The Best SOC Tools in 2025: Legacy vs Modern Automation

By Torq

June 20, 2025

9 Minute Read

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are evolving faster than ever. As cybersecurity threats grow more sophisticated and digital infrastructure expands across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, legacy SOC tools like SOAR are falling behind. Static dashboards, siloed point solutions, and human-dependent processes simply can’t keep up.

Traditional SecOps tools are no longer enough. Modern tools must proactively detect suspicious activities using broad data sources (e.g., threat intelligence, vulnerability databases, etc.) and enable seamless collaboration across teams. Automation is the key SOC tool to scale detection and response efficiently.

Modern SOCs require automation-first platforms that enable proactive defense, seamless integrations, and high-scale responsiveness. Platforms like Torq — powered by Hyperautomation — represent the next generation of SOC architecture.

Read on for a breakdown of SOC tools, an exploration of the best tools of 2025, and how automation streamlines security operations.

What is a SOC Tool?

SOC Tools

SOC tools are technologies designed to help security teams detect, investigate, and respond to threats. They support incident resolution by collecting and analyzing data across IT and cloud ecosystems. Each tool plays a vital role in the SOC technology stack.

Today’s cybersecurity environments rely on dozens of integrated systems. While powerful, this complexity can create inefficiencies, increase SOC analyst fatigue, and lead to slower threat response times. This is where SOC automation platforms like Torq shine by orchestrating across all tools, streamlining workflows, and accelerating response.

5 Core Capabilities of Security Operations Center Tools

Modern SOCs demand tools built for the cloud’s dynamic, distributed nature. Here are five must-have capabilities your stack needs.

1. Continuous SOC Monitoring

Tools should provide always-on visibility across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem workloads, dynamically adapting to autoscaling and ephemeral infrastructure. Look for platforms that detect real-time anomalies, monitor traffic flows, flag malicious configurations, and help strengthen your cloud security posture with minimal manual effort.

2. Log Collection and Analysis

Log tools enable deep investigation by aggregating decentralized telemetry across services. They help correlate signals across layers, enhancing intrusion detection, root cause analysis, and threat attribution across sprawling cloud environments.

3. Threat Detection

The best detection tools are plugged into real-time threat intel feeds and vulnerability databases. This allows SOC teams to quickly spot indicators of compromise (IoCs), detect novel tactics, and stay ahead of emerging threats with precision.

4. Incident Response

Incident response platforms have prebuilt playbooks and customizable workflows to stop attacks quickly. They can block malicious IPs, isolate compromised assets, and auto-contain threats without human intervention.

5. Automation

Security automation is essential for modern SOCs to operate efficiently at scale. It streamlines repetitive tasks, accelerates incident response, and allows SOC analysts to focus on complex threats instead of manual workflows.

The Top 10 SOC Tools in 2025

Specific tools have emerged as foundational to operational success as the SOC landscape evolves. Below are ten must-have SOC software tools and technologies for any security team aiming to stay ahead.

1. Log Collection and Management

Log management tools like Splunk and Elasticgather security logs and telemetry from various sources, including endpoints, network devices, and cloud environments. Proper log management is foundational for threat detection, compliance monitoring, and forensic investigations, making it an indispensable part of the SOC infrastructure.

2. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

SIEM platforms provide essential SOC monitoring and event correlation capabilities, helping security teams quickly identify and respond to threats. They are the cornerstone for centralized security operations.

Common examples of SIEM tools include IBM QRadar, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk Enterprise Security, LogRhythm, and ArcSight. This SOC software correlates data across multiple sources, providing comprehensive threat visibility and efficient event management.

3. Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management platforms continuously scan and assess SOC network assets for vulnerabilities, prioritizing them based on severity and business impact. These platforms help SOC analysts proactively address critical issues before attackers can exploit them.

Rapid7 InsightVM, Nessus, Tenable, and Qualys are leading vulnerability management tools that provide actionable vulnerability data, enabling teams to patch vulnerabilities rapidly and effectively. Effective vulnerability management reduces organizational risk, maintains compliance, and prevents attackers from exploiting known weaknesses.

4. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

EDR tools monitor endpoints, such as laptops and servers, enabling detection of malicious activities and automated response to threats in real time. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions expand this coverage to networks, email, the cloud, and servers, delivering comprehensive security visibility.

EDR solutions like CrowdStrike Falcon and SentinelOne provide forensic capabilities and proactive threat-hunting features. XDR tools like Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR unify endpoints, SOC networks, and cloud security to offer a holistic view of the threat landscape.

5. Email Security

Email security tools work by performing detection and response across email, endpoints, and identity systems. They can quarantine malicious messages, remove harmful emails post-delivery, and correlate activity across systems to reveal the full scope of an attack.

Solutions like Proofpoint and Microsoft Defender provide real-time URL and attachment sandboxing, threat intelligence integration, and automated remediation of compromised accounts. These capabilities not only strengthen threat response but also support compliance by enforcing encryption, archiving, and access controls.

6. Threat Hunting

Threat hunting tools proactively search for signs of malicious activity that evade traditional detection methods. Platforms like Carbon Black and Cisco empower SOC analysts with advanced investigative capabilities to discover and neutralize threats before they cause significant damage.

7. Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence tools gather and analyze external threat data, providing actionable insights into potential cyber threats. Platforms such as Recorded Future and Anomali enhance a SOC’s ability to predict, identify, and ensure a proactive response to emerging threats, keeping teams informed of global threat trends and attacker tactics.

8. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

CSPM tools help identify, assess, and remediate misconfigurations and policy violations in cloud infrastructure. These tools continuously monitor cloud environments like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform to ensure compliance with internal security policies and industry standards.

