SOC Automation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Organizations today face relentless cyber attacks, with high-profile breaches hitting the headlines almost daily. Reflecting on a long journey in the security field, it's clear this isn't just a human problem—it's a math problem. There are simply too many threats and security tasks for any SOC to manually handle in a reasonable timeframe. Yet, there is a solution. Many refer to it as SOC 3.0—an AI-augmented environment that finally lets analysts do more with less and shifts security operations from a reactive posture to a proactive force. The transformative power of SOC 3.0 will be detailed later in this article, showcasing how artificial intelligence can dramatically reduce workload and risk, delivering world-class security operations that every CISO dreams of. However, to appreciate this leap forward, it's important to understand how the SOC evolved over time and why the steps leading up to 3.0 set the stage for a new era of security operations. A brief history of the SOC For deca...

The job of a SOC analyst has never been easy. Faced with an overwhelming flood of daily alerts, analysts (and sometimes IT teams who are doubling as SecOps) must try and triage thousands of security alerts—often false positives—just to identify a handful of real threats. This relentless, 24/7 work leads to alert fatigue, desensitization, and increased risk of missing critical security incidents. Studies show that 70% of SOC analysts experience severe stress, and 65% consider leaving their jobs within a year . This makes retention a major challenge for security teams, especially in light of the existing shortage of skilled security analysts . On the operational side, analysts spend more time on repetitive, manual tasks like investigating alerts, and resolving and documenting incidents than they do on proactive security measures. Security teams struggle with configuring and maintaining SOAR playbooks as the cyber landscape rapidly changes. To top this all off, tool overload and siloed ...

AI agents have rapidly evolved from experimental technology to essential business tools. The OWASP framework explicitly recognizes that Non-Human Identities play a key role in agentic AI security. Their analysis highlights how these autonomous software entities can make decisions, chain complex actions together, and operate continuously without human intervention. They're no longer just tools, but an integral and significant part of your organization's workforce. Consider this reality: Today's AI agents can analyze customer data, generate reports, manage system resources, and even deploy code, all without a human clicking a single button. This shift represents both tremendous opportunity and unprecedented risk. AI Agents are only as secure as their NHIs Here's what security leaders are not necessarily considering: AI agents don't operate in isolation . To function, they need access to data, systems, and resources. This highly privileged, often overlooked acces...

Triaging and investigating alerts is central to security operations. As SOC teams strive to keep up with ever-increasing alert volumes and complexity, modernizing SOC automation strategies with AI has emerged as a critical solution. This blog explores how an AI SOC Analyst transforms alert management, addressing key SOC challenges while enabling faster investigations and responses. Security operations teams are under constant pressure to manage the relentless flow of security alerts from an expanding array of tools. Every alert carries the risk of serious consequences if ignored, yet the majority are false positives. This flood of alerts bogs down teams in a cycle of tedious, repetitive tasks, consuming valuable time and resources. The result? Overstretched teams are struggling to balance reactive alert "whack-a-mole" chasing with proactive threat hunting and other strategic security initiatives.  Core challenges High alert volumes: Security operations teams receive hundreds t...

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) was introduced with the promise of revolutionizing Security Operations Centers (SOCs) through automation, reducing manual workloads and enhancing efficiency. However, despite three generations of technology and 10 years of advancements, SOAR hasn't fully delivered on its potential, leaving SOCs still grappling with many of the same challenges. Enter Agentic AI—a new approach that could finally fulfill the SOC's long-awaited vision, providing a more dynamic and adaptive solution to automate SOC operations effectively. Three Generations of SOAR – Still Falling Short SOAR emerged in the mid-2010s with companies like PhantomCyber, Demisto, and Swimlane, promising to automate SOC tasks, improve productivity, and shorten response times. Despite these ambitions, SOAR found its greatest success in automating generalized tasks like threat intel propagation, rather than core threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) workloads....

Created by John Tuckner and the team at automation and AI-powered workflow platform  Tines , the  SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM)  is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents.  A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it's been shared and recommended by members of the security community since its launch in January 2023, notably by Airbnb engineer Allyn Stott in his BSides and Black Hat talk,  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Modern Detection & Response Program .   The SOC ACM has been compared to the MITRE ATT&CK and RE&CT frameworks, with one user saying, "it could be a standard for classification of SOAR automations, a bit like the RE&CT framework, but with more automation focus." It's been used by organizations in Fintech, Cloud Security, and beyond, as a basis for asses...

It's no secret that the job of SOC teams continues to become increasingly difficult. Increased volume and sophistication of attacks are plaguing under-resourced teams with false positives and analyst burnout. However, like many other industries, cybersecurity is now beginning to lean on and benefit from advancements in automation to not only maintain the status quo, but to attain better security outcomes. Automation across multiple phases of the SOC workflow The need for automation is clear, and it is apparent that it is becoming table stakes for the industry. Of all cyber resilient organizations, IBM estimates that  62%  have deployed automation, AI and machine learning tools and processes.  Up until now, much of these advancements in automation have been focused on response, with SOAR and incident response tools playing an instrumental role in tackling the most urgent phase of the SOC workflow.  Centering the focus only on response, however, means we're treat...