Automating Threat Hunting With SOAR Solutions

Threat hunting is a proactive security activity designed to allow security personnel to identify and remediate unknown threats and vulnerabilities within an organization’s IT environment. This requires in-depth analysis of security data to prove or disprove hypotheses about an organization’s exposure to various threats.

Threat hunting can be an invaluable exercise for an organization, but it can also be difficult and time-consuming to perform. As cyber threat actors become more sophisticated, detecting their presence requires careful analysis of security data. At the same time,IT environments are growing more complex, making it more difficult to collect and process the required data. Additionally, effective threat hunting requires cybersecurity knowledge and expertise that can be difficult to attract and retain with the current cybersecurity skills gap and competitive market for skilled cybersecurity professionals.

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions help organizations to overcome these challenges and achieve their threat hunting goals. A SOAR solution streamlines the threat hunting process by automating the collecting, processing, and analysis of security data. By reducing the burden on security analysts, SOAR solutions enable them to focus their time and expertise on the tasks where they can have the greatest impact.

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and corporate environments become more complex, threat hunting is vitally important to reducing data breaches and corporate cybersecurity risk. SOAR solutions, with their support for automated threat hunting, are essential to an organization’s efforts to accomplish this. Let’s take a closer look at how SOAR works.

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SOAR Collects And Normalizes Security Data

As companies’ IT infrastructure grows and expands, so does their security architecture. With this growing scale and complexity comes difficulty in collecting and analyzing security data. At the same time, detecting and remediating advanced, modern threats requires context and in-depth analysis of security data.

SOAR systems can help incident response and threat hunting teams by automating the process of collecting and normalizing security data. SOAR systems can connect to the various systems in an organization’s security architecture and accept data in many different formats. This data is then translated to a consistent format and analyzed for anomalies and signs of potential threats. The SOAR solution can then alert on potential threats, providing security analysts with recommendations of where to focus their attention and efforts backed up with centralized contextual data.

SOAR Optimizes Threat Reporting

SOAR solutions collect security information from across the enterprise and automatically analyze it to highlight and alert security analysts about potential threats. When developing incident mitigation strategies or performing a threat hunt, analysts have a wealth of data at their fingerprints, making it easy to investigate a potential threat and develop an informed plan for remediating it.

SOAR Automates Repeatable Processes From A Single Platform

As the name suggests, SOAR solutions are designed to orchestrate and automate security processes. This includes the ability to automatically respond to certain types of security incidents based upon playbooks and prebuilt scripts and procedures. These automated procedures can be designed to bring in human analysts to make critical security decisions when needed.

In addition to automating incident response, SOAR platforms can also automate repeatable and time-consuming tasks such as applying patches and updates. By automating these processes, a SOAR solution frees up security personnel to focus their efforts on incident response and threat hunting activities.

SOAR Enables A Faster Response To Threats

Security analysts are commonly buried under a deluge of security data. As companies pursue digital transformation initiatives, their IT infrastructure expands, and security architecture has grown to match. Each security solution generates its own data and alerts, making it difficult for security analysts to pick out true threats from false alarms.

SOAR solutions act as a filter for security data and alerts. Using context and information from across the organization, a SOAR solution can differentiate true threats from false-positive alerts. This enables security personnel to focus their time and attention on the events most likely to indicate true security incidents, making incident response more efficient and effective.

Conclusion

Threat hunting is a vital component of a mature corporate cybersecurity strategy and enables an organization to identify and respond to subtle and previously undetected threats. SOAR solutions make threat hunting processes more efficient and effective by automating the process of collecting and analyzing security data. SOAR solutions can also streamline security reporting and automate incident response and other time-consuming tasks to maximize the effectiveness of security personnel.