How to Do Endpoint Detection and Response with SOAR?
06.05.2020
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Ensuring business continuity is the top priority of every organization. However, is this possible in the age of digital warfare? Today, businesses are at great risk from state-sponsored attacks, insider threats, external threats, organized crime, and threats from hacktivists. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) including all types of viruses are sophisticated and fast, and protecting endpoints has become a great challenge for enterprises. Therefore, endpoint detection and response is crucial to prevent business disruption and financial loss.
According to this whitepaper, the impact of security breaches is rising each day and malicious actors are getting more skillful. Thus, security teams are falling behind on dealing with constant bottlenecks and covering the alerts all the time. This is the reason why most businesses benefit from EDR security tools.
As a matter of fact, endpoint security ensures that entry points of end-users’ devices such as laptops, desktops, and mobile devices are secured enough against cybercriminals. It is achieved through EDR tools that are specifically designed to swiftly detect, analyze, block, and contain cyber-attacks in progress.
They are able to detect more advanced threats such as zero-day attacks and fileless malware. In recent years, hackers have developed a more sophisticated penetration method. They exploit a polymorphic virus and these are aptly named polymorphic attacks. EDR tools are able to propose a security response to those contemporary malicious codes, too.
However, businesses apply for other cyber security tools to enhance the capabilities of EDR tools for legitimate security response. Among those, the role of the Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tool is inevitable to deal with cyber threats more extensively. The SOAR solution continually ingests threat data from all security tools and then automatically feeds essential components into the EDR security suite so that it can produce fast and more accurate outcomes.
Using the EDR solution, security professionals can monitor endpoints and take security actions manually. However, the SOAR tool allows SOC teams to investigate alerts, query endpoints, and orchestrate immediate changes at once with its continuous monitoring. SOAR can also ingest alerts generated from them based on the predetermined rules.
For example, there are customizable or pre-determined playbooks implemented in the tool to allow regulation of endpoints. The hash value of suspicious files is also considered. After that, contextual data is used to support security alerts to achieve more accurate alerts. Once these alerts are enriched with contextual data, the Sandbox is used to grab and detonate the file for analysis purposes.
SOAR can take a variety of actions based on the results produced by the Sandbox. For example, if the malicious file is detected in any of the endpoints, then SOAR can kill the process, block the hash, or quarantine the infected ones. It can disburden analysts with an extensive endpoint response service so to say.
A lot of inter-connected devices mean a lot of security alerts. Is it possible to deal with millions of alerts manually? No, it’s not. Most commonly, SOC teams build an incident response plan to handle incidents more precisely. However, they can be suffocated by the incidents piling on one after another. This is when the SOAR security suite comes into play. SOAR incident response capabilities allow the CSIRT team to deal with pesky alerts more effectively. In this case, developed alerting and advanced security automation have immense importance.
Accordingly, this article emphasizes that since the number of interconnected devices increases each day, more businesses turn their gaze towards SOAR solutions to manage their incidents. Therefore, it is reasonable to claim that various security operations including endpoints are regulated by SOAR tools with an apparent competence.
In addition, SOAR can inject alerts from EDR and other tools like SIEM and analyze whether such an alert is true or false. This is, of course, valid for SOARs that are software vendor-free, which is more of a contemporary and advanced approach to security tool building.
Protecting and detecting endpoints should be the core function of any successful SOAR solution. Logsign SOAR helps to achieve this crucial goal. It allows automation and orchestration of alerts. In addition, it includes incident management capabilities that cover the entire incident response cycle.
Apart from that, Logsign SOAR can provide threat hunting, which is also a valuable service for endpoint protection. This article by SecurityIntelligence states that threat hunting promotes situational awareness against most cyber threats with great precision.
For an incident response to be effective, Logsign SOAR’s threat intelligence is a critical component as it provides a lot of historical data to a SOAR system and helps understand the nature of incidents, potential risks, action to be taken, and data to be collected. To fill the cybersecurity skills gap, Logsign SOAR reduces the involvement of manpower by automating manual, mundane, and repetitive tasks.
To conclude, cybersecurity threats are lurking around the endpoints of businesses to exploit their weaknesses. There are numerous ways to battle against this issue. Advanced alerting or decreasing mean time to response (MTTR) is adequate enough to handle such threats. For the former, SOAR tools are quite useful with their improved monitoring methods. For the latter, automation, playbooks, and incident response management are quite crucial. Plus, threat hunting enables businesses to obtain an important level of proactivity against the attackers that aim at those entry points.
Ultimately, SOAR tools are vital for either affected systems with alerts and monitoring or for unaffected ones with proactivity attained by threat hunting.
