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What is SOAR with its best 9 Use Cases

May 19, 2023 44

SOAR: The Complete Guide to Its Benefits and Uses

Introduction: What is SOAR and Why It is Used in Cyber Security?

Let us start with what is SOAR? SOAR tools are the software that can help your business automate processes and improve efficiency. In this blog section, we’ll introduce you to SOAR word meaning and show you some of the ways it can be used in your business. We’ll also provide some tips on how to get started with SOAR security and how to make the most of its features.

The SOAR framework is a way to guide the development of cyber security strategies. It hfaceelps organizations think about the key threats and risks that they face, and then create plans for how to address them.

SOAR in cyber security provides a structured process for decision-making, ensuring that companies are thinking about both their current and future needs. This enables them to more effectively allocate resources and plan for the future.

Like SIEM tools, SOAR security is also designed to assist security teams in decreasing their alert fatigue and streamlining their incident response time and processes. The SOAR platforms combine standardization, comprehensive data gathering, workflow and reporting, and case management to provide enterprises the ability to implement sophisticated defense-in-depth capabilities.

The benefits of SOAR in cyber security

  • SOAR solutions assemble alert data from each and every integrated platform and put them together in a single location for extra investigation.
  • SOAR’s approach to case management permits users to assess, research, and perform extra other investigations from within a single case.
  • SOAR establishes integration to deliver faster results, accommodate complex incident response workflows, and facilitate an adaptive defense.
  • SOAR solutions also include various playbooks in response to some specific threats. Each step in the playbook can be completely automated or made up for one-click execution from the platform. Including the interaction with all third-party products for comprehensive integration.

siem xpert soar Put simply, SOAR integrates all of the systems, applications, and tools, within an enterprise’s security toolset and then allows the SecOps team to automate incident response workflows.

SOAR’s main benefit to a Security Operation Centre is that it automates and orchestrates manual tasks, time-consuming, that enables security teams to better use their specialized skills and speed up response times. The result is reduced dwell time,  faster MTTD and MTTR, and a higher level of preparedness. Till now, we have read about what is SOAR and its benefits, let us now discuss SOAR features and its use cases. 

Security Orchestrator features:

  • Process automation:
    Regulate customized incident response workflow automation among your security appliances.
  • Incident response playbooks:
    Accelerate investigations and upskill your analysts with pre-built courses of action developed by incident responders.
  • Open plugin framework:
    Regulate and deploy more than 175 third-party tools and various data sources for single-pane management of your valuable security stack.
  • Case management:
    Collaborate between incident response teams and analysts by storing correlated artifacts and alerts in an intuitive case management system. Create role-based groups and give permissions to enhance workflow management.
  • Intuitive user interface:
    Allow security team members to connect with various security tools with a simplified abstraction layer to get and push information. Affect changes at the host, application levels, and network, even physically access security systems with the click of a button.

SOAR challenges:

SOAR is neither a standalone system nor a silver bullet technology.  SOAR security is a part of the defense security methods,  as they need some other security systems to detect threats successfully.

It can not be a replacement of other security tools but can be taken as a complementary technology. SOAR analysis also can’t be talked about as a replacement for human analysts, rather they augment their workflows and skills for effective incident detection and response.

Some potential drawbacks of SOAR can be:

  • fail to remediate a in-depth security strategy;
  • conflated expectations;
  • deployment and management complexity; 
  • lack of or limited metrics.

SOAR vs. SIEM

While SIEM and SOAR platforms both aggregate data from different sources, the following terms are not interchangeable. SIEM just collects data, identifies deviations, ranks threats, and generates alerts. SOAR also handles these tasks, but they have some extra capabilities. First, SOAR analysis integrates with a range of external and internal applications. Second, SIEM platforms only alert security analysts for any potential threat, while SOAR platforms use AI and machine learning, and automation to give greater context and automated responses to those events.

Many companies now use SOAR services. In the future, they are expected to add SOAR to their SIEM products. Other products, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), email security gateways, and extended detection and response (XDR), network detection and response (NDR) are also adopting SOAR capabilities.

SOAR Vendors

The following is the list of representative vendors and their products:

  • Fortinet FortiSOAR
  • Honeycomb SOCAutomation
  • IBM Security Resilient
  • Micro Focus ArcSight SOAR
  • Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR
  • Rapid7 InsightConnect
  • ServiceNow Security Operations
  • Siemplify SOAR Platform
  • Splunk Phantom
  • ThreatConnect SOAR Platform
  • ThreatQuotient ThreatQ
  • Tines
  • Anomali ThreatStream
  • Cyware Virtual Cyber Fusion Center
  • EclecticIQ Platform
  • FireEye Helix

How are SOAR use cases different from other automation and response products?

SOAR uses are unique in that they allow for the orchestration and automation of response processes. This includes the ability to automatically detect and respond to incidents, as well as escalate them to the appropriate party. SOAR products are also able to monitor for changes in data or systems and take action accordingly.

How do I get started with a SOAR use case?

