The Best Incident Response Tools & How to Automate Them with Torq

If you ask ten security architects to draw their incident response stack on a whiteboard, you will get ten different diagrams that all share one common feature: chaos.

The modern SOC is a museum of standalone best-of-breed tools. Endpoint tools excel at process behavior, SIEMs aggregate vast log volumes, cloud security platforms surface exposure and misconfigurations, and identity systems track user activity, each operating in its own domain and language. The challenge isn’t the tools themselves, but the operational sprawl that emerges when these systems run independently, forcing analysts to manually stitch together partial views of the same incident.

Effective incident response isn’t just about having the right tools; it’s about making them talk to each other. The traditional approach of buying more dashboards to solve the problem of too many dashboards is over.

This blog breaks down the essential incident response tools you actually need and, more importantly, how to use Torq to turn that disconnected jumble of software into a coordinated, autonomous defense system.

What Are Incident Response Tools?

Incident response tools are the specialized software and platforms security teams use to detect, investigate, contain, and recover from cyber incidents. They sit across the incident response lifecycle — supporting detection, analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery.

At their core, these SOC tools help you:

• Detect when something is wrong (suspicious activity, malware, policy violations).
• Investigate quickly (who, what, where, when, and how)
• Respond and recover (contain the threat, remediate, and restore normal operations)

Without them, you’re flying blind. With them, you have visibility — but often so much data and so many consoles that you struggle to turn information into action.

Incident Response Lifecycle Placement

Different tools own different parts of the NIST or SANS frameworks. Typical incident response tools map to them like this:

• Preparation: Threat intelligence platforms, vulnerability scanners, configuration management, incident response runbooks, and playbooks
• Detection & analysis: SIEM, EDR/XDR, cloud monitoring tools, email security, UEBA
• Containment, eradication & recovery: Firewalls and gateways, IAM tools, EDR isolation, sandboxing, patch and configuration management, ticketing/ITSM systems
• Post-incident activity: Case management, reporting and dashboards, evidence archiving, and analytics on incident response procedures (MTTR, first-pass resolution, automation coverage)

Gaps in Traditional Tooling

The industry secret: most incident response tools were designed to be operated manually, one at a time, by humans.

• Manual handoffs: An alert in the EDR doesn’t automatically trigger a firewall block. A human has to read the alert, log into the firewall, and type the rule. This latency is where attackers live.
• Alert overload: Tools are incentivized to be noisy. A SIEM that generates zero alerts looks broken, so it generates thousands. This creates alert fatigue, where analysts miss the signal because of the noise.
• Siloed context: Your Identity provider knows who the user is. Your EDR knows what the process is. But neither tool talks to the other to ask, “Should this user be running that process?”

That’s why modern SOCs are moving beyond tools alone toward security Hyperautomation — using automation and orchestration to stitch all of this together.

5 Types of Incident Response Tools Used by Security Teams

To build a functional stack, you need coverage across four distinct categories. Here is the breakdown of the tools typically found in a mature SOC.

1. Detection and Alerting Tools

These platforms collect telemetry and generate alerts when something suspicious occurs.

• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): The central aggregation and correlation layer for logs and events.
  • Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Datadog
• EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response): Agents on endpoints and workloads that monitor process execution, file changes, and behavioral indicators.
  • CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
• NDR (Network Detection and Response): Observes network traffic to detect anomalies and threats missed at the endpoint.
  • Corelight, Darktrace
• Cloud Monitoring Platforms: Cloud security posture and runtime monitoring for public cloud environments.
  • Wiz, Orca Security, Lacework

2. Investigation and Enrichment Tools

These tools help validate alerts and gather additional context. Is this IP bad? Is this hash known malware?

• Threat Intelligence: Provide external intelligence on IPs, domains, file hashes, and attacker TTPs.
  • Recorded Future, VirusTotal, GreyNoise
• Log Analysis: Tools (often your SIEM or data lake) that allow deep queries over raw logs and telemetry.
• Case Management: Systems of record for investigation and incident response procedures.
  • Jira, ServiceNow

3. Containment and Response Tools

These tools enable rapid containment and remediation.

• Firewalls/SASE: Block malicious IPs, domains, and traffic patterns as part of containment.
  • Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Check Point 
• Access Controls (IAM): Revoke sessions, enforce MFA, reset credentials, and adjust group memberships.
  • Okta, Azure AD (Entra ID), Duo
• Endpoint Isolation: Network-isolate a compromised host, kill malicious processes, and remove persistence.
  • EDRs like Crowdstrike Falcon and Microsoft Defender

4. Communication and Reporting Tools

Incident response is a team sport. You need to talk to IT, Legal, and HR.

• Collaboration Platforms:  Real-time “war room” coordination across SecOps, IT, Legal, and leadership.
  • Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom 
• Dashboards: Visualization tools that show the CISO the current threat status.
• Documentation: Store runbooks, incident response steps, and post-incident reports.
  • Wikis or knowledge bases like Confluence

5. Hyperautomation 

These platforms orchestrate the entire incident response lifecycle end to end. Instead of analysts stitching tools together manually, Hyperautomation connects detection, enrichment, containment, and communication into one cohesive flow.

• Hyperautomation Platforms: Automates triage, enrichment, and decision-making the moment an alert fires.
  • Torq HyperSOC™, Torq Hyperautomation™ 

How Automation Transforms Incident Response Workflows

Traditional incident response is linear and human-dependent. An alert fires, a human looks at it, a human investigates, and a human remediates. This model fails at scale.

Security Hyperautomation transforms this process from a relay race into a unified, autonomous machine.

From Reactive to Autonomous

The shift is from static playbooks to dynamic, automated workflows.

