Automated Incident Response: What It Is, Tools and Use Cases

In the first half of 2021, global cyber attacks jumped 29%, compared to the same period in 2020. (Checkpoint).

Cyber attacks and data breaches pop up on security radars with alarming frequency. If your organisation does not have a powerful and timely process to respond to such security incidents, it remains vulnerable to all kinds of threats, including ransomware, phishing attempts, zero-day exploits, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, and SQL injections, to name just a few.

Even if you do have an incident response process, you may be struggling with issues like:
 

• Inability to effectively integrate people, processes and security infrastructure;
• Staying ahead of clever attackers armed with sophisticated tools;
• Fragmented, sub-optimal workflows that increase threat exposure;
• False positives creating alarm fatigue among security teams.
  

The most effective way to eliminate such challenges, improve threat response and boost cyber defence is through automated incident response.

What is Automated Incident Response?

When you see the term Incident Response , what that refers to is an organization’s ability to identify and investigate attacks and breaches, and reduce their impact. We call this process, Assess and Mitigate. This has often been done in the past with human elements monitoring traffic, investigating suspicious activity, drafting procedures when new threats arrive, etc.

However, as the name suggests, automated incident response eliminates the human element from the process. It automates repetitive tasks, expedites threat detection and response, and provides ‘round-the-clock defence, allowing your SOC team the time and space to further develop and strengthen your security posture in other ways.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF AUTOMATION IN INCIDENT RESPONSE?

SPEED AND TIME

Speed and time are the primary benefits of automating incident response processes. When faced with an incident, you want to respond as quickly as possible to minimize the damage and prevent it from becoming worse. Automation helps to speed up the detection and response process, and goes a long way towards helping security teams to stay on top of incidents. With automation, you have the ability to respond any time of the day, and in record time. 

EVOLVING THREAT LANDSCAPE

With new attack vectors and increasingly sophisticated threats emerging every day, incident response teams have more to do than they ever have before. In addition to new threats, they also need to deal with existing threats that have evolved and are becoming more complex and prevalent. Security teams must stay up-to-date with the latest threat intelligence and adapt their response processes accordingly. Failure to do so can lead to missed threats, ineffective response measures, and potential breaches. 

Implementing automation into incident response processes can help security teams keep pace with the evolving threat landscape by providing real-time threat intelligence and enabling rapid response to new and emerging threats. In fact, increasing cyber threats have led to employee burnout in 38% of organisations, according to recent statistics. This brings us to the next point.

OVERWHELMED SECURITY TEAMS

Besides hackers, one of the biggest threats to the security of an organization is employee burnout. When incident response teams are constantly dealing with threats and alerts, they can experience feelings of burnout and have less time to focus on their primary responsibilities. 

According to VMWare's Global Incident Response Threats report, 69% of respondents experience burnout symptoms and have contemplated leaving their work for the same reason. And the skills shortage only further exacerbates the situation. 

Implementing automation can improve the productivity of security teams and reduce the risk of burnout. By automating repetitive tasks, such as log analysis and incident prioritisation, security teams can focus their efforts on more strategic and high-level tasks.

BETTER RESULTS

Automation not only reduces response times and workload, but it also improves the overall efficiency of incident response teams. By automating processes like incident triage and investigation, teams can quickly gather necessary information and identify the root cause of incidents. This means less time spent on manual tasks and more time spent on devising effective response strategies. Automated incident response gives you the visibility and context you require to respond faster and more effectively. Additionally, automated incident response workflows ensure consistency and standardisation in the incident response process, reducing the risk of human error and enabling faster resolution times. 

REDUCED COSTS

Overall, automating incident response processes can help security teams to improve their efficiency, accuracy, and speed of response, ultimately leading to better protection against cyber threats and lower costs. According to the most recent IBM Cost of a Data Breach Study, organisations who have fully adopted security AI and automation save 65.2% on total breach costs. That's a huge difference! 

