Laura
01/03/2023
Automated incident response can help security teams identify and respond to cyber threats faster.
When a breach happens, delays equal costs.
Today, a cyber attack happens every 39 seconds, and the global average total cost of a data breach is the highest it’s been in 17 years. In this environment, a low response time is crucial to reducing cyber risk.
Even though the average organisation is more likely to have an incident response plan in place than before, it still takes most companies far too long to identify and contain a breach.
Part of the reason why is an overabundance of security alerts. Security operations centre (SOC) teams don’t have nearly enough time to investigate all of the alerts they receive. This is true even when a SOC has effective manual workflows and response playbooks in place.
Yet being able to investigate and correlate alerts is a critical aspect of incident response.
Fortunately, there is a more efficient and effective way to manage alerts, as well as respond to them when they turn out to be critical. It’s called incident response automation, aka security automation.
What Is Automated Incident Response?
Automated incident response refers to the use of automation to detect, investigate, and contain cyber threats with little to no human input.
Automated incident response typically consists of the following processes:
- Data correlation, i.e., looking at data from different sources within an organisation and correlating security alerts. This reduces the number of false positives analysts need to investigate and speeds up incident detection and investigation.
- Automated response, i.e., issuing real-time alerts to security teams or responding to threats without human input, like isolating devices in case of time-sensitive threats such as ransomware.
Organisations can enable automated incident response processes via tools like security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), extended detection and response (XDR), and incident response platforms.
Why Automated Incident Response Is Important In 2023
Automated response is an important tool for fighting back against “alert fatigue,” a problem that keeps getting worse.
Nearly 30% of security analysts say their roles are getting more difficult due to the volume of alerts they receive. This is compared to 20% of security staff who said the same in 2021.
As SecOps teams are being increasingly buried under a mountain of alerts, security incidents that should have been caught end up slipping through the cracks. It’s not unusual for businesses to find out they’ve been breached only after cybercrime groups demand a ransom from them or leak sensitive details on leaked sites.
Research from a few years ago shows that 56% of incident response requests happen after damage from an attack is complete. There’s no shortage of recent breaches that occurred because alerts were missed or disregarded as false positives.
With cybercrime showing no signs of stopping and detection not getting any easier, automated incident response tools are a must.
Benefits of Automated Incident Response
Automating incident response opens up a range of security benefits, including:
- Faster detection and response. By eliminating false positives and flagging only genuine security alerts, automated incident response tools reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). The earlier an organisation can spot and stop an attack in the kill chain, the less damage there will be.
- Better staff productivity and retention. Unable to cope with the number of alerts they receive and under the constant threat of missing signs of a breach, security professionals are experiencing burnout. Things are so bad that about three-quarters of SOC staff say their home lives are being impacted. By investigating and correlating alerts on their behalf, automated incident response technology takes this stressor away. It gives back security professionals time to focus on more rewarding security tasks, like improving their company’s security posture.
- Cost savings. Automated incident response tools increase security professionals’ productivity and reduce the likelihood of staff quitting due to burnout, causing the organisation to look for another employee. Considering the ongoing cybersecurity skills shortage plus the fact that the cost of turnover is, on average, around half of the worker’s salary, being able to retain talent can help companies save a lot of money. Improved detection and response processes also mean organisations are less likely to experience a costly attack.
How SenseOn’s Automated Incident Response Works
SenseOn’s consolidated cyber security tool reduces alert fatigue, makes it easier for security professionals to detect malware and other signs of intrusions, and reduces response times.
Here’s how SenseOn’s platform can help SOCs with cyber incident management:
Threat investigation
From endpoints and on-premise servers to assets and workloads hosted in the cloud, SenseOn can pull together data from across a company’s digital estate. This reduces coverage gaps and creates a holistic picture of network behaviour.
Critically, SenseOn uses machine learning to understand user and device behaviour, taking note of anomalies and learning from experience for future threat detection.
Alert correlation
SenseOn does not look at alerts in isolation or send security teams isolated data points. Instead, it analyses data from multiple sources to see if there’s a link between them.
When it spots related alerts, SenseOn automatically collects them into a “Case” and maps them against the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Benign alerts are recorded but not surfaced, which means that analysts don’t have to perform triage analysis—SenseOn does this for them.
Automated response
In the event of a cyber incident, SenseOn will escalate security issues it detected.
Every issue flagged is prioritised based on severity to help SOC teams with remediation and reduce the mean time to respond (MTTR). ATT&CK mapping makes it easier for security teams to know what action to take next.
In the case of time-critical events like ransomware, SenseOn can take automated security incident response steps like isolating infected systems within moments of ransomware being detected.
Try a demo of SenseOn today.