• Static: “If malware is detected, analyst logs into Okta and suspends user.”
• Dynamic: “If malware is detected, Torq immediately suspends the user via API, creates a Jira ticket, messages the manager on Slack, and isolates the endpoint — all in less than a minute.”

Torq workflows can also adapt based on context. For example:

• Check the user’s role (is this a privileged admin or an executive?)
• Check asset criticality (is this a production database or a test VM?)
• Adjust the incident response steps based on risk (e.g., require approval for high-impact actions)

Role of Security Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is the concept of automating everything that can be automated. Torq’s platform serves as the connective tissue. It uses API-first integrations to ingest alerts from any detection tool and orchestrate actions in any response tool. It’s no-code, meaning security architects can build these complex flows visually without waiting for software engineering resources.

Key Benefits for Security Teams

• Faster response times: We are talking about reducing MTTR from days or hours to seconds. Automation moves at machine speed.
• Reduced manual work: By automating the Tier-1 triage and containment tasks (the boring stuff), you free up your analysts to do actual threat hunting and critical thinking.
• Improved consistency and scalability: A workflow never gets tired, never forgets a step, and never calls in sick. Whether you have 10 alerts or 10,000, the process execution is identical.

Orchestrating Incident Response Tools with Torq: Real-World Use Cases

Let’s look at how this works in practice. Here are three common scenarios where Torq turns disconnected tools into a unified response capability.

Automated Phishing Response

Phishing is a high-volume, low-fidelity problem that drowns SOC teams.

With Torq:

• User reports a suspicious email (via phishing button or ticket).
• Torq ingests the event from email security or the mailbox.
• Torq automatically:
  • Extracts URLs, attachments, and headers.
  • Checks them against Recorded Future, VirusTotal, and other threat intel tools.
  • If malicious, deletes messages across all affected inboxes (via M365 or Google Workspace API).
  • Triggers IAM actions like forcing a password reset or revoking sessions.
  • Posts a full summary and evidence to a dedicated Slack or Teams channel.

What used to take many minutes per email now completes in seconds, and analysts only step in for edge cases.

Coordinated Ransomware Containment

Ransomware moves laterally in minutes. Human response is too slow.

With Torq:

• Torq receives the detection alert via webhook or SIEM. It Immediately:
• Commands the EDR to isolate the host from the network.
• Adds temporary firewall rules to block traffic from the affected IP or subnet.
• Revokes the user’s active sessions via IAM.
• Opens a high-severity incident in ServiceNow or Jira
• Spins up a “war room” channel in Slack or Teams and notifies the on-call IR team.

By the time an analyst joins the call, initial containment is done and they can focus on deeper investigation and recovery instead of scrambling through manual steps.

Enrichment and Triage at Scale

Alert fatigue comes from a lack of context. SIEM alerts like impossible travel or suspicious login are common — but without context, they’re hard to triage.

With Torq:

Torq receives a “suspicious login” alert. It automatically:

• Checks the user’s recent login history in the IdP.
• Pulls device posture from EDR.
• Looks up IP reputation in threat intelligence.
• Optionally messages the user via Slack, Teams, or email: “Was this you?”

If the user confirms, Torq records the outcome and closes the case. If they deny or don’t respond, Torq escalates the incident, applies containment actions, and routes it to the right analyst with full context.

Choosing the Right Approach: Tools Alone Aren’t Enough

There’s a common trap in cybersecurity: assuming that buying one more “next-gen” tool will fix structural problems in incident response.

It won’t.

What to Look for in a Modern IR Ecosystem

When evaluating incident response tools and platforms, prioritize:

• Open, well-documented APIs for ingesting alerts and triggering actions
• Interoperability with your existing stack (SIEM, EDR, IAM, cloud, email security, ITSM)
• Automation readiness, not just dashboards
• Flexible deployment that works across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

Don’t Just Buy More Tools, Orchestrate Them

Instead of adding another dashboard to the pile, invest in the layer that sits above them. A Hyperautomation platform like Torq acts as a force multiplier for every other investment you have made. It makes your EDR faster. It makes your threat intel more actionable. It makes your analysts smarter.

Why Torq Is Built for Modern IR Challenges

Torq was built because legacy SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) tools failed. They were too complex, too rigid, and too hard to maintain. In comparison, Torq has:

• Agentless automation: Deploy in minutes, not months.
• AI workflows: Use Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, to reason through alerts and make decisions, not just follow scripts.
• No-code customization: Drag-and-drop workflow building that allows you to adapt to new threats instantly.
• Enterprise scale: Built to handle the millions of events that modern cloud environments generate.

Plug-and-Play with Any IR Stack

Torq is agentless and tool-agnostic:

• It connects via APIs to your existing incident response tools, including SIEM, EDR/XDR, IAM, firewalls, cloud platforms, ticketing systems, and threat intelligence.
• It doesn’t require agents on endpoints or rip-and-replace projects.
• If you swap tools (e.g., move from Splunk to Sentinel), you update integrations in Torq and keep your incident response workflows intact.

That makes your incident response architecture future-proof: your automation logic lives above any single vendor.

Turn Your Incident Response Tools into an Autonomous Defense System

The bad guys are using automation. They are using scripts to scan your network, AI to write phishing emails, and bots to brute-force your accounts. You cannot fight them with manual processes and spreadsheets.

Incident response is no longer about who has the best tools; it’s about who has the fastest, most integrated workflows. Empower your security team by orchestrating your stack with Torq. 

Transform your incident response tools from a collection of noisy, disconnected boxes into a fast, intelligent, and autonomous defense system with Torq. Get the Don’t Die, Get Torq manifesto to learn more.

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