CSPM solutions automatically detect configuration drift, enforce least privilege access, and reduce the risk of data exposure by alerting teams to insecure storage, open ports, or excessive permissions. By offering centralized visibility and continuous compliance assessment, CSPM enables SOC teams to secure cloud workloads at scale while responding faster to evolving risks.

9. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM tools control and monitor user access to IT resources, ensuring only authorized individuals can reach sensitive systems and data. They encompass technologies like single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), privileged access management (PAM), and identity governance.

In a SOC, IAM is essential for investigating incidents, detecting compromised accounts, and preventing unauthorized lateral movement, making it a cornerstone of a strong security posture.

10. Automation

At Torq, we call this Hyperautomation. Hyperautomation represents the next generation of SOC technology, combining advanced automation and artificial intelligence (AI) into a unified approach that fundamentally transforms traditional security operations.

Torq integrates seamlessly with existing SOC tools, orchestrating complex workflows across the entire security stack and significantly reducing repetitive, manual tasks. By leveraging GenAI and agentic AI, Torq Hyperautomation dynamically identifies, analyzes, and responds to threats in real time, delivering faster and more consistent incident responses.

This proactive, autonomous approach enables security teams to scale effectively, enhance operational efficiency, and improve accuracy across their security processes. Hyperautomation accelerates response times, reduces SOC analyst workload, and ensures more precise threat detection and remediation.

How Automation Transforms SOC Tools

Automation transforms traditional SOC operations by connecting disparate tools, streamlining workflows, and enabling rapid, automated responses. Here’s how:

Faster detection and response: Automation drastically reduces the time it takes to identify, investigate, and respond to security incidents. What once took hours or days now happens in seconds, minimizing dwell time and damage.
Increased SOC analyst efficiency: With Tier-1 alerts automatically triaged (and often auto-remediated) and routine tasks offloaded to automated workflows, SOC analysts can handle a higher volume of cases without burnout. Teams get more done with fewer resources, reducing the need to scale headcount just to keep up.
Effortless scalability: As threats grow in number and complexity, automation allows SOC analysts to keep pace without compromising performance. Whether your environment is expanding across clouds or adding new tools, automation scales effortlessly alongside.
Smarter use of human talent: SOC analysts are too valuable to be bogged down by repetitive tasks. Automation frees them to focus on high-impact investigations, strategic decision-making, and threat hunting, where human judgment and creativity matter most.
Reduction in alerts: Automated triage filters out low-priority noise, enriching and escalating only the alerts requiring attention. SOC analysts stay focused on real threats instead of drowning in false positives.

How Torq Hyperautomation Transforms the SOC

Torq HyperSOC™ is the first agentic, AI-powered SOC platform built for autonomous security operations. It transforms your SOC from reactive and overloaded to autonomous and high-performing.

Here’s how Torq makes it happen.

Seamless Integration with Your Entire Security Stack

Torq connects instantly to all your SOC tools — SIEM, EDR, CSPM, IAM, SaaS platforms, ticketing systems, and even homegrown apps — without custom code or complex deployments. Whatever you’re running, Torq plugs in and gets to work.

AI Agents That Work Like SOC Analysts

At the heart of HyperSOC is Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst and omniagent. Socrates orchestrates a team of specialized AI Agents purpose-built for tasks like enrichment, case management, user verification, and remediation. Together, they coordinate end-to-end case lifecycles with precision and speed.

Natural Language-Driven Automation

Security automation doesn’t have to be complex. With Torq, anyone on your team can trigger powerful workflows using plain English. Want to isolate a user, rotate credentials, or escalate a threat? Just ask — Torq handles the rest.

Hyperautomation at Enterprise Scale

Torq’s performance automatically scales to keep up, whether your environment is cloud-native, hybrid, or on-prem. It runs thousands of workflows in parallel, adapts to evolving threats, and ensures no alert slips through the cracks.

Built to Flex with Your Needs

Torq’s open architecture and robust APIs let you fully customize cases to fit your cybersecurity strategy. Build once, reuse anywhere, and adapt fast to new use cases — all without needing a team of developers.

Hyperautomation is the SOC Tool You Need Today

As cybersecurity challenges mount, traditional tools are no longer enough. Modern security operations centers require intelligent, automated, and scalable solutions that enable security teams to move faster, act smarter, and deliver better outcomes.

AI-driven Hyperautomation is that solution.

Torq brings Hyperautomation to life, enabling SOC analysts to move beyond fragmented processes and manual triage. Whether you’re a lean security team or an enterprise SOC analyst, Torq empowers you to detect, respond, and remediate with unprecedented speed and precision.

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The Top 3 Hyperautomation Use Cases for Torq POCs

By Torq

June 16, 2025

5 Minute Read

Many organizations come to Torq when they’ve hit a wall with their legacy SOAR platform. The migration to Torq isn’t just a technology upgrade — it’s an operational overhaul. With Torq, enterprises have replaced hundreds of rigid playbooks in weeks, dramatically reduced time-to-value, and unlocked capabilities that legacy SOAR could never support.

The move to Torq is faster and smoother than you think,thanks to our intuitive workflow design, low-code flexibility, and hands-on migration support. If you’re considering a demo or a proof of concept (POC), these are the top three Hyperautomation use cases we’d start with — the ones that deliver instant value and set your implementation up for long-term success.

Hyperautomation: A SOC Must-Have

Hyperautomation is the current era of security operations — where every repetitive task, manual process, and alert-handling bottleneck gets replaced by scalable, intelligent automation. Unlike traditional SOAR, AI-driven Hyperautomation is agile, dynamic, and driven by real-time context.

