SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) 🟢 Protection

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), Orchestration, Automation and Security Response refers to a category of platforms and tools designed to improve the management of cybersecurity operations.

• Orchestration integration and coordination of heterogeneous security tools, systems and processes (eg: SIEM, EDRthreat intelligence) to centralise their operations.
• Automation (automation): automated performance of repetitive or complex tasks (e.g. analysing alerts, blocking malicious IP addresses) via playbooks (predefined scenarios).
• Response (answer) Accelerated management of security incidents, from detection to resolution, using standardised procedures.

🎯 Objectives of a SOAR

Reduce incident response time, reduce human error and cope with alert overload thanks to a unified, automated approach.

• Reduced incident response time.
• Improving the efficiency of security teams.
• Reduced safety-related costs.
• Better visibility of threats and incidents.
• Improved regulatory compliance.

Examples of SOAR uses

• Management of security alerts (Alert triage and Incident Qualification) a SOAR is excellent for automating the sorting and initial qualification of security alerts from various sources (SIEM, IDS/IPS, etc.). It can enhance alerts with additional contextual information, determine the seriousness of the alert and decide whether it is a genuine incident requiring further investigation.
• Response to security incidents (Incident Response Automation) : a SOAR enables all or part of the incident response process to be automated, by executing predefined playbooks for different types of incident (phishing, malware, DDoSetc.). This can include actions such as isolating hosts, blocking IP addresses, removing compromised user accounts, sending notifications, etc.
• Threat Hunting : a SOAR can assist threat hunting teams by automating data collection and analysis, enriching data with information from threat intelligenceand allowing hunting requests to be executed across different systems.
• Management of vulnerabilities (Vulnerability Management) : a SOAR can be integrated with vulnerability management tools to automate the process of remediation of detected vulnerabilities. This can include creating remediation tickets, monitoring remediation progress and validating the correction of vulnerabilities.
• Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) Increase : a SOAR can consume and act on information from threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) to improve threat detection and response, by automating the dissemination of indicators of compromise (IOC) in the various security tools.
• Automated reporting and security metrics : A SOAR can automate the generation of security reports and dashboards to provide an overview of the security posture, security team performance and incident trends.

Related tools

Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR, Splunk Phantom, IBM Resilient.

Complementarity

often coupled with a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) for optimised detection and response.

Differences between SOAR and SIEM

It is important to distinguish SOAR from SIEM, although the two technologies are often complementary.

• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) : SIEM is a security information and event management platform. It collects and analyses security logs and events from various sources within the IT infrastructure to detect security threats. SIEM focuses primarily on detection and warning.
• SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) : SOAR goes beyond simple detection and alerting. It takes alerts from the SIEM (and other tools) and orchestrates and automates the response to these alerts. SOAR focuses onautomate response and improve the operational efficiency of security.

In a nutshell:

• SIEM: detects and alerts.
• SOAR: responds and automates.