Automation and Standardization: The Boon for Incident Response and SOC
22.03.2018
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In the evolving world of information technology, digital crimes are emerging by leaps and bounds and, therefore, making Incident Response (IR) and Security Operation Center (SOC) platforms mandatory. In fact, IR is an organized approach to address and manage the aftermath of a cyber-attack or security breach. On the other hand, SOC is a dedicated site where organizations’ IT systems such as networks, servers and data centers, databases, websites, and applications are assessed, monitored, and defended against cybersecurity incidents.
Standardizing IR and SOC means designing a document that could provide guidelines, requirements, and specifications to ensure that they are established to support Cybersecurity Operations and Incident Response along with new automated technology platforms. Currently, several standards for both IR and SOC have been designed. The generally accepted standards are called de facto standards. The current de facto standards for Incident Response and SOC include:
An effective standard must provide answers to the following core themes that are significant in managing IR and SOC. These questions were also asked by numerous CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) in RSA Conference 2016.The cybersecurity incident or data breach can be even more disruptive if organizations are unable to know such questions:
IR automation can assist companies to mitigate IT security threats in several ways, such as: Responding SIEM Security Incidents: IR automation can certainly help to respond to SIEM security incidents and automatically executing specified procedures for extracting vital information and managing incident resolution. Remotely Lock and Disconnect: If you detect any suspicious device or unauthorized activity on your corporate network, you can instantly lock or disconnect that device from accessing the network anymore. Daily Reports Generation: Daily reports of the users, which have logged in to the workstation during off hours timeframes, can be generated. Block DoS Attacks: Doing so requires the IR automation to adopt security and communication to external resources dynamically. Forensic Tools Installation: IR automation automatically installs required forensic tools to carry out a deep investigation of suspicious systems. Respond to Alerts: IR automation automatically responds to antivirus alerts by executing specified policies in order to prevent intrusions and forbid malicious actors from compromising the system.
Automating IR and SOC can help to reduce manual work and provide more reliable and consistent response actions through a highly effective and closed-loop process. Besides, it reduces workload by responding to policy violations and weaknesses with automated remediation and review that could help the organizations to achieve their security endeavors with less burden. Moreover, automating also enhances response times by integrating both configuration assessments and event management. In this article, you have learned the importance of standardizing and automating Incident Response (IR) and Security Operation Centers (SOCs). To better defend and respond to cybersecurity threats especially the Ransomware Attacks, the organizations must build their SOCs through the standardized approach and use SOC automation tools. Additionally, enterprises also must use the same approach for IR.