In the SOC, this means:

Faster threat response: Alerts are triaged, investigated, and remediated automatically across EDR, IAM, email, and cloud systems.
Massive analyst efficiency gains: Your team spends less time on tedious Tier-1 tasks and more time threat hunting and improving security posture.
Lower operational costs: Hyperautomation eliminates tool sprawl, reduces alert fatigue, and streamlines workflows, making the SOC leaner and more effective.
Scalability: Whether it’s 10 alerts or 10,000, Hyperautomation responds at machine speed.
Immediate ROI: The impact is measurable within days: reduced MTTR, faster MTTD, and happier analysts.

Torq’s Hyperautomation platform makes it easy to deploy, customize, and scale automation across your environment without writing a single line of code.

1. Endpoint Detection and Response

EDR is one of the most common Hyperautomation use cases, and for good reason. Endpoints are often the first line of defense when threats bypass preventative controls. But while EDR platforms like SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft Defender continuously surface alerts, they still rely on analysts for response.

That’s where Torq comes in. By integrating your EDR tools with Torq Hyperautomation, you can:

Instantly isolate compromised hosts and cut off lateral movement
Trigger targeted endpoint scans, triage workflows, and auto-remediation actions
Correlate EDR alerts with identity, network, and threat intel context for smarter decision-making
Auto-generate detailed incident reports with full observability into root cause and system impact

EDR Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and SentinelOne

When SentinelOne detects a threat, it sends event data via webhook to Torq, which triggers a predefined workflow. Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, evaluates the threat, retrieves asset details from CMDB, checks for correlated user activity, and executes the appropriate response. The compromised host is quarantined, impacted credentials are flagged, and a full report is auto-generated for the analyst.

Automating EDR response is one of the most powerful first moves in any Hyperautomation POC. It delivers instant value, dramatically reduces MTTR, and frees analysts from constantly chasing endpoint alerts across multiple consoles.

2. Email Security

Phishing remains the #1 attack vector — and one of the most common triggers for Tier-1 security alerts. These alerts are high-volume, high-noise, and easy to miss. Automating phishing response with Torq during a POC delivers fast, visible results that eliminate manual overhead.

Torq integrates with various email security platforms, including Microsoft 365, Gmail, Proofpoint, VirusTotal, Mimecast, Abnormal Security, Barracuda, and Cisco.

With Torq, you can:

Auto-quarantine suspicious emails
Lock user inboxes and enforce password resets for potentially compromised accounts
Extract, analyze, and enrich email artifacts like headers, links, and attachments
Launch phishing investigation playbooks

This automation dramatically reduces the mean time to remediate (MTTR) phishing attempts, and it’s one of the clearest, most repeatable use cases for proving the power of Hyperautomation.

Email Security Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and VirusTotal

Torq integrates with VirusTotal to enhance email threat analysis. A Torq workflow can monitor a designated mailbox (such as Outlook or Gmail), extract URLs, attachments, and header IPs from each message, and submit them to VirusTotal for threat scoring. Based on the results, Torq automatically categorizes the message as malicious, suspicious, or clean, updating labels, alerting stakeholders, and kicking off remediation.

What once took hours (or days) is reduced to seconds. Analysts can investigate real threats instead of triaging false positives. And you immediately prove Hyperautomation’s impact on everyday SOC volume.

3. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity is the new perimeter. Many breaches are caused by compromised credentials, whether through phishing, MFA fatigue, or social engineering. Automating IAM workflows early in your POC helps you immediately reduce access-related risk.

Torq integrates with leading IAM providers, including Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping Identity, Duo Security, JumpCloud, CyberArk, and Auth0.

Integrate Torq with your IAM, and you can:

Detect and respond to suspicious login behavior
Auto-disable accounts after anomalous activity
Automate user provisioning and de-provisioning
Trigger MFA resets and log analysis workflows

IAM Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and Okta

Here’s one way Torq and Okta work together: This workflow monitors for new MFA methods added in Okta, a common sign of account takeover. It checks the source IP with VirusTotal, asks the user to confirm the action, and if suspicious, auto-opens a Jira ticket, spins up a Slack message, and suspends the account if needed.

Integrating IAM with Torq at the start of your implementation reduces security risk and enhances operational efficiency by replacing slow, manual processes with scalable automation.

Fast, Scalable Results… In Days

These three use cases — EDR, email, and identity — are high-impact, high-speed proof of what AI-driven Hyperautomation can do for your SOC.

Our customers routinely:

Cut MTTR and MTTD across critical workflows
Eliminate repetitive Tier-1 analyst work
Prove ROI in days, not weeks

Start with what matters most. Let Torq show you how fast modern SOC can move.

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Squish the Phish: 6 Automated Phishing Response Strategies

By Torq

June 12, 2025

11 Minute Read

And rather than getting better at recognizing phishing emails, humans are seemingly getting worse, in part due to the increasing phishing sophistication and customization at scale that GenAI offers. According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, people are falling for phishing attacks at an alarming rate, taking a median of just 21 seconds to click a malicious link and another 28 seconds to enter their personal data.

Of course, part of the solution lies in educating users to recognize and report phishing. But user education only goes so far — on average, only 3% of users report phishing emails. Strong anti-phishing education may increase that number, but you’re still fighting an uphill battle if you rely on end users as your primary means of defense against phishing.

Instead, modern security teams are turning to automated phishing response. By using security automation to detect and respond to phishing attempts, security teams can stop the majority of phishing messages before they ever reach end users.

