There’s a term to describe what happens to something that gets sucked into a black hole: “spaghettification.” The gravitational pull of a black hole is so forceful, that it is believed to stretch and compress objects into long thin shapes resembling spaghetti.

SOC analysts spend their days trying to avoid being sucked into the black hole of overwhelming security events and alerts. They’re fighting to not be spaghettified.

Day in, day out, SecOps analysts face a staggering deluge of alerts. A recent Vectra AI study found that on average, SOC teams receive 4,448 alerts per day, and spend nearly three hours a day manually triaging them. Startlingly, that same study found that security analysts are unable to deal with 67% of the daily alerts they receive, with 83% reporting that alert alerts are usually false positives and not worth their time.

This overabundance of low-fidelity alerts and false positives clouds the judgment of security teams, and leads to alert fatigue. It’s also dangerous, in that it can distract from more impactful and important security operations, such as proactive threat hunting, strategy optimization, and addressing major vulnerabilities. According to IDC, 30% of alerts are ignored or not investigated due to alert fatigue. 

Meanwhile, according to IDC, 83 percent of cybersecurity employees say they’re struggling to cope with the volume of alerts, while 30% of alerts are ignored or not investigated due to alert fatigue. 

But all hope is not lost. Torq Hyperautomation provides the rocket fuel to help SOC analysts achieve escape velocity and evade the security events black hole. Through a hyperautomated SOC, a security operations center powered by hyperautomation through which the vast majority – 90% to 95% – of tickets, alerts, events, and incidents are handled and closed by hyperautomation, SOC analysts can eliminate alert fatigue and escape the black hole. 

A hyperautomated SOC helps eliminate alert fatigue through a five-tiered approach.

1. Collect the Noise: Millions of Events; One Hyperautomation Platform

First, Torq’s Hyperautomation platform effortlessly ingests event data with limitless horizontal scalability through a variety of mechanisms, such as message queues (AWS SQS, GCP Pubsub, Azure EventGrid,Kafka), direct webhooks, TCP transmission, email, and API polling, just to name a few. This is where we start collecting events. It’s where we embrace the chaos to bring order.

2. Start Filtering: Reduce the Noise 10x

Here, triggered workflow automations apply a 10x reduction filter. This slashes the volume of events from a million to hundreds of thousands. Torq’s technology sifts through the events to identify the data that matters most, zapping out false positives and low-fidelity alerts. Our horizontally scalable events pipeline performs numerous checks, ranging from string and numeric comparisons to more advanced regular expressions. Only the most relevant pieces pass through this stage. No more irrelevant and superfluous logs, events, or alerts get through.

3. Gain Context: Enrich Events With AI

This is where things get really exciting. We use stateful event filtering to reduce noise by 100x. Through intelligent event handling with large language learning models (LLMs), we enrich the

context for each security event. 

Your events volume is down to mere thousands now – as opposed to the millions you battled with before – and these are the events you should genuinely care about. 

From there, Torq Hyperautomation adds another layer of AI-driven stateful filtering, further enriched with context like threat intelligence, business context, or even historical events. Every event is vetted from multiple angles using LLMs and third-party security tools. Torq hyperautomates 95% of Tier-1 analysis with generative AI, which ultimately empowers you to make faster, better informed decisions.

4. Intelligent Security Case Orchestration: Automatically Triage, Classify, and Remediate 100s of Tier-1 and Tier-2 Cases

At this point, the funnel narrows to just 100s of security cases requiring further action, but they still don’t necessarily require human involvement. Torq Hyperautomation does the heavy lifting by intelligently delegating issues to R&D, DevOps, or related business owners.

If an event makes it this far, it requires serious attention. We’ve already performed significant

noise reduction and filtered out irrelevant events and alerts. It’s time to prioritize what’s critical. 

Through Torq’s sophisticated orchestration capabilities, some of these cases may still be handled entirely without analyst involvement. 

Third-party integrations like SecOps, DevOps, or application owners have handled vulnerabilities and other findings, and non-compliant assets have been flagged and are now considered exceptions. That, coupled with case management through external communication and ticketing, means you can automatically close about 90% of Tier-1 tickets.

5. Security Analyst Expertise: High-Priority Cases Require Human Intervention

A hyperautomated SOC does not eliminate the need for human intervention. It does, however, ensure that humans are the last, and most critical, line of defense for the most severe and high-priority cases. At this part in the process, you’re left with only critical security cases that have undergone rigorous scrutiny and automated handling. Now humans must intervene. By now, the remaining cases are enriched with valuable data, minimizing the time and effort needed to take appropriate action. Analysts can tap into a library of pre-configured sub-processes, making their operations significantly more efficient.

By the time an event has passed through Torq’s Hyperautomation platform, it has undergone an intense, multi-tiered evaluation and action process, each phase of which is designed to optimize accuracy and efficiency, and, of course, improve your security posture to defend against threats.

Following this five-tier approach can help SOC analysts prevent being sucked into the security event black hole (and avoid spaghettification). 

To read more about achieving escape velocity, read our guide “Escape the SecOps Black Hole.” And if you’re ready to hyperautomate your SOC with Torq, request a demo.

