Security operations center (SOC) automation is the use of security automation tools and advanced technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and optimize SOC workflows. SOC automation comes with the ability to parse large data volumes and allows you to respond to security incidents with more efficient automated workflows, as well as letting SecOps teams skip repetitive tasks.
Here’s just one example: Using AI in SOC automation can streamline the response to phishing attempts by automatically scanning emails for suspicious patterns and isolating these threats. The result? Lightning-fast security operations and improved response accuracy.
In this article, we’ll dig into why you should consider automating SOC, which SOC workflows to automate, and some best practices to adopt. First, let’s take a closer look at what SOC automation brings to the table.
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Why SOC automation is necessary
In 2023, Security Magazine reported that SOC analysts can’t read and respond to about 67% of the alerts they see every day. It’s not surprising: The threat landscape has evolved rapidly, and SOC engineers have to move faster and faster to keep up. But without the right SOC tools and technologies, it’s simply not possible to stay ahead of threat actors. Luckily, by automating SOC processes, enterprises can:
Reduce alert fatigue: Without automation, the data overload that comes from a mountain of daily alerts can lead to alert fatigue. SOC automation, on the other hand, filters out false positives and prioritizes relevant alerts.
Eliminate siloed reporting: Security operations and findings are often siloed, with different teams depending on varying tools and data streams to prevent, detect, and respond to threats. This leads to inaccurate reports (and those reports lack context and threat correlation). Automated SOC tools bring all the data from different streams together to create a holistic view of threats and incidents.
Simplify security for complex environments: It’s not unusual for a company’s environment to span multiple clouds, use on-premises systems, or combine the two in a hybrid architecture. But manually managing security across these environments is time-consuming and error-prone. Security automation tools like automated cloud detection and response (CDR) solutions efficiently monitor and protect multi-cloud and hybrid environments, freeing up teams to do other work.
Minimize human error: In the U.S. alone, triaging alerts manually costs organizations about $3.3 billion each year. And, unfortunately, it’s not a good investment. SOC teams face a lot of pressure to triage and respond to large volumes of alerts at breakneck speed, making errors inevitable. The solution? Automating repetitive tasks, such as log analysis or alert correlation.
Detect sophisticated threats: Automated security workflows leverage AI and ML to detect behavioral indicators of compromise (IoCs) and other subtle patterns. For example, ML models can flag abnormal login behaviors like a user suddenly logging in from an unusual location or accessing sensitive files—triggering an automated investigation.
How SOC automation works
Security automation tools streamline the various processes involved at each SOC tier. Here’s a table that displays how SOC automation happens at each tier:
| Tier | Operations |
|---|---|
| Triage | Using SIEM platforms, SOC automation handles frontline security tasks like:
|
| Investigation | When a suspicious activity is flagged at tier 1, SOC automation immediately pulls relevant context from global threat databases, internal data, and industry reports to compare the detected incident against known threat signatures. This threat intelligence automation gives SOC analysts a more holistic view of the threat landscape and makes it easier to escalate incidents that require immediate attention without time-consuming manual research. |
| Containment | As a tier 3 engineer, your automated SIEM tool has surfaced a malicious IP accessing your networks and lateral movement to an admin pod, and threat intelligence automation has provided the correlated data needed to investigate the threats. It’s clear they’re related. But meanwhile, you must ensure the threat doesn’t spread. The automated containment capabilities of a CDR comes in at this point, helping to box in threats in real time, well before full investigation and remediation efforts can begin and radically minimizing the potential damage. |
| Threat Hunting | Automated SIEMs, CDRs, and adversary emulation platforms (such as MITRE Caldera) continuously hunt threats using incorporated OSINT data and known threat scenarios. This way, SOC automation helps tier 3 engineers uncover and respond to advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other complex attacks that might not be detected during manual threat hunting operations—possibly because they’re still in their early stages or they employ obfuscation mechanisms too stealthy for traditional tools to uncover. |
Common use cases for SOC automation
Accelerating MTTD: Manually sorting through thousands of alerts (many false) delays the detection of actual threats and leads to security teams’ burnout. With automation, an alert on a suspicious login attempt from an unusual location can be easily correlated with VPN usage logs or the user’s travel history. If evidence of suspicious activity is established, security teams can be notified.