Manual Phishing Triage: A Losing Battle for SOC Teams

Manual phishing investigation and response is a relentless, high-volume drain on SOCs. When a potentially malicious email is flagged — either by a security tool or a user — the clock starts ticking.

The analyst must first deconstruct the suspicious email: digging into email headers, verifying sender addresses, analyzing the message body for suspicious language, and identifying any potential Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), such as embedded links or file attachments.
Each potential IOC must then be manually validated. This initiates a tedious cycle of “swivel-chair” analysis, where the analyst copies and pastes information — IP addresses, domains, file hashes, etc. — out of the email and into various threat intelligence platforms and security tools. Juggling these multiple browser tabs and windows is essential to determine if an artifact is truly malicious, but each copy-paste and window hop wastes time while the risk of human error increases.
And this is all before remediation even starts. Once the threat is confirmed, the analyst must then take action to block the sender, initiate a search to delete the email from all other inboxes, and respond to the user who reported it.

This monotonous, repetitive process is not just slow — it’s dangerously error-prone. A single missed detail or misinterpretation can be the difference between a blocked threat and a full-blown incident.

Manual phishing triage and response workflows can take tens of minutes to over an hour for a single case. Multiply that by hundreds of daily alerts, and the challenge of keeping up becomes too big to ignore. However, with anti-phishing automation, all of the grind of phishing triage, investigation, and remediation disappears.

What is Automated Phishing Response?

Anti-phishing automation refers to technology that autonomously investigates, triages, and neutralizes suspected phishing emails. It is designed to replace the slow, repetitive, error-prone grind of manual phishing defense with a consistent machine-speed response that immediately isolates compromised inboxes, revokes access to malicious emails, blocks phishing URLs, and notifies users.

6 Hyperautomated Phishing Response Strategies and Tactics

Torq Hyperautomation™ integrates with several key partners to help organizations prevent and mitigate phishing attacks and avoid costly data breaches — which cost organizations an estimated $4.88 million in 2024. Below are six strategies for leveraging Hyperautomation to fight phishing across your entire security environment.

1. Perimeter Defense: Hardening the Email Gateway

Your first line of automated defense is securing the primary phishing entry point: the email inbox. The goal is to identify and block as many malicious emails as possible before they ever reach a user.

Torq partners with Secure Email Gateway (SEG) providers to enhance their detection accuracy and response by correlating data across leading SEG solutions like Abnormal Security, Microsoft, Proofpoint, Mimecast, and more. Torq then autonomously initiates remediation actions, such as removing malicious emails or adjusting email security controls.

Key tactics:

Filter messages based on multiple attributes: The days are long gone when simply scanning email for strings like “Nigerian prince” guaranteed that you’d catch the phishers. Simple keyword or domain name scanning won’t cut it. Effective anti-phishing automation evaluates every email based on multiple attributes — its content, the domain from which it originated, whether it contains an attachment, the type of attachment, and so on — to build a far more informed assessment than content analysis alone can provide.
Detonate attachments in sandboxes: For suspicious but unconfirmed email threats, automation can instantly “detonate” (i.e. download and open) attachments or links in a secure, isolated sandbox. By evaluating the content’s behavior in a safe environment, the system can detect anomalies or attack signatures that confirm the content is indeed malicious. At the same time, the original email remains quarantined from the user. Pending the results, the workflow can either safely release the back content to the user or block it definitively.
Block sender names and domains automatically: When a phishing attempt is confirmed, automation can instantly block the sender’s name and entire domain across the organization. This prevents subsequent waves of the attack from different accounts on the same infrastructure, disrupting the phisher’s campaign.

2. Identity and Access Control: Protecting Your People

Since credentials are the primary target of most phishing attacks, proactively protecting user identities is paramount. Torq does this by analyzing cloud-based user and entity behaviors to detect anomalies that could be indicative of phishing. And if a phishing attack does occur, Torq integrates with solutions, including Okta, Active Directory, JumpCloud, OneLogin, Ping, and Wiz, to prevent account takeover and limit an attacker’s access.

Key tactic:

Reset credentials automatically: Upon detecting a potential phishing compromise, automation should immediately trigger a security workflow to reset login credentials for impacted users. This includes logging the user out of all active sessions and forcing a password reset to instantly invalidate any stolen credentials.

3. Endpoint Security: Containing the Impact

If a malicious email makes it through and a user clicks a link or opens an attachment, the battle shifts to the endpoint (e.g. the user’s laptop or phone). Working with EDR providers like Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft, and others, Torq can correlate endpoint data for a holistic view of a phishing attack’s scope and impact, then rapidly take action to contain and remediate any compromise on the device itself.

Key tactic:

Scan and quarantine affected endpoints automatically: The moment a user is linked to a confirmed phishing attack, automation should trigger the EDR solution to perform an immediate scan of their devices. If malware is found, the endpoint can be automatically quarantined from the network to prevent lateral movement while the threat is removed.

4. The Human Element: Empowering Users as a Line of Defense

Your employees are both a target and a potential ally. Torq’s chatbot integrations with communication tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and email make it quick and easy for users to report threats, providing them with instant feedback and education, and turning users into an active part of your security posture.

Key tactics:

Use chatbots for phishing reporting: Integrating chatbots into communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams gives users a simple, immediate way to report suspicious emails. These bots can then kick off automated security workflows based on the report, such as resetting passwords, revoking access, or initiating scans for malware. Chatbots can also provide educational resources and coaching to users on how to avoid phishing and improve their cybersecurity awareness.
Triage user-reported emails automatically: When a user reports a suspected phishing email, automation takes over. It can instantly extract key indicators (URLs, file hashes, headers), analyze them against threat intelligence, and provide the user with immediate feedback, confirming if the email was malicious and has been handled, or if it was safe.

