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How SOAR Can Revolutionize Fraud Detection and Investigation

Detecting and investigating internal and external fraud in your organization can prove to be very difficult. Fraud detection generally occurs after the fraudulent action has already taken place, and in the case of financial institutions, after a customer has called and complained their account is missing assets. The scenario leaves analysts suddenly rushing to complete an investigation to enable a stakeholder to explain the situation to an unhappy customer. The analyst rushing to collect all relevant information quickly finds themselves reaching out to several different people in the organization just to gather enough evidence to understand how the company was defrauded. From a security information and event management (SIEM) system to customer databases to proprietary financial databases to customer support platforms to threat intelligence platforms (TIPs), to case management tools; the route to finding answers can be quite long and complex.

Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) can help solve this problem and can also enable a proactive approach to detecting and stopping fraud before it occurs. This is accomplished when the SOAR solution is set up and properly configured to take coordinate actions across most, if not all, of the organization. The SOAR platform can take on information gathering tasks, investigative steps, notifications, and even security-specific actions, such as enacting firewall or endpoint changes. The result of using a properly tuned SOAR platform is elimination of the manual tasks and a single common interface with everything needed to handle each type of situation encountered. Taking the number of tools an analyst needs for investigation down to one reduces the total investigation to mere minutes.

Security orchestration solves the problem of requiring multiple tools to collect logs from multiple sources and enables the ingestion of all alarm data into a single tool to manage the data. In the case of fraud, orchestration makes querying data sources for more supporting information a much simpler process. If an analyst has a single indicator of compromise suggesting fraud may be present, they can execute queries across all the organization’s relevant data sources for more evidence. This data is pulled into the SOAR tool and presented to the analyst in a single display, such as a record, dashboard or report. The display format used is often a function of what needs to happen next.

Security automation allows for real time machine response to known indicators of compromise. Whether using data from a TIP, or using in-house data, SOAR can continuously monitor for known or suspected indicators of compromise and carry out actions the second they are detected. Many organizations rely on alerts or manual querying of SIEM data. Alerts and logs often arrive at a fast and furious pace, causing them to create a backlog. Human analysts performing manual tasks can easily make mistakes or even miss these notifications. This routinely results in indicators of compromise being caught well after fraudulent activity has occurred, if ever. SOAR solves this by continuously monitoring data and alerting in near real time.

Case management brings orchestration and automation together in one singular location to manage the entire incident response cycle. Analysts can review alert data from sources throughout the entire organization, enrich the data via TIPs, take incident response action to contain the incident (freeze a customer’s account/stop a transfer), and remove the fraudulent data from the account.

SOAR can take what was a historically reactive (and expensive) process and transform it into a proactive cost-effective solution. Through orchestration and automation, analysts can prevent fraud from happening in minutes where, prior to SOAR, it could take them months to gather enough data to explain how a fraudulent event occurred.


*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Swimlane (en-US) authored by Jay Spann. Read the original post at: https://www.swimlane.com/blog/how-soar-can-revolutionize-fraud-detection-and-investigation/