Cybersecurity Playbooks – An Essential Tool for the SOC Team

Cybersecurity playbooks can provide rapid automated response in several cybersecurity areas, including incident identification, incident detection, rapid response, and team communications. This ability to respond in real time elevates playbooks to an important place in your cyberdefense. The response can be reduced from hours (or days) to minutes. Automated cybersecurity playbooks are an automated guide for delivering a response to a cybersecurity event. They deploy and act across your entire network respond automatically to meet and stop cybersecurity threats. Standardized automated responses work. In context, the manual response to a cyber event requires that the SOC team manually brings up different security tools, gets various logs, and then likely runs an array of anti-virus/signature-based tools. In the meantime, an automated playbook runs the tools and counter-response automatically and then presents all of the data back to the SOC team. This saves time, reduces risk, and reduces costs – a win on all fronts. A good example of a simple automated playbook might be reviewing indicators of compromise (IOCs) to determine if a threat exists. Playbooks can be set up to automatically investigate an IP address, run a file against known threat intelligence sources, and more. This saves time and resources and provides security operations team personnel important actionable data sooner. Another example would center around the review and validation of anti-virus/anti-malware software alerts. The team can benefit from the early automated review and triage of these alerts to determine if they should be escalated and then actionable. Follow-on actions such as additional scanning can also be automated by the playbook. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the landscape for automated cybersecurity playbooks. Baseline workflow automation capabilities have moved to where your system can analyze data. This enables the early identification of vulnerable areas so that IT teams can make better and faster decisions. Unlike the use of simple and unchanging rules-based environments, machine learning technology brings continuous improvement. Security playbooks using AI, with the right underlying orchestration, can evolve and learn to address the current environment. They get “smarter” and adapt to deliver the best and most impactful response. This stops attacks as they unfold in real time. Finally, automated cybersecurity playbooks can also help many organizations with compliance. Most compliance processes are regularly executed procedures. This can be incorporated into your automated cybersecurity playbooks, which gives you complete logging and rapid retrieval of data as you require.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from CipherCloud CASB+ Platform | Enterprise Cloud Security authored by CipherCloud. Read the original post at: https://www.ciphercloud.com/blog/cybersecurity-playbooks-an-essential-tool-for-the-soc-team