5. Data Protection & Incident Response: Minimizing the Damage

When a breach occurs from a phishing email, the strategy shifts to understanding and minimizing the damage. Automation is critical for rapidly assessing the scope and scale of data loss and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements for notifications and reporting. Torq partners with providers like Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Varonis, and Symantec to automate these two important pieces of the phishing puzzle.

6. Continuous Improvement: Learning from Every Attack

A strong defense is one that constantly learns and adapts. Understanding the metrics after the fact can help prevent a phishing attack in the future. Torq partners with SIEM, SEG, and EDR providers to use data from past incidents to refine and improve your automated workflows and overall security posture.

Key tactic:

Quantify improvements with automated metrics: Use automation to analyze response times, workflow effectiveness, and incident severity. By leveraging AI in the SOC to automatically categorize incidents and create cases, you can ensure critical threats receive priority and gather insights to continually harden your defenses against future attacks.

Example Automated Phishing Alert Analysis Workflow in Torq

This Torq Hyperautomation workflow automates the initial triage of a reported phishing email. It instantly extracts and aggregates key artifacts like URLs, file hashes, and headers from Outlook messages and attaches to create a structured data set for deeper analysis, following these steps:

Alert trigger: The process begins the moment a potential phishing alert is received from a source like Microsoft 365.
Parallel data extraction: Torq immediately executes multiple tasks in parallel to deconstruct the email:
- URLs: It extracts all unique URLs from the email’s body and within any attachments.
- Attachments: It processes all file attachments to retrieve their details and corresponding file hashes.
- Headers: It retrieves the full message headers using the Microsoft Graph API.
Threat Validation: Torq then leverages integrations with various threat intelligence feeds, such as VirusTotal, to determine if the URLs, attachments, or information pulled from the email headers are flagged as malicious or benign. This helps quickly weed out false positives, or confirms the alert as a true malicious threat before a security case is even created.
Data consolidation and output: All extracted artifacts (URLs, file hashes, and headers) are automatically collected, combined, and formatted into a single, structured output, ensuring all necessary data is ready for the next step.
Initiate case management: If the alert is confirmed as malicious through third-party validation (or reaches a designated suspicious threshold), the structured output is then used to automatically create a new security case or escalate an existing incident with similar IOCs, often triggering a nested workflow for full case management and remediation.

Case Study: Lennar Cuts Phishing Resolution from Hours to Minutes

The security team at Lennar, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, was swamped by phishing. They spent “hours and hours” remediating phishing attacks due to manual processes and the lack of flexibility and integrations in their existing XSOAR solution.

After switching to Torq Hyperautomation, the time it took Lennar to resolve a phishing attack dropped from hours to just minutes. This freed up their security experts to focus on more important work, like hunting for major threats.

Before we had Torq, we would do a lot of manual phishing remediation, which was a big time-taker. We would spend hours and hours. With Torq, we’ve significantly reduced the amount of time spent on phishing, which allowed us to further refine our other tools and alerts.
Daniel Gross, Senior Operations Analyst, Lennar

Read the full case study >

Win the Phishing War with Automated Phishing Response

Phishers are only going to get better at what they do, especially as they become more sophisticated in their use of AI. The only way for today’s stretched-thin security teams to keep up is with automated phishing response.

Anti-phishing automation eliminates the noise from low-level phishing alerts and frees up analysts to focus on more critical threats. It also enables immediate, consistent, and accurate phishing incident response, reducing human error and minimizing the potential impact of a breach.

A truly effective automated phishing defense relies on the ability to connect and orchestrate every tool in your security stack. With Torq’s limitless integrations, you can automate any phishing tool and process, creating a unified and automated response to neutralize phishing threats across your entire environment.

Want to make your SOC more efficient across the board? Get Torq’s Field CISO’s guide covering practical advice to overcome rising threats, lean teams, and budget scrutiny.

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SecOps Automation: How Lean Teams Can Achieve Enterprise-Level Security

By Torq

June 9, 2025

8 Minute Read

What Is SecOps Automation?

SecOps automation is the process using technology to streamline and automate the core workflows of security operations, including threat detection, triage, investigation, response, access control, and compliance reporting. It removes the manual work and alert fatigue that bog down security teams, enabling faster, more consistent, and more scalable operations.

While DevSecOps focuses on integrating security into the software development lifecycle, and ITOps automation targets infrastructure and IT service management, SecOps automation is laser-focused on protecting the business from threats.

Traditional SecOps Is Broken

Most security teams today are running on fumes. Threats are increasing, tools are multiplying, and analysts are stuck in an endless loop of triage and tuning as they face:

Too many alerts, not enough analysts: Security teams are drowning in noise. With limited headcount, it’s impossible to investigate everything, causing critical alerts to go unnoticed.
Poor tool integration: 51% of security leaders say their tools don’t integrate well, creating silos, manual handoffs, and slower response times.
Busywork over threat work: 46% of teams spend more time configuring and troubleshooting tools than mitigating threats. Another 59% say maintaining tools is the #1 inefficiency in their SOC.

It’s not sustainable — especially for lean teams.

Why Lean Teams Need SecOps Automation

Lean security teams are under pressure to deliver big results — without the benefit of big budgets, big headcount, or big enterprise infrastructure. They face the same volume of threats, alerts, and compliance requirements as a Fortune 500 but with a fraction of the resources.

SecOps automation bridges this resource gap. Deterministic automation workflows are ideal for the most common, repetitive, or predictable tasks, while non-deterministic workflows — augmented by agentic AI — enable understaffed SOC teams to handle more complex, multi-step security use cases more quickly and move towards an autonomous SOC.

