If you’re a developer who lives and breathes code all day, you probably don’t mind having to write complex configuration files to set up an automation tool or configure a management policy.

But the fact is that many of the stakeholders who stand to benefit from security automation are not developers. They’re IT engineers, test engineers, help desk staff, or other types of employees who may have some coding skills, but not enough to generate the hundreds of lines of code necessary to set up the typical automation tool.

Fortunately for non-developers, there are ways to leverage security automation without drowning in manually written code. Here’s a look at five examples of how non-developers can take advantage of security automation while writing little, if any, code.

1. Low-Code Configuration for Detection Rules

Detection rules are the policies that tell security automation tools what to identify as a potential breach. They could configure a tool to detect multiple failed login requests from an unknown host, for instance, or repeated attempts to access non-existent URLs (which could reflect efforts by attackers to discover unprotected URLs that contain sensitive content).

Traditionally, writing rules to detect events like these required writing a lot of custom code, which only developers were good at doing. A faster and easier approach today is to use a low-code technique that allows anyone – not just developers – to specify which types of events security tools should monitor for and then generate the necessary configuration code automatically.

When you take this approach, any engineer can say, “I want to detect repeated login failures” or “I want to detect high rates of 404 responses from a single host,” and then generate the requisite code automatically.

2. Automated Incident Response Playbooks

Along similar lines, you don’t need to be a developer to specify which steps automation tools should take when they detect a security incident.

Instead, non-developers can indicate their intent, which may be something like “I want to block a host’s IP range if the host is previously unknown to the network and more than three failed login attempts originate from the host in under a minute.” Then, automation tools will generate the code necessary to configure security tools to enforce that rule instantly whenever the specified condition is triggered.

3. Automatically Trigger Endpoint Scanning

Whenever a possible security incident arises, automatic scanning of impacted endpoints is a basic best practice for determining the extent of any breach and isolating compromised hosts from the network.

However, performing endpoint scanning across a large number of hosts can be difficult. It has traditionally required either a large amount of manual effort (if you perform each scan by hand) or the authoring of code that will tell your scanning tools to run the scans automatically based on the host and access data you give them. Either way, the process was slow and required collaboration between multiple stakeholders.

However, by using an approach where endpoint scans are configured and executed automatically teams can perform this important step much faster. For instance, if helpdesk staff who are supporting end-users notice the possible presence of malware on a user’s device, they can automatically request scans of all endpoints associated with that user (or with the user’s group or business unit) rather than having to ask developers to configure the scans for them.

4. Automatically Generate Security Testing Code During CI/CD

The testing stage of the CI/CD pipeline has traditionally focused on testing for application performance and reliability rather than security.

That’s not because test engineers deem security unimportant. It’s because most of them aren’t security engineers, and they don’t want to spend lots of time writing code to automate pre-deployment security testing on top of performance testing.

This is another context in which automatically generated code can help integrate security into a process in which it has traditionally played little role due to the complexity of generating the necessary security code. When test engineers can indicate the types of security risks they want to test for within application release candidates (like injection vulnerabilities) and then automatically generate the code they need to run those tests, it becomes much easier to make security testing part and parcel of the broader CI/CD testing process.

5. Update Security Automation Rules for a New Environment

Your business may already have security configuration code in place. That’s great – until you decide to make a change like moving to a new cloud or migrating from VMs to containers, at which point your rules need to be rewritten.

You could update the rules by having security analysts and developers work together tediously to figure out what needs to change and how to change it. Or, you could use low-code security automation tools to generate the new code automatically. There may be some tweaks left for your team to perform manually, but the bulk of the heavy lifting required to secure your new setup can be performed automatically.

Extending Security Automation to Non-Developers

Security automation is a powerful methodology. But given that non-coders are often the stakeholders most in need of security automation, platforms that require stanza upon stanza of manual configuration code to do their job make it difficult – to say the least – for most businesses to leverage security automation to the fullest effect.

That’s why the future of security automation lies in solutions that generate the necessary code and configurations automatically, allowing all stakeholders to implement the security checks and responses they need in order to protect their assets without having to learn to code or lean on developers to write code for them.

In an age when attackers create over a million phishing sites each month, and phishing serves as a beachhead for 95 percent of all attacks against enterprise networks, how can businesses respond?

