Streamlining Security Incident Management & Responses
20.05.2021
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In order to get a grasp on how to ease security incident management and response processes, there are terms to be clarified first. First of all, a security incident is the common name of an attack towards an organization’s cybersecurity system, network, or data in general. In addition, TechSlang also includes successful attacks within the term “incident”. Therefore, whether impactful or not, all types of attacks, violations, or exploitations can be described as security incidents.
Moving forward, the security operations that are centered on the management of such incidents are called security incident response and management. However, it is not as easy as it may seem because security teams often struggle to handle one incident after another. They often implement various types of incident response procedures. These procedures are helpful to identify the incidents, yet the high workload remains.
Adding insult to injury, security teams frequently encounter false positives that are quite time-consuming. As an example, this article underlines the fact that even though false positives cause bottlenecks, they almost always have to be dealt with great caution. The reason is simple - if there is one single successful entry among any amount of false positives, the security network will most probably collapse. Thus, it is not possible to overlook them even though they are often a resource drain.
There is a positive correlation between the competency of a security system at threat detection and the number of security incidents it spots. Therefore, as a security network gets stronger, the need for a more advanced security incident response increases. Yet, dealing with these incidents manually is quite burdening for any security team to shoulder. That’s the reason why a security tool competent enough to handle this issue (and many more) becomes inevitable.
Finally, the last term left to clarify is streamlining. To detect how to streamline the incident management and response processes, the key obstacles are stated above. The suffocating amount of incidents, unnerving false positives, and the hardship of managing and responding to incidents manually are bothersome for analysts. Thus, for the sake of streamlining them, automation, visibility, and orchestration can be utilized.
Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platforms are gaining more importance day by day. For example, this article written by a CTO claims that SOARs are able to sort out many problems that analysts encounter and are obviously beneficial for organizations. Therefore, their capability to move security operations to the next level is underlined. Among the positive sides of SOAR, being able to simplify the incident management and response process shines out.
SOARs attributes can correspond to the contemporary difficulties of incident response and management one by one. As an example, SOARs innate ability to reduce mean time to detect and mean time to response (MTTR and MTTD) disburdens analysts. This is attained by introducing efficiency to the various operations of security teams. Its performance-oriented customized workbench can prioritize incidents and alert analysts against emergencies. Thus, security analysts are able to respond to incidents faster.
Not only that, but SOAR also enables security networks further with its ability to automate. The issues of manual processes and constant false positives can be solved concurrently. Firstly, either with pre-defined or manually customized playbooks, SOARs operate more developed incident response plans and procedures. Those playbooks resemble shortcuts that are essential for managing and automating the incident life cycles. This is especially important for false positives. As stated, dealing with false positives or false negatives is a repetitive and time-consuming task. Thus, disburdening analysts from this repetition alone enables further efficiency.
Moving on, SOARs are assisting security teams by simplifying the case management process. Case management means coordinating various security teams to deal with incidents more collaboratively. SOAR provides this through numerous methods like its case grouping that displays interrelated cases together to the analysts. Apart from that, SOAR also connects teams to work on a single platform which accelerates the information transfer across the security network.
Thanks to SOAR platforms, the probability of a cyberattack and it being successful vastly decreases. In line with that, organizations are not bothered with a data breach or other malicious acts like ransomware threats. These are all acquired with the contribution of SOAR to incident management and response.
In the end, what’s achieved is the streamlining of the whole process for further efficiency and simplicity. Yet, these are all achievable with a SOAR that’s skillful enough. Standardization of response processes and increase of incident response quality are essential for a well-developed SOAR. In addition, managing incidents from containment to eradication and recovery steps are also what capable SOARs promote.
To streamline incident response and management, terms had to be clarified. Firstly, an incident is the common name for numerous types of cyberattacks. These attacks happen consistently and many incidents overlap with each other, piling up one after another. This is because analysts don’t have enough time and resources to handle them. That’s the point where the importance of incident management and response becomes obvious.
To not overlook a possibly impactful incident, analysts have to come up with different solutions. Yet, because of various reasons, such as false positives, continuously increasing the number of incidents and processes being manual, analysts need help. Enter SOAR platforms. SOAR platforms solve all of these issues via security automation, a customizable workbench, and well-planned case management. It disburdens analysts and introduces simplicity and efficiency to their workflows along with collaboration between analysts and teams. A final reminder: only solution-oriented and well-designed SOAR platforms are able to move security operations forward.