SecOps automation significantly reduces manual overhead, accelerates threat response times, and empowers lean teams to run high-performance SOCs without the traditional overhead.

Five Ways Automated SecOps Helps Level the Playing Field

1. Phishing

Phishing is the most common form of cybercrime, with an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails sent daily. Each suspicious email requires triage, enrichment, investigation, and user outreach. Multiply that by dozens (or hundreds) of alerts a day, and you’re looking at full-blown burnout.

Automated SecOps turns phishing response into a self-contained workflow. From inbox monitoring and URL detonation to IOC lookups and automated takedowns, the entire lifecycle can be handled in minutes — not hours — without ever touching the analyst queue.

2. Threat Intelligence Enrichment

Threat intel is only useful if it’s fast, contextual, and operationalized — three things that don’t happen when analysts are manually switching between threat feeds and enrichment tools.

With SecOps automation, threat enrichment happens automatically. As alerts are ingested, automation pulls relevant context from multiple intel sources, correlates them with local data, and attaches insights to each case. That gives analysts a complete picture from the start.

3. Incident Response

Manual incident response is slow, error-prone, and hard to scale, especially with limited staff. Analysts have to piece together clues from multiple systems, coordinate handoffs, and manually document every action. For lean teams, it’s a recipe for delays and missed steps.

Automated incident response changes the game. As soon as an incident is detected, workflows kick off to contain the threat, collect forensics, notify stakeholders, and even auto-resolve based on pre-approved playbooks. With agentic AI in the loop, you can even triage, investigate, and remediate without any human intervention.

4. Vulnerability Management (VM)

Prioritizing which vulnerabilities matter is half the battle. But manually scanning assets, matching vulnerabilities to context, and assigning follow-up tasks can take days — assuming it gets done at all.

Automated SecOps streamlines the entire VM lifecycle. It ingests scanner output, correlates it with asset data, flags exploitable vulnerabilities, and initiates remediation workflows based on risk level — all without human touch. Analysts get real-time visibility into what’s fixed, what’s pending, and what’s critical.

5. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access creep and reused credentials are an open door for attackers — but they’re often overlooked because IAM tasks are tedious and time-consuming.

With automation, IAM becomes hands-free. Just-in-time access, automatic revocation, and periodic audits all run behind the scenes. You can even automate a response to suspicious activity, like impossible travel or privilege escalation, before an attacker has time to act.

SecOps Automation = Big Results for Lean Teams

Built for all skill levels: Low-code and no-code automation platforms have lowered the barrier to entry for security teams, making it easier for them to implement and manage security solutions. Analysts can build and deploy workflows without needing to write a single line of code, while more technical users can dig into scripting and APIs when needed. This flexibility empowers teams to move faster and focus on strategy instead of syntax.

Faster time to value with pre-built workflows: Many SecOps automation platforms offer prebuilt workflows for common use cases like phishing response and alert triage. These templates help teams launch fast, then iterate and customize for their environment.

Unified dashboards and reporting: Effective SecOps automation isn’t just about doing more — it’s about seeing more. Automation platforms often include built-in dashboards, visual workflow builders, and custom reporting tools that make it easier to track performance, prove value, and drive continuous improvement.

More use case coverage: Automation isn’t limited to incident response. Mature SecOps teams extend it to vulnerability management, insider threat detection, access controls, compliance audits, and even IT workflows like onboarding or offboarding. The more you automate, the more time your team has for strategic work.

Fully integrated AI access: It’s no secret that AI is the big hot ticket item in the cybersecurity industry. However, most organizations are diligently evaluating and carefully choosing when and where to deploy AI in their security stack — and rightfully so.

Whether you are slow-rolling AI access due to budget constraints or still building a business case to demonstrate the value of AI in the SOC to upper management, a SecOps automation platform provides a unique, centralized hub that fully integrates with every security solution, ensuring consistent and controlled AI access across your entire security environment.

Torq: The Leading Platform for SecOps Automation

Torq HyperSOC™ is the agentic AI-driven platform explicitly designed to empower lean security teams with extensive SecOps automation capabilities. Torq delivers:

Multi-Agent AI: Torq’s Socrates orchestrates automated workflows across specialized AI agents, seamlessly handling phishing triage, malware containment, IAM hygiene, and more.
Natural language workflows: No-code and low-code interfaces allow teams to launch and modify workflows simply by describing their intent, significantly accelerating adoption and effectiveness.
Rapid integration: Instant, seamless integrations across the entire security ecosystem eliminate silos, ensuring workflows operate fluidly across tools like AWS, Azure, Okta, SentinelOne, and many more.
Autonomous response: From detection to containment and remediation, Torq autonomously manages threats, dramatically reducing response times and enabling analysts to focus on high-impact tasks.

What SecOps Automation Looks Like

Torq customers consistently report transformative impacts from automating SecOps.

Check Point

Check Point’s SOC faced a crushing alert load and a 30–40% manpower gap, until Torq HyperSOC™ came into the picture. Within days, Torq deployed over two dozen AI-driven playbooks that automated repetitive tasks, reduced alert fatigue, and enabled autonomous remediation for low-level threats. Now, analysts are empowered to focus on what matters, with NLP-powered case insights helping them make faster, smarter decisions.

Global Retailer

This global fast-fashion giant replaced its legacy SOAR with Torq Hyperautomation™ to streamline security operations, cut alert fatigue, and simplify complex workflows across international teams. By automating end-user requests, case management, and just-in-time access, they reduced ticket resolution from days to minutes and saved a week of time per request.