There are many ways to get started with SOAR uses. One way is to think about what processes or tasks in your organization could be automated or streamlined using SOAR. Once you have identified some potential areas for improvement, you can then begin to develop a more specific use case. 

Another way to get started is to look at existing SOAR use cases and see if any of them are applicable to your organization. If you find a use case that is a good fit, you can adapt it to your specific needs. 

Finally, you can also reach out to a SOAR solution provider for help in developing a use case. They will be able to provide guidance and expertise based on their experience with other organizations.

How SOAR Can Help in the following Amazing Use Cases

As cyber-threats become more prevalent, the need for a strong cybersecurity defense becomes more urgent. Fortunately, there are plenty of security solutions to help protect your business, and many of them don’t require you to change the way that you do business or provide any IT support. Read on to learn about just a few of the ways that SOAR can improve your cybersecurity posture. SOAR use cases vary depending on various factors, such as the security processes and workflows in place, industries they cater to,  the regulatory compliance that needs to be ensured, and the problems their security team is trying to solve for. Following are some of the SOAR use cases:

Automated Phishing Investigation and Remediation

There are many different use cases for SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response). One common use case is automated phishing investigation and remediation. This involves using SOAR to automatically investigate phishing emails, determine if they are malicious, and then take appropriate remediation steps. A SOAR platform just automates this task that parses out indicators and checks if they are a phishing attempt and truly malicious. The playbook also enriches the indicators and performs further analysis to determine any response actions if needed. Automated responses can add indicators to a SIEM watchlist, block malicious indicators, check false positives,  delete emails from other mailboxes, block sender’s email addresses, and keep a threat quarantined for later investigation. 

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle Automation

The threat intelligence lifecycle is becoming troublesome when the security team members have to ingest indicators manually, format the information, and go through various sources to enrich them. In the current scenario of the security field, various indicators of compromise (IOCs) are aggregated on a daily basis, and enriching them manually is not up to the mark to get any productive results. With automation, threat intelligence enrichment, ingestion, and analysis can be done quickly and consistently. SOAR platforms now automatically ingest and normalize IOCs from several sources and then enrich them. Data is enriched from several tools like Hybrid Analysis Whois, VirusTotal, and NVD among others.

Threat Hunting with SOAR

Threat hunting is an important SOAR use case. It includes processes and methods such as identifying malicious domains, malware, and other IOCs. Automating these processes and methods using SOAR systems frees up the security team members to tackle other critical find and prioritize threats before they impact an enterprise’s network.

Incident Response with SOAR

Incident response with SOAR is the common SOAR use case. It can involve using SOAR to automatically respond to threat hunting, containment of incidents, ingestion, analysis, detection, investigation, and quarantining of infected systems. First, a SOAR system ingests security data from external as well as internal sources. In the next step, it analyses the data, enriches it, and identifies threats using detection playbooks. SOAR automatically identifies all the alerts, lets security teams automate incident response playbooks, and eliminates false positives. As a result, it can more quickly be triggered by blocking an IP address on a firewall,  isolating compromised endpoints from a network, and terminating user accounts.

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management can involve using SOAR to automatically scan for vulnerabilities and then take appropriate remediation steps. After identifying a threat from a vulnerability management tool, the SOAR system correlates the events with data collected from other security tools. This enables security team members to immediately respond to vulnerabilities. 

Malware Analysis

Malware analysis can involve using SOAR to automatically analyze malware samples and then take appropriate action. This automation allows faster malware analysis giving some of the exciting SOAR use cases. SOAR comes with capabilities to take data from SIEMs, email inboxes, malware analysis tools, threat intelligence feeds, and extract files. These files are then uploaded to a malware analysis tool. Then further analysis and research is performed. If the files are found malicious, the SOAR system updates suitable watchlists and takes action such as quarantining impacted endpoints, opening tickets, and accommodating data from threat feeds.

Ransomware Alert Response

Ransomware alert response can involve using SOAR to automatically respond to ransomware alerts, such as by isolating the affected system. The SOAR system can then collect the host and user data and coordinate it with previous investigations. Then connect the dots among threat aspects. On completing the initial stage, a SOAR system can initiate actions to find the aftermath and extent of the ransomware attack. It is followed by response and remediation.

Human-to-Machine Orchestration

Human to Machine Orchestration is among significant SOAR use cases because it allows security members to completely automate alert ingestion and circulate threat alerts. It disseminates from both external and internal human-readable sources into machine-understandable security updates.

Machine-to-Human Orchestration

SOAR platforms allow security teams to enrich, aggregate, and share security alerts with customers, vendors, and employees for real-time decision-making, situational awareness, and actioning.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the SOAR analysis can be used for a variety of use cases within an organization. By automating and orchestrating security processes, SOAR can help to improve efficiency and effectiveness while also reducing costs. With its ability to integrate with existing systems and tools, SOAR is a powerful solution that can help organizations to improve their overall security posture. 

We hope you have now completely understood about what is SOAR, features, and use cases.

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