Threat data enrichment: Automated threat intelligence platforms consolidate data from multiple feeds, autonomously filter for organization or industry-specific relevance, and provide actionable recommendations for identifying and mitigating threats effectively. This data can also be fed into security tools to boost their efficacy.
Threat hunting: Threat intelligence automation tools can search for specific IoCs, including IP addresses linked to known malicious servers and unusual login patterns across specific timeframes.
Incident response: SIEMs and CDR tools automate threat response, using predefined playbooks to automatically trigger appropriate threat resolution or containment actions before human analysts arrive “on the scene”—for example, temporarily locking down an admin account to prevent malicious access to sensitive assets.
Risk assessment and mitigation: SOC automation helps defenders find and assess the severity of gaps and weak spots in cloud configurations, APIs, networks, identity access management, and more—taking the heavy lifting out of the task of checking and resolving misconfigurations across numerous IT components.
Forensic analysis: Investigating past and ongoing incidents, identifying root causes, and refining future defense plans is easy with automated forensic analysis tools. Automation makes it effortless to gather and analyze historical data, user activity, network traffic, and file changes, which help re-create the sequence of events.
Incident resolution: SOC automation provides teams with detailed guidance for resolving various threats. Say an alert came in: high CPU usage in your server instance. Automated investigations show it’s a cryptomining attack; you’ve contained it, but now it’s time to boot the malware out. There’s no need for guesswork with automated, AI-powered remediation guidance tailored to your stack.
What SOC workflows to automate
To efficiently implement SOC automation, your automation efforts must cover three workflows: alerts, response, and threat intelligence. What does automating these workflows mean? Let’s take a look:
Alert enrichment and triage: Automating security workflows start with the prioritization and categorization of alerts, helping analysts focus on the most pressing issues. Security automation tools enrich each alert with contextual data, such as related user activity, IP reputation scores, or known threat indicators.
Threat containment: Equipped with insights from alerts, you’ll want some IR processes to occur automatically (like putting a stop to lateral movement). For example, isolating a compromised device, blocking suspicious IPs, or disabling user accounts without waiting for manual intervention. AI can be used to recommend containment actions.
Threat intelligence integration: Threat intelligence automation integrates data from threat intelligence feeds, streamlining responses to known and emerging threats. This enables real-time insight into new attack techniques or indicators of compromise (IoCs) relevant to the organization’s environment.
The role of security teams in SOC automation
SOC automation isn’t meant to replace SOC analysts. Instead, it enhances security analyst productivity by reducing the burden of manual tasks. The partnership between automation and human analysts is often referred to as human-in-the-loop automation. Here’s how it works in practice:
Enhanced decision-making: Analysts are still essential in assessing the broader context of an alert, especially in complex scenarios where subtle threats may be at play.
Refining automated responses: SOC analysts need to keep training and refining automated processes, such as response playbooks and threat detection algorithms.
Investigating edge cases and complex threats: Analysts are irreplaceable when it comes to investigating nuanced or ambiguous cases where automation might miss the mark.
Tools and technologies for SOC automation
Next, let’s explore some of the core tools driving automation in SOC environments, along with key factors to consider when evaluating or selecting vendors for these solutions:
SIEMs: Choose a SIEM that not only offers robust data analytics but also integrates easily with other automation tools (like SOARs), is highly scalable, and can perform high data loads. Notable SIEMs include Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel.
SOARs: Pick a SOAR solution with customizable playbooks and flexibility to adapt to specific processes within your SOC. Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk are good choices.
Vulnerability management solutions: Look for a solution that’s compatible with existing SIEMs and SOARs and aligns with your environment (e.g., multi-cloud or hybrid).
CSPMs: When assessing CSPMs, keep an eye out for context-aware and risk prioritization, automatic remediation, and multi-cloud support in a unified platform, such as WIZ CSPM.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools: Prioritize EDR solutions that leverage ML for advanced threat detection, provide real-time endpoint data, and allow for automated containment actions. For cloud-native applications, the Wiz Runtime Sensor offers everything you need.
Threat intelligence platforms: Choose a platform that autonomously enriches threat data, adding valuable context and IoCs, to make the data immediately usable. You’ll also want your chosen platform to provide specific guidance on identifying and mitigating threats effectively.