Lennar

Lennar’s SOC team replaced XSOAR with Torq to eliminate manual phishing remediation that used to take hours and is now resolved in minutes. With no-code and AI-powered workflow building, analysts of all skill levels can build automations and refocus on proactive threat hunting. Torq’s flexibility and speed also helped streamline asset management, cutting hours of work down to just minutes.

Scale Your Security Without Scaling Your Team

Torq HyperSOC™ enables lean teams to protect their businesses at enterprise scale, with automated SecOps workflows that eliminate manual drudgery, reduce response times, and enable analysts to focus on strategic threat hunting and high-value tasks.

Want to scale your security operations with Torq? Get a demo. And check out our Field CISO’s guide with practical advice for a more efficient SOC.

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The AI SOC Analyst That Offloads 90%+ of Tier-1 Cases — Meet Socrates

By Bob Boyle

June 2, 2025

10 Minute Read

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) continue to struggle in 2025. The perfect storm of growing alert volume, consistent talent shortage, and the well-documented limitations of legacy SOAR solutions have brought many SOC teams to a breaking point. At the same time, bad actors continue to innovate, and cybercriminals have become more sophisticated in their tactics and techniques, including using AI to launch attacks at scale.

Fortunately, AI in the SOC has begun to revolutionize the security operations field, specifically in the area of Tier-1 security analysis. According to Gartner, “By 2026, AI will increase SOC efficiency by 40% compared with 2024 efficiency, beginning a shift in SOC expertise toward AI development, maintenance and protection.”

Why the SOC Needs an AI Analyst

As alert complexity rises, so does burnout and alert fatigue. SOC analysts today spend too much time sifting through noise and manually triaging alerts, rather than taking action to proactively secure the environment. According to the 2024 SANS Detection and Response Survey, more than half of security teams say false positives are a huge problem, and 62.5% are overwhelmed by sheer data volume.

A major reason for this frustration is that security teams are fighting with their own tools. In a recent State of Security 2025 report, Cisco’s Splunk surveyed over 2,000 security professionals in their community to find:

59% spend too much time and/or effort maintaining tools and associated workflows
51% admit their tools do not integrate well with one another
47% face alerting issues
32% of teams do not have the requisite skills to be efficient in the SOC

Tier-1 alert triage is overwhelming. Analysts face tens of thousands of Tier-1 alerts per day, and on average, security analysts are only getting to half of the alerts they’re supposed to review. Combined with these SOC inefficiencies, the volume becomes too high for human-only triage. As a result, detection and response times suffer. Gartner says, “AI agents are emerging as a critical solution to enhance efficiency, reduce burnout, and enable teams to focus on strategic initiatives.”

Enter Torq Socrates — the agentic AI SOC Analyst designed to dramatically offload Tier-1 workloads and lead organizations toward an autonomous SOC.

What is an AI SOC Analyst?

An AI SOC Analyst serves as an extension of SOC teams, automating incident response by interpreting natural language instructions in security runbooks to execute tasks such as alert triage, containment, and remediation actions. While an AI SOC Analyst autonomously handles over 90% of Tier-1 tasks, human analysts remain in control of critical decisions and can interface with the AI SOC Analyst using natural language for additional enrichment, investigation, and recommended next steps.

Learn unconventional criteria for evaluating AI SOC analysts >

What Is Torq Socrates?

Socrates is Torq’s agentic AI SOC Analyst — a self-deterministic, autonomous AI Agent that plans, reasons, and acts the way a human SOC analyst would. Unlike SOAR solutions or common Generative AI chatbots, Socrates does not require human instruction or guidance. Socrates understands the SOC objectives and executes complex actions with minimal oversight.

Legacy SOAR and generic workflow automation solutions offer AI chatbots that run on static, rule-based playbooks — controlled by human input. And, while GenAI augments case triage by generating context to help reduce detection and response times, it is still largely reactive and reliant on human analysts to instruct, guide, and manually trigger remediation actions. Agentic AI, on the other hand, represents the next leap towards a more autonomous SOC.

According to IDC’s latest report, agentic AI has enormous potential in cybersecurity as it can process and solve problems the way a human being would. Socrates isn’t reactive — it’s adaptive. To continuously improve and evolve with new threats, Socrates uses:

Semantic memory to understand prompts and take explicit action
Episodic memory to learn from past incidents to develop new strategies
Procedural memory to make decisions on which tools to use and which data to gather

The Anatomy of Socrates: Torq’s OmniAgent

Socrates is more than just a single AI Agent. Socrates sits at the helm of Torq’s Multi-Agent System (MAS), acting as an OmniAgent in charge of coordinating multiple specialized AI Agents. Each of these agents is trained to perform a specific task, and is capable of using sophisticated iterative planning and reasoning to solve complex, multi-step problems autonomously. Torq’s AI Agents include:

Runbook Agent: Autonomously plans and adapts incident response runbooks with a deep knowledge and understanding of the environment.
Investigation Agent: Performs deep-dive investigations in seconds, uncovering hidden patterns across disparate data sources and tools to pinpoint root causes and assess threat impact.
Remediation Agent: Executes remediation actions, closing the loop with verifiable outcomes, either by autonomously following the associated runbook or through human-in-the-loop response.
Case Management Agent: Gathers real-time and historical data, organizes case timelines, highlights key indicators, and reprioritizes incidents based on evolving information.

This agentic AI architecture is supported by first in class Retrieval-Augemented Generation (RAG) and Model-Context Protocol (MCP) technology that helps the Torq MAS dynamically accelerate SecOps outcomes by improving detection and triage accuracy, while reducing MTTD and MTTR.

