How Cybersecurity Automation Speeds Up Detection and Response
By: Brittany Holmes, Corporate Communications Manager
Faced with constantly evolving cyber threats, IT teams today must embrace digital transformation. Post pandemic reality has accelerated some of these evolutions, like more cloud users, more cloud providers, and an obscene number of devices passing Internet of Things (IoT) data to the cloud. All are interdependent and interconnected, delivering the scale, speed, and connectivity expected in our daily digital personal and work lives. More importantly, expanding every organization’s attack surface for cybercriminals.
While these advancements offer convenience and efficiency, they also expose organizations to a wider array of cyber risks. This has caused IT teams to look for AI-powered threat detection, investigation and response solutions to mitigate threats across their systems, networks and cloud data.
By understanding the role of automation in protecting against cybercriminals, organizations can strengthen their defense and safeguard their organization. In this blog, we dive into the power of cybersecurity automation and how it ultimately speeds up detection and response.
Cybersecurity Automation Solutions for Organizations
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
UEBA is a machine learning cybersecurity process and analytical tool usually included with security operation platforms. It is the process of gathering insight into users’ daily activities. Activity is flagged if any abnormal behavior is detected or if there are deviations from an employee’s normal activity patterns. For example, if a user usually downloads four megabytes of assets weekly, then suddenly downloads 15 gigabytes of data in one day, your team would immediately be alerted because this is abnormal behavior.
The foundation of UEBA can be quite simple. A cybercriminal could easily steal the credentials of one of your employees and gain access, but it is much more difficult for them to convey that employee’s daily behavior in order to go unseen. Without UEBA an organization would not be able to tell if there was an attack since the cybercriminals has the employee’s credentials. Having a dedicated Managed Detection and Response team to alert you can give an organization visibility beyond its boundaries.
Preventative measures are not sufficient. It is better to have the mindset that if a cybercriminal penetrates your system, how will you know or be alerted? Detection is equally as important if there is a foreign intruder.
Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)
SOAR is a form of pure automation that immediately stops a threat even before a security analyst reviews an alert, greatly reducing an organization’s risk. These tools are used for the following operation tasks:
- To document and implement processes
- To support security incident management
- To apply machine-based assistance to human security analysts and operators
- To better operationalize the use of threat intelligence
SOAR takes how IT teams respond to alerts to the next level. When teams are tasked with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of alerts daily, there is no room for human error when evaluating which one should be prioritized as high-risk. SOAR automates organizations’ managed detection and response teams’ response and alert processes and systematically orchestrates them. SOAR functions can initiate and disable accounts in machine time to contain the threat and reduce the amount of damage done. This can occur before an analyst even has eyes on it.
Organizations Embracing Cybersecurity Automation
Organizations need to build a cybersecurity infrastructure embracing the power of cybersecurity automation, deep learning, and machine learning to handle the scale of analysis and data. AI has emerged as a required technology for cybersecurity teams, on top of being one of the most used buzzwords in recent years. People can no longer scale to protect the complex attack surfaces of organizations by themselves. So, when evaluating security operations platforms, organizations need to know how AI can help identify, prioritize risk, and help instantly spot intrusions before they start.
Is your Security Defenses Ready?
Cybercriminals don’t work a 9-5 schedule; they work around the clock all year round. Most attacks occur during off hours, either on the weekends or in the late night/early morning, to maximize the probability of a successful attack. One of the main benefits of ensuring AI is incorporated into your cybersecurity products and services is the 24×7 network monitoring, which can respond immediately when any threat is detected.
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