Part of the answer lies in educating users to recognize and report phishing, of course. But user education only goes so far – particularly because the same statistics cited above show that, on average, only 3 percent of users will report phishing emails. Strong anti-phishing education may increase that number, but you’re still fighting an uphill battle if you rely on your users as your primary means of defense against phishing.

Instead, teams should lean as much as possible on automated anti-phishing techniques. By using automation to detect and respond to phishing attempts, businesses can stop the majority of phishing messages before they ever reach end-users.

Keep reading for an overview of five practical strategies for automatically detecting and managing phishing attacks.

Filter Messages Based on Multiple Attributes

Most security and IT teams know that they should automatically filter incoming email for signs of malicious content.

However, the mistake that many teams (and security tools) make in this regard is focusing just on one attribute of messages – typically, the content of the message itself – when performing scans.

Although scanning for signs of phishing like misspelled words or suspicious domain names is one way to detect phishing messages, it’s hardly the only one. A better approach is to evaluate each message based on multiple attributes – its content, the domain from which it originated, whether or not it contains an attachment, which kind of attachment, and so on – to build a more informed assessment of whether it may be phishing.

This multifaceted analysis is especially important for automatically catching phishing attempts, given that attackers have gotten much better at crafting good phishing content. The days are long gone when simply scanning email for strings like “Nigerian prince” guaranteed that you’d catch the phishers.

Detonate Attachments in Sandboxes

If your security tools detect possible malicious content but you need an extra level of confirmation, you can take the automated response a step further by “detonating” attachments — or downloading and opening any links that the phishing content included —  inside a sandboxed environment.

By installing the malicious content in a safe, isolated location and evaluating what happens, you can detect anomalies or attack signatures that will confirm that the content is indeed malicious.

Of course, the original content should remain quarantined and inaccessible to your end-users while your tools perform the sandboxed detonation. You can either safely release the content to users or block it definitively, pending the results of the sandbox analysis.

Block Sender Names and Domains Automatically

If you detect a phishing attempt, you can minimize its impact by using automation tools to block the sender’s name and domain as quickly as possible. Doing so minimizes the number of emails or other messages that the phishers are able to send to your users. It also disrupts their ability to engage with any users whom they successfully trick into responding to them.

And, by blocking not just malicious sender names but entire domains, you make it much harder for the phishers to continue their attack using multiple accounts.

Automatically Scan Affected Endpoints

Another step that you should take immediately and automatically upon detecting a phishing email is to scan any endpoints – such as the affected user’s PC or phone – that are associated with it.

Immediate scanning will maximize your chances of detecting and isolating any malware that the phishers may have been able to deploy.

Reset Affected User Credentials

Along with scanning impacted endpoints, you should also use automation tools to reset the login credentials for users who may have been impacted by a phishing attack. By logging them out of any open sessions and forcing a password change, you also mitigate the ability of attackers to exploit accounts that they compromised through phishing.

Automation as the Future of Anti-Phishing

The phishers are only going to get better at what they do. To keep up, businesses need to become more efficient in their responses. That means adopting automated anti-phishing tools that allow teams not just to detect phishing attacks as quickly and as accurately as possible, but also to minimize the potential impact of a successful phishing breach on the IT estate.

SecOps and security teams spend an excessive amount of time sifting through low-value, poorly-contextualized alarm data rather than actively hunting for valid threats. This is because bad actors are constantly looking to steal whatever they can hold onto with the least exposure. Recent ransomware attacks in critical business sectors only serve as reminders that organizations cannot lie dormant.

This blog post will unpack strategies to help overcome these challenges and explain why integrating threat intelligence with security orchestration and automation is critical for an effective security operations strategy.

What Is Threat Intelligence and Why Is It Needed?

Threat intelligence is the evidence-based collection of information and the observation of the capabilities, techniques, motives, goals, and targets of an existing threat. Simply put, it’s everything that you know about your attacker – actual or potential – based upon their motives and how bad they can damage your business assets.

Threat intelligence is not a checklist. It’s a cycle of well-defined processes and operations that involves collecting and managing potentially valuable pieces of information called observables, cleaning and normalizing these obersvables, comparing them to current data to remove duplicates, and then storing them in a structured, human-readable format. 