Ticketing tools: When choosing a ticketing tool, consider options that integrate perfectly with your existing SOC stack, particularly with SIEM and SOAR platforms. (With integration in place, alerts and incidents will automatically generate tickets.)
SOC automation best practices checklist
Identify what to automate and what not to automate.
Start with basic repetitive tasks, then gradually scale to more advanced workflows.
Identify and align automation with security and business objectives.
Create and regularly update playbooks. (Remember: Playbooks power your automated IR processes!)
Choose security tools that automate investigation and leverage AI to automate containment actions.
Don’t try to automate workflows that aren’t ideal for automation; orchestrate them instead. For example, you can orchestrate security policy creation by autonomously gathering data on evolving compliance laws and best practices, baking this data into policy-as-code templates and scheduling periodic policy updates.
Challenges to implementing SOC automation
Implementing SOC automation usually presents these four challenges:
Lack of expertise: With cyber threats changing fast, it’s hard to develop accurate playbooks for the wildly varied vulnerabilities, threats, attacks, and IoCs out there.
Cost: While there are significant long-term ROIs for automating security operations, the immediate and recurring costs (like tools, time, and training) can be a big roadblock.
Integration and complexity: It’s common for organizations to use multiple security tools from many vendors to detect and respond to cyber threats. The downside? The complexity of integrating tools necessary for comprehensive security—to avoid siloed processes—can trip up teams.
False positives: A major goal of automation is to reduce alert fatigue (i.e., SOC efficiency improvement). However, if there are misconfigurations, automation can increase the volume of false positives and negatives.
How Wiz automates SOC workflows
SOC automation drives precise threat detection and remediation, and abstracts the steep costs of cyberattacks. Wiz gets this — and that’s why we’ve developed top tier SOC tools designed to help you find threats wherever they may be hiding, and give them the boot with minimal effort. Here’s how Wiz automates your SOC workflows:
High fidelity detection: As Wiz cloud detection and response (CDR) uncovers threats across your IDE and cloud environments, the Wiz Security Graph maps various incidents, correlates risks and visualizes attack paths across your stack, to eliminate false positives and automatically group threats for efficient remediation.
Automated investigation: Leveraging insights from the Security Graph, Wiz presents analysts with detected events alongside associated incidents. This way, Wiz removes time-consuming repetitive tasks like the manual querying that would ordinarily have been required to piece the details of attacks together and gather additional context.
Automatic correlation between runtime and cloud activity: A hacker sneaked into your K8s stack, and you’re not sure where they are now or what they’re doing? With the Wiz Runtime Sensor, there’s no cause for alarm — our automatic correlation engine shows you exactly how runtime activities span across cloud environments and vice versa.
AI-driven containment recommendations: Wiz lets you define autonomous containment actions that are triggered when threats are detected. And Wiz’s AI-driven remediation guidelines take you through threat resolution step-by-step, without missing a beat.
Support for custom automation rules: Wiz lets teams set hundreds of custom runtime rules tailored for their organization’s workloads, networks, and processes. Each rule is assigned a severity and appropriate containment responses, ensuring the most critical threats are detected and addressed as soon as they emerge.
Threat intelligence feeds: We integrate proprietary threat intelligence (Wiz TI) directly into our platform, enriched by a dedicated research team that uncovers indicators of compromise (IoCs), threat behaviors, and cloud-specific risks. This unique, cloud-focused threat intelligence allows organizations to reduce false positives, detect critical risks, and respond more effectively to emerging cloud threats.
Integration: Wiz’s Integration (WIN) platform enables bi-directional integration with other security tools. With this flexibility, Wiz lets you automate SOC workflows across various tools. The result — streamlined threat detection and response, while abstracting the headache of manually moving siloed signals from tool to tool.
Forensic analysis: Wiz offers an automated cloud forensics solution that enables fast, precise incident response by preserving evidence and ensuring a secure chain of custody across multi-cloud environments. This streamlined forensic analysis allows SOC teams to conduct thorough post-incident reviews and enhance overall security posture across platforms like AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes.
Policy and compliance enforcement: Wiz supports automated policy enforcement through its PaC framework, allowing organizations to define compliance requirements programmatically. This approach ensures that policies governing cloud operations are automatically enforced across environments, helping organizations maintain compliance with regulations such as GDPR and PCI DSS. Wiz Code implements security and compliance policies throughout your entire development lifecycle.
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