How to Automate Incident Response and Detection with the Right Tools

It’s critical to expedite the incident response process in order to minimize the potential damage of a cyber incident. Manual analyses of events are rarely feasible, and neither are manual reviews of every alert raised by security tools. Automated incident response addresses these limitations.
The right technology platform is essential to automate incident detection and response. Such tools provide integrated workflows, automated scripts and pre-built tasks, so the organization’s security infrastructure can automatically take actions for threat detection, response, containment, and closure.

When selecting an automated incident response tool, it’s important to consider which part of the process should be automated. It’s also useful to remember that there are different tools available for:
 

• Data gathering and analysis;
• Response procedure automation;
• Forensic investigations;
• Complex incident response and management.

 
The below considerations are also important when selecting an automated incident response platform:
 

• If the tool will run on analyst workstations or be deployed as a server;
• If agents will be deployed on specific machines;
• If it requires integration with security tools.

 
A Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) tool provides one of the best ways to automate the incident response process. By leveraging SOAR (defined here by Gartner), security teams can effectively triage alerts, respond quickly to critical cybersecurity events, and deploy an efficient incident response program.

Here are some tips you can follow when it comes to automating incident response.

CREATE A FRAMEWORK AROUND MANUAL TASKS

Automating external tools may not go as planned, as it would depend on the availability and functionality of the tools. Build an initial workflow around manual tasks that security analysts can easily perform during incident response. If these processes are effective during a real incident, you can consider automating them either completely or partially.

CONSTANTLY ASSESS AND IMPROVE

Adjust and refine the processes after analyzing what worked for previous security incidents. Repeat this process until you can identify the steps that can be easily automated with the integration of tools. Continue to monitor the relevant processes even after automation to ensure incidents are properly managed.

BUILD TEMPLATES FOR ITERATIVE AND SCALABLE DEVELOPMENT

Once you’ve dealt with multiple incident responses with automation, you will be able to build playbook templates for different categories of security incidents. This lets security analysts reuse common procedures and customize the templates for the various types of attack scenarios your company faces.

Benefits of Automated Incident Response

Automate Manual Security Processes

Instead of wasting time on manual incident response tasks, security teams are better off investigating and responding to genuine and serious security events. Automated incident response enables them to do exactly that. From alert notification and correlation, to initial investigation, triage, ticket generation and report generation – automating these tasks enables analysts to focus on areas where their skills and inputs are most required.

More Efficient Security Operations

Automation brings advanced proactivity, consistency, and speed to incident detection, response, and mitigation. Instead of manually copying and pasting evidence of a threat, analysts can focus on stopping attacks before they cause irreparable harm. Security operations also become more efficient as they improve mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

Generate Critical Insights in Real Time

An automated incident response platform can report on relevant metrics in a centralised dashboard, allowing security personnel to prioritize incident response activities and optimally manage security alerts at scale. Notifications can be automatically enriched from varied security intelligence sources to provide greater insight into the threat environment, and further improve incident response.

No More Alert Fatigue

For many organisations, security tools generate an overwhelming number of alerts. To determine whether these alerts refer to genuine threats or false positives, analysts have to manually review each alert. This is fine as long as alerts are low, but for most businesses and organizations, SOC teams can spend days tracking down one day’s worth of alerts. This leads to what we call alert fatigue. Alert fatigue often results in genuine issues being ignored, which makes the organization far more vulnerable. Automated incident response takes care of this problem by completely eliminating the human element from alert analysis and response. This benefit also enables security teams to analyse and remediate more threats, and thus strengthen enterprise security.

Improved Decision Making

An automated incident response plan includes clear definitions of everyone’s role during an incident. Not only does this speed up the process, it also ensures that the right decision-makers are appropriately engaged when there is a threat.

Reduced Damages

Automated IR enables your organization to take better and faster action during a real cyber attack, thereby limiting its effects on your business.

Internal and External Coordination

In the event of a security crisis, an efficient automated IR strategy helps coordinate interactions not only between an organization's internal departments and units, but also with external parties like suppliers and partners. Bringing together all the concerned stakeholders during a security incident is vital to manage brand reputation and damage.

