimizing security workloads and processes to enable rapid threat detection and response. SOAR fits in multiple tools and technologies to strengthen security operations and provide a comprehensive IT infrastructure view. Its automation features ensure a rapid reduction in response times and standardize processes such as audits, to drastically minimize security teams’ workloads. SOAR powers an automated response through playbooks, either to investigate threats or to mitigate them. Speed of resolution is high, as SOAR enables improved cooperation between various teams to share threat data and ensure remediation. SOC teams can also leverage dashboards to get deeper insights into every incident, including reports, for further analysis.
SOAR can contextualize relationships in alerts and group them for security staff to act on them with efficiency. This feature and automated response can disable the attacker’s ability to have minimal access time on systems. SOAR increases the dwell time of incident response teams to prevent any critical damage. The platform is very simple yet sophisticated for analysts of varying experience to identify incidents and act on them.
A centralized security platform, SOAR integrates various tools from multiple vendors to provide a comprehensive security view of the IT infrastructure. The multi-tool integration feature helps in reducing costs, minimizing false positives, and performing time-consuming tasks.
No doubt, SOAR is a next-gen secops tool.
SOAR and SIEM
SIEM solutions can analyze threat data from security controls by statistically correlating them between devices to generate actionable insights based on various events. SOC teams can use these insights for incident management, audits, and real-time threat management.
SIEMs are good at consuming and correlating data logs while identifying the prioritized alerts for the security team. More alerts more work for the SOC teams. Analysts must investigate these alerts to verify whether it is a false positive. Investigation and response is a manual feature in SIEM and is time-consuming.
SOAR can help SIEM manage alerts more diligently. SOAR can enhance SIEM capabilities, and both can function symbiotically. SOAR can categorize and document the alert management processes into repeatable playbooks. Playbooks overcome the challenges caused due to surge in alerts and help in executing tasks and workflows. Alert handling becomes more streamlined across the SOC, and there is a drastic reduction in the number of uninvestigated alerts.
SOAR acts on SIEM data by automating incident inspection and response to reduce the dependency on manual interventions freeing up analyst time, allowing them to focus on complex tasks such as threat hunting. Reduced manual intervention allows the analyst to work on relevant areas needed to deal with threats quickly.
If SIEM is an alert soundboard, SOAR enables the context to inspect the alert automatically, empowering the SOC team to orchestrate incident detection, response, and remediation by triggering the appropriate playbook. SOAR is a value multiplier – it minimizes breach response time, incident risks, improves SOC efficiency, and ROI from existing security ecosystems.
Modern day SIEMs also offers excellent threat hunting abilities by leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK framework to detect any attack. They are powered by behavioral analytics to detect anomalous behaviors that might indicate a threat. SOAR can aggregate threat intelligence from various sources and can automatically correlate them to enhance threat detection.
The SIEM-SOAR combo is a powerhouse for any large enterprise looking to create a robust, reliable security framework. The SIEM can consume and analyze large data volumes to create alerts, while SOAR can manage these alerts’ responses based on relevance. SOAR can automate and orchestrate manual tasks that otherwise would have been slow to respond. With SOAR, all alerts get addressed promptly.
The combination can transform security operations by streamlining incident management processes and facilitating automation, orchestration, and accelerated response capabilities.
To find innovative ways to deal with today's threats and secure your enterprise for tomorrow, talk to Aujas experts at: contact@aujas.com.