The benefits of hyperautomation are well documented. But it can be challenging to determine where to get started. 

Maybe you’ve been burned by outdated and antiquated solutions, like legacy SOAR, that were so complex, costly, and time consuming that a path forward seemed impossible. 

At Torq, the journey to true hyperautomation is a three-phased approach that will transform your security posture and result in more than 90% of SOC processes automated.

1. Phase 1: Task automation
2. Phase 2: Process automation
3. Phase 3: AI-driven hyperautomated SOC

Let’s examine each of the three phases of the hyperautomation journey.

Phase 1: Task Automation

The journey starts by determining which specific tasks require significant manual effort from SOC analysts. The goal is to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks – it’s essentially laying the bricks for your cybersecurity foundation. We use APIs and event feeds to pull data and automate tasks that would otherwise consume your team’s valuable time.

During this phase, you can automate a broad spectrum of task-based workflows, such as IOC enrichment, ticket triage, audit processes, and tasks related to handling vulnerabilities. 

This phase can run anywhere from two weeks to three months based on your organization’s maturity and whether you’ve pre-determined what to automate. The timing is also dependent on the priority your organization places on automation creation and implementation.

It gives you a solid start on your hyperautomation journey. Once completed, you’ll have automated roughly 15% to 20% of SOC processes.

Phase 2: Process Automation

Now that you’ve laid the foundation, the second phase focuses on automating process-based workflows. Here is where we automate entire security workflows and processes, not just tasks. You’ll automate rules-based decision making and allow for a few exceptions where human judgment is required. Internal and external event triggers help in seamless flow to create a more robust, responsive, and intelligent automated system.

Process automation requires extensive communication with your technology stack and tailoring use cases from start to finish. During this phase, multiple tasks converge to serve a specific use case, where Torq bridges all of the different elements, reducing user dependency. The goal is to involve users solely in critical decision-making aspects. 

The result is quicker identification of threats and risks, which allows for immediate action and a reduction of the window of exposure.

Based on organizational maturity and the priority your organization puts on automation creation and how much time to spend, this phase ranges from a few weeks to six months.

Once phase two is completed, you’ll have automated 30% to 65% of SOC processes.

Phase 3: AI-Driven Hyperautomated SOC

The third and final phase of your hyperautomation journey is harnessing the power of AI to hyperautomate your SOC. It’s this phase where you integrate AI and machine learning to deal with complex decision-making processes. Torq processes unstructured events to deliver contextual insights through cognitive automation. To do this, you’ll leverage your processes and technology solutions alongside large language models (LLMs).

The goal of this phase is to streamline day-to-day tasks through a combination of workflow automation, your security stack, and AI – all driven by your unique business logic. It combines the power of both process and AI to enhance efficiency and address your business needs.

This phase varies in duration based on the time it took for you to complete the first two phases. But once completed, you’ll achieve true automation and will have successfully automated more than 90% of your SOC processes. 

Achieve True Hyperautomation

Once you’ve completed all three phases of the journey, you’ll have evolved from basic task automation to an advanced, AI-driven, hyperautomated SOC. You’ll have automated more than 90 percent of your SOC processes, and your security team will be able to focus on only the most complex and nuanced issues. And your SOC analysis will be relieved to have automations that can support them 24/7.

You’ll have achieved true hyperautomation.

Ready to start the journey to true hyperautomation? Request a demo.

Legacy SOAR offers limited events processing. That’s just the way it was built. SOAR is a standard monolithic architecture in which the entire application is deployed as a single entity, which typically runs on a single server or cluster of services. This dramatically restricts SOAR’s processing capacity, and it’s time-consuming and costly to try and extend SOAR beyond these restrictive configurations – it typically would require an entire rebuild and redeploy to upscale.

The only ways to deal with that is by either underprovisioning or overprovisioning your legacy SOAR. But that also creates problems. Underprovisioning creates poor performance, slow response times, and reduced availability. This affects the user experience and your solution’s ability to identify and remediate threats effectively. Overprovisioning allocates more resources than are actually needed to ensure there is always enough capacity to meet demand, but that method boosts costs, reduces efficiency, and increases risk with an extended infrastructure footprint.

Where legacy SOAR falls short, however, security hyperautomation shines. 

Here are the five major benefits of using hyperautomation to process your security events to overcome the limits of legacy SOAR.

1. Hyperautomation provides limitless horizontal scalability that allows individual components and services to be independently scaled based on specific demands.
2. Hyperautomation allows you to sift through the noise, prioritize events, close false positives, and more – all at scale and with precision accuracy. Plus, it’s entirely automated. 
3. Hyperautomatn ensures specific event types are directed to relevant owners and automatically enriched with decision-supporting data.
4. Hyperautomation empowers you to automate the orchestration and handling of diverse technical solutions that best suit your requirements, including CNAPP, CSPM, CWPP, EDR, XDR, EASM, IAM, SAST, and DAST.
5. Hyperautomation enables you to have SLAs for different events to ensure the flood of events from one type or source does not prevent the system from processing other events. 

Through dynamic defenses, security hyperautomation allows you to unblock the events processing bottleneck. Read more about how hyperautomation outperforms SOAR in our “SOAR is Dead” manifesto.