Better MTTD and MTTR

 The average time taken to detect a security threat or incident is your Mean Time to Detect, or MTTD. Whereas, the average time taken to contain the threat and mitigate it is the Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). Automated incident response helps businesses to detect and respond to threats faster by separating real threats from false positives.

Lower Operational Costs for SOCs

Since automated IR expedites repetitive tasks and deals with most alerts, SOCs can spend their time focusing on more productive tasks. This reduces the operational costs of SOCs.

Automated Incident Response: 5 Key Use Cases

Automated incident response has a number of applications and use cases. Here are just five of them:

Automatic Firewall Updates
Security staff can automatically update the enterprise firewall to block malicious IPs as soon as they’re detected.

Limit Malware Damage

The automation of tasks, such as gathering forensics data, disconnecting infected systems from the network, and running vulnerability scans, can speed up malware investigation and removal.

Breach Investigation

Investigating a breach requires repetitive, manual actions like log reviews and data analysis. Automated solutions with log management capabilities eliminate this need, delivering all required investigation data in a compiled, easy-to-digest format.

Block Communications with Malicious Domains

Sometimes, organisations discover traffic to or from a known malicious domain. This traffic must be blocked as they investigate the potential intrusion. It’s faster and easier to take such actions – and then move from detection to response – with automated incident response.



Prevent Ransomware Infections

An automated incident response tool generates actionable threat intelligence, performs regular vulnerability scans, and raises alerts about at-risk systems – all of which enable the organization to build a proactive, protective shield against ransomware attacks.

Automated Incident Response PLAYBOOKS

A crucial tool in an organisation's incident response strategy is an automated incident response playbook. An incident response playbook is a set of pre-defined and pre-approved procedures that organisations follow in response to cybersecurity incidents. The playbook outlines a series of steps to be taken by security teams in response to specific types of incidents, such as malware infections, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks.

The purpose of an Automated Incident Response Playbook is to enable a rapid and coordinated response to incidents. It gives security teams a structured and repeatable process they can follow in the event of an incident. This helps to ensure that all necessary steps are taken in a timely manner, all relevant parties are notified, that the incident is contained, and that any damage is minimised. The playbook can also help to establish the roles and responsibilities of different parties, including IT staff and external service providers.

There are many resources available online to help organisations develop their own Incident Response Playbook. Some organizations publish their playbooks online as open-source documents, which others can use as a starting point. For instance, CISA has an Incident Response Playbook, which provides guidance on how to develop a playbook for government agencies. 

Managed security service providers (MSSPs) can be a valuable resource for organisations looking to develop an incident response playbook. Many MSSPs have pre-built playbooks that they use to manage incidents for their clients. They can also help organisations tailor playbooks to meet their specific needs.

Traditional approaches to incident response are very slow and often fail to address legitimate issues, leaving your business exposed for days or even weeks. This is where Evolve steps in.

Evolve's automated IR capabilities help you automate your incident response processes with pre-configured workflows and various use-cases that can be customised to fit your organization's specific needs. Check out some of the cases Evolve has successfully handled below:

• Security Breach and Data Exfiltration;
• Ransomware Attack Containment, Emergency Response;
• Command and Control (C2) Attack Mitigation;
• Insider Threat Incident Response.

As soon as suspicious activity is identified, our Evolve Security Automation platform triggers Automated Incident Response procedures to ensure the incident is contained as quickly as possible, minimising any negative impacts to your organization. With Evolve you’ll have: 

• Automated Incident Detection;
• Automated Incident Response Evidence Collection;
• Automated Incident Response Evidence Analysis.

Conclusion

A robust incident response process is critical to every organization’s cybersecurity infrastructure. Because manual processes cannot always provide the proactivity, fast response, or real-time mitigation required to deal with modern threats and threat actors, however, new tools have been developed to help counteract these increasingly complicated threats. Automated incident response provides the solution to these limitations. By investing in automated tools, organizations can strengthen their cybersecurity posture and set themselves up for success.