How SOAR can help in Responding to 2020 Threat Landscape

With organizations increasingly relying on digital technologies, attackers have ramped up their efforts to obtain access to their infrastructure and sensitive information. From social engineering to ransomware attacks, the threat landscape is seeing a dramatic spike of attacks which capitalizes on users’ fears and new security weaknesses triggered by remote workplace implementation.

Organizations are embracing the need for adopting next-generation security technologies that can maximize investments by bringing new and existing security tools together, making security teams more efficient.

When we talk about 2020 Threat Landscape, phishing attacks play a role in 92 percent of security breaches, says Verizon Data Breach Digest. This means more and more security teams are spending time trying to identify and remediate these attacks. However, as the volume of attacks continues to grow, it’s difficult to keep up.

Globally, with the healthcare sector battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there are a number of concerns around privacy and cybersecurity threats. According to the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, “As more devices are connected to hospital and clinic networks, patient data and information will be increasingly vulnerable.”

Any healthcare organization may have multiple security controls in place. The fundamental purpose of these controls is to detect and protect from threats. That goal is quickly disguised by the sheer volume of alerts, the complexity of having many tools, and by security teams having to manage and monitor such an infrastructure.

The Role of Security Orchestration, Automation & Response (SOAR)

Consider an instance where an organization gets thousands of malicious emails every day. Is it efficient to manually investigate each reported email? This is where SOAR comes into play. For each reported malicious email, SOAR can orchestrate each step to the investigation mostly without any human intervention. Based on the output of the analysis, analysts can be notified and enter into the process. For the seamless progress and workflows, SOAR playbooks decrease manual and repetitive tasks like investigating email senders, attachments, URLs, and pushing suitable remediation to controls. While these repetitive tasks are being handled automatically, security analysts can focus on more important investigations and incidents.

As mentioned by Gartner in How to Respond to the 2020 Threat Landscape research, “90% of ransomware most often distributed in the form of a phishing email, can be prevented. But what about the other 10%? Integrating solutions that can automate a response to limit damage through isolation, such as using security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) is key to preparing, defending and responding to these attacks.”

To overcome the challenge of skills shortage, SOAR allows security teams to focus less on repetitive tasks and more on threat hunting. By gathering events and alerts from disparate security tools, SOAR aggregates the information into a unified platform which acts as force multiplier and reduces response time. SOAR also helps build context around the aggregated events and provides intelligence through which security teams can make quick response decisions, and also calibrate detection and prevention tools. This enables SOC teams to respond faster and more effectively to today’s increasingly complex threat landscape.

SIRP is a Risk-based Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platform that fuses essential cybersecurity information to enable a unified cyber response. Through a single integrated platform, it drives security visibility, so decisions can be better prioritised and response time is dramatically reduced. With SIRP, the entire cybersecurity function works as a single, cohesive unit. SIRP combines security orchestration, playbook automation and case management capabilities to integrate your team, processes and tools together. SIRP makes security data instantly actionable, provides valuable intelligence and context, and enables adaptive response to complex cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

To see how our SIRP can empower your response capabilities against the 2020 threat landscape and reduce cyber risk, get in touch today to arrange your personalized demonstration.