However, transforming raw collections of data into valuable and actionable intelligence observables requires a lot of effort. The data must pass through many layers of processing and evaluation before reaching the end product. According to established practice, you should have a six-part cycle of data collection that consists of direction, collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and finally, feedback. Due to the nature of these operations, you need to keep an eye out for new threats and an eye on your adversaries’ capabilities at all times. It’s also just as important to maximize your use of resources. 

You need to be able to identify the most critical threats and act on them before they make their move – and doing so accurately means that you can stay alive longer. Therefore, the first and most important part of operating a threat intelligence network is to figure out how to automate the whole security orchestration.

6 Ways to Automate Your Threat Intelligence

As we’ve mentioned, the most effective way to gather actionable and valuable threat intelligence is through security orchestration and automation. The general operations that you need to automate may include the following:

1. Pulling relevant observables from alerts or emails into the right IoC

Observables are often stored as strings that represent hashes or registry keys. They can even be stored as event types (such as the creation or deletion of certain files). These events usually come from automated systems that monitor pertinent files and system components that are critical to the operation of computers and networks. You will need to be able to pull observables from emails, Slack messages, or alerts into relevant Indicators of Compromise (IoC) containers.

2. Creating tickets/issues on tracker software

Once the IoC containers have been populated with observables, you will need to set up automatic alerts based on specific rules and conditions, such as when events match criteria for generating suspicious files or deleting sensitive log files from the system. Creating tickets and triggering incident response systems will help bring people up to date on any suspicious activity.

3. Delivering results through email and instant messaging

Effective communication means providing relevant parties with actionable information when an IoC needs attention. This can be accomplished through email, instant messaging, or applications.

4. Collecting more information about IP, domain, email, file, and signatures from various sources

When collecting observables, you will need to expand their origin from several vetted and established sources. This could include critical, public, or private organizations like SANS Internet Storm Center or DomainTools. All of the feeds need to be cleaned, parsed, and stored in the same structure for further analysis.

5. Performing contextual log searches for IP, domain, email, file, and signatures

Searching for matching IoC based on specific IP, domain, email, file, or signatures should be quick, accurate, and thorough. Another way to improve this process is to enable the saving of search queries so that they can be attached to automated alerts.

6. Offering IoC block settings

IoCs are significant indicators that a particular resource has likely been compromised. Services and operators need to respond to actionable events in case there are active threats, and they should be able to create blacklists to block those threats quickly.

What Are the Key Challenges in Implementing Threat Intelligence Automation?

Implementing threat intelligence automation faces several challenges, including the complexity of integrating diverse security tools, the need for skilled personnel to manage and interpret automated processes, and ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of the threat data being analyzed. Organizations must navigate these hurdles by fostering a culture of continuous learning, investing in training for their security teams, and choosing scalable, interoperable solutions that can adapt to evolving threats and technologies.

How Does Threat Intelligence Automation Enhance Incident Response?

Threat intelligence automation enhances incident response by accelerating the detection, analysis, and containment of threats. By automating the collection and correlation of threat data, organizations can quickly identify indicators of compromise (IoCs) and initiate predefined response protocols. This rapid response capability minimizes the window of opportunity for attackers, reduces the impact of breaches, and enables a more proactive defense posture. Furthermore, automation ensures that incident response teams are focused on high-value tasks, such as threat hunting and strategic analysis, rather than being bogged down by manual data processing.

What Role Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) Play in Threat Intelligence Automation?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in threat intelligence automation by enabling advanced analytics, pattern recognition, and predictive capabilities. AI algorithms can sift through vast amounts of data at unprecedented speeds, identifying anomalies, trends, and potential threats that might elude human analysts. This not only improves the accuracy and efficiency of threat detection but also allows organizations to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats. AI-driven automation can adapt to new tactics employed by attackers, continuously learning from the latest threat intelligence and adjusting defensive measures accordingly.

Getting Started with Automated Threat Intelligence

Automating your threat intelligence initiatives is not without its challenges, chief among which is an organization’s willingness to step up their security operations and transform the way they do business in a digital online world where they are constantly under threat of attack.

Threat intelligence is a good way for organizations to take the offensive position, plan for the unexpected, and protect their critical assets and their image. By automating their threat intelligence operations, they can turn the tables and provide a consistent response to threats that happen during their operational hours. If you want to delve deeper into threat intelligence, you can explore these community repo resources, or learn more about how Torq can help.