Let us first understand -
What is Incident Response Orchestration?
You know that -- Automation refers to replacing one or more manual tasks, which typically slow down incident response, with immediate reactions to security events identified across your environments. When you automate certain repetitive tasks, you actually reduce the burden of security operations and it helps you respond to threats more quickly—and more effectively.
You know that -- Automation refers to replacing one or more manual tasks, which typically slow down incident response, with immediate reactions to security events identified across your environments. When you automate certain repetitive tasks, you actually reduce the burden of security operations and it helps you respond to threats more quickly—and more effectively.
Automation is a critical initiative for many security operations teams, who look to overcome resource constraints while keeping pace with evolving attackers and a growing volume of security alerts.
But not everything should be automated, because the human element of incident response isn’t going away any time soon. There are certain pieces or alerts which will require the judgment or intervention of human…
Instead, your security teams should focus on orchestrating the incident response processes so that your human security analysts can respond to threats as quickly and efficiently as possible.
For example, switching between an intrusion detection solution and an application where you need to take an action in the event of a breach can slow down the entire incident response process. To take full advantage of incident response orchestration and improve processes across multiple steps and toolsets, you should always look for IR solutions that can help you in unifying all your IR activities within a single solution, like AlienVault's USM Anywhere.
All such technologies comes under the category of SOAR - Security Orchestration, Automation and Response!
"These are technologies which enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team. For example, thousands of alerts are coming from the SIEM system and other security technologies, then SOAR solutions are there where incident analysis and triage can be performed by leveraging a combination of human and machine power.
SOAR technologies help you to define, prioritize and drive standardized incident response activities. SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format."
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How SIEM and SOAR work together in Cybersecurity?
Many organizations rely both on SOAR and SIEM to drive their cyber security defense. That is because SIEM and SOAR do not contradict one another, yet they complement each other’s strengths and actually make each other better by collaborating:
SIEM
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How SIEM and SOAR work together in Cybersecurity?Many organizations rely both on SOAR and SIEM to drive their cyber security defense. That is because SIEM and SOAR do not contradict one another, yet they complement each other’s strengths and actually make each other better by collaborating:
SIEM
This is basically an alert-detection technology that is virtually unmatched at detecting threats to keep analysts up to date with every event inside the organization. However, SIEM’s job stops at detecting, and the technology itself cannot take remediation actions to nullify potential threats. Plus, the technology has to be constantly tweaked and overlooked by analysts, which is time-consuming.
SOAR
SOAR
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. While SOAR can’t match SIEM’s alert-detecting capabilities, it does so much more by bringing automation and orchestration to the table. By using automation and machine learning, SOAR is able to automate a wide range of repetitive and mundane tasks, thus replacing analysts from having to complete the task themselves.
The problem with SIEM is that it generates a lot of alerts, and many of those alerts are not real threats, meaning that they are false positives. This is where SOAR steps in to fill in the gaps, as SOAR is capable of recognizing false positives and telling apart real threats from false ones. This saves much of the analyst’s time, and with SIEM’s alert detecting capabilities and SOAR’s machine learning technology, it is obvious why these two technologies work so well together.
The Top SOAR vendors are:
The problem with SIEM is that it generates a lot of alerts, and many of those alerts are not real threats, meaning that they are false positives. This is where SOAR steps in to fill in the gaps, as SOAR is capable of recognizing false positives and telling apart real threats from false ones. This saves much of the analyst’s time, and with SIEM’s alert detecting capabilities and SOAR’s machine learning technology, it is obvious why these two technologies work so well together.
The Top SOAR vendors are:-
Demisto
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IBM
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Palo Alto Networks
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Siemplify
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Swimlane
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ThreatConnect
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Splunk
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Rapid7
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Cyberbit
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LogRhythm
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What Incident Response Orchestration Can Do for You?
Incident response orchestration will look slightly different at every organization—that’s where the human element I mentioned earlier comes into play. When you gear up for IR Orchestration, there are a few key IR orchestration and automation capabilities you should look for.
• Prioritized Security Alerts
What Incident Response Orchestration Can Do for You?
Incident response orchestration will look slightly different at every organization—that’s where the human element I mentioned earlier comes into play. When you gear up for IR Orchestration, there are a few key IR orchestration and automation capabilities you should look for.
• Prioritized Security Alerts
It should be capable of prioritizing alarms automatically, because this reduces the burden of researching alarms individually and allows you to focus your security resources where they’re most needed. It must help you focus your attention in the right places right out of the gate.
• Threat Context
• Threat Context
Understanding the full picture is one of the biggest challenges when investigating incidents. To support the incident response process, some solutions, it should allow you to centrally investigate events aggregated from 'multiple data sources' to help speed up forensic investigation. It must build a context and response guidance into the alarms it raises, helping you to streamline your response efforts.
• Automated Incident Response Actions
• Automated Incident Response Actions
When malware infects one of your systems, you can employ automated IR actions like isolating or shutting down the system to keep it from infecting other assets. You should consider solutions that give you granular control over what you want automated. It will allow you to tailor them to fit your organization’s needs and infrastructure.
• Threat Intelligence Updates
• Threat Intelligence Updates
As the threat landscape changes, your incident response plan should adapt accordingly to provide the most optimal response to the threat. If you want up-to-date threat detection and enough context for effective forensics, then you will need 'actionable threat intelligence updates'. Keep in mind that some threat intelligence solutions just provide threat data, meaning you still need to figure out how to apply it. You should look for a solution that continually incorporates new threat intelligence into product updates that assure you’re ready to detect and respond to emerging threats.
• Bidirectional Response
• Bidirectional Response
Some IR orchestration products can interact with each other to streamline your incident response actions. A solution like USM Anywhere, for example, can incorporate and analyze log data from Cisco Umbrella to detect threats, then respond to threats by sending the IP addresses of malicious domains back to Cisco Umbrella to block traffic between the domain and your employees and assets.
All you want is to shorten the time between detection and response by centralizing your IR activities in one place.
These platforms actually add a layer of time-saving IR automation capabilities on the top of a foundation of essential security and compliance monitoring capabilities, which include asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, SIEM, and log management. I have mentioned all these things in the graphic given here.
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Guys, It is a long piece to read and grasp fully, nonetheless you would have learnt a lot of finer points about IR Orchestration and why everything connects together.
Please let me know of what do you think about this in the comment section. You can also share with all if the information shared here helps you in some manner.
As you are truly interested in reading more of such high-quality posts on cybersecurity, you can always let me know by leaving your comments.
All you want is to shorten the time between detection and response by centralizing your IR activities in one place.
These platforms actually add a layer of time-saving IR automation capabilities on the top of a foundation of essential security and compliance monitoring capabilities, which include asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, SIEM, and log management. I have mentioned all these things in the graphic given here.
-
Guys, It is a long piece to read and grasp fully, nonetheless you would have learnt a lot of finer points about IR Orchestration and why everything connects together.
Please let me know of what do you think about this in the comment section. You can also share with all if the information shared here helps you in some manner.As you are truly interested in reading more of such high-quality posts on cybersecurity, you can always let me know by leaving your comments.
This Article Was Written & published by Meena R, Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India.
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