How an AI SOC Analyst Performs Tier-1 Tasks

So, how does Socrates leverage Torq’s MAS to perform Tier-1 security tasks? Let’s look at this Command and Control attack detected by Crowdstrike and see how tasks previously handled by human analysts are now handled with unprecedented efficiency by Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, Socrates.

*Watch Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, following the guidelines in a SOC runbook to triage a case automatically.*

1. Automatic Runbook Analysis

When a security event arises, an analyst traditionally consults a “runbook” – a guide specifying the response to that specific type of event. Today, these “runbooks” exist in all modern SOCs and are prepared by senior architects to benefit Tier-1 and Tier-2 analysts.

Torq Socrates looks at outcomes of historical cases and associates the appropriate runbook based on the observables of the new case. Socrates automatically analyzes runbooks written in natural language, typically containing step-by-step procedures for handling various security incidents. By analyzing the semantic meaning of the natural language instructions, the AI SOC Analyst derives action flow from the recommended response strategies for different security events.

*The associated case remediation runbook is written in natural language that Socrates analyzes, “understands,” and can follow.*

2. Deep Research Incident Investigations

The many security tools available in the arsenal of Tier-1 SOC analysts can return a large amount of detailed information. The analyst’s goal is to synthesize this information into a decision about which next steps to take, according to the runbook’s guidance.

Just as human analysts rely on insights from the runbook, Socrates can assist in automating investigation or even incident response tasks. This includes executing tasks such as alert triage, data enrichment, containment, and remediation actions, which speeds up response times and reduces the manual effort required from human analysts.

An agentic AI SOC Analyst like Socrates excels at processing both structured and unstructured security tool data. This enables it to analyze complex information and create dynamic decision trees based on runbook analysis. These decision trees adapt to the specific context of each incident, allowing for more efficient and accurate incident handling. For example, Socrates can determine: Is the file malicious? Is the user a very important person (VIP)? Is the activity frequent or infrequent during a specific time period indicating anomalous behavior?

*Socrates utilizing Crowdstrike, VirusTotal, and a deep understanding of the organization’s environment to query observables and distill the relevant information.*

3. Knowledge of Security Frameworks for Context

More experienced alert triage specialists bring their own contextual knowledge and understanding of networking, endpoint architecture, and attack techniques into the mix.

AI Agents are trained on an immense body of natural language documents containing information about the above and more. This allows the semantic analysis of an AI Agent to match the observed outcome of a security tool and the technique described in a documented framework, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Using the above technique, Torq’s agentic AI SOC Analyst, Socrates, leverages the information available in numerous documents describing attack frameworks, such as the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and maps its tactics and techniques to the outcomes observed in the analyzed security event.

Intelligent modeling with Torq’s AI SOC Analyst Socrates enables it to mimic a human-like thinking process, correlating information efficiently and mapping the appropriate outcomes to common frameworks like the MITRE ATT&CK framework, NIST, and more.

4. Leveraging Hyperautomation to Perform Designated Remediation Actions

The next step for a human analyst is to carry out the remediation actions outlined in the runbooks, choosing the proper tool and executing the instructions.

Based on the content of the runbook, the AI SOC Analyst utilizes its semantic analysis capabilities to suggest and trigger suitable Hyperautomated workflows and security tools from the list of ones explicitly made available within the Torq platform. These workflows align with the specific steps outlined in the document conveyed in natural language.

*Torq Socrates performing the initial actions within the runbook.*

5. Intelligent Case Management and Documentation

An important pillar of any operational practice is the meticulous documentation of all actions taken, decisions, and achieved outcomes.

AI Agents have proven to be efficient at summarizing large amounts of natural language text. Torq Socrates leverages this capability to summarize the “conclusions” and desired next steps, and document them in the “case timeline”. Socrates then reaches back into its toolbox and ability to take action autonomously, marking the case as “closed” and moving the case forward without any human intervention.

*Torq Socrates summarizing the findings and actions taken of the security event and automatically adding them to Torq’s built-in ticket management system timeline.*

How Security Teams Use Socrates Today

Gartner forecasts that by 2028, multi-agent AI in threat detection and incident response will rise from 5% to 70%. For Torq customers leveraging Socrates, this is already their reality.

“I believe the successful use of Torq Agentic AI in SOC operations shows up in practical outcomes. With Torq Agentic AI, the answer is yes to questions such as: Are analysts happier? Are they sticking around? Do they have time to focus on more interesting and complex investigations? Are MTTM and MTTR lower? Torq Agentic AI extends and enhances our team so it can make better decisions more quickly — resulting in stronger security all around.”
Mick Leach, Field CISO, Abnormal Security

Socrates isn’t just another tool — it’s another teammate. And it’s changing the way security gets done. With Socrates, security decisions are made with context, fully automated incident response becomes the default, and agentic AI becomes the connective tissue across previously siloed security solutions that enable SOC teams to move from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop.

According to IDC, Torq HyperSOC, powered by Socrates, helps:

Eliminate over 95% of Tier-1 analyst workload
Reduce time-to-remediation by 90%
Increase case handling capacity 3-5x with zero added headcount

Torq Socrates is designed to handle Tier-1 triage actions by mapping the tasks and activities of human Tier-1 analysts to use cases leveraging agentic AI. With Torq Socrates as their AI SOC Analyst, human security analysts remain in charge of processes and outcomes while introducing dramatic new efficiencies and incident response accuracy, alleviating security analysts’ most critical challenges.

Want to meet Socrates? Request a demo. And get the AI or Die Manifesto to learn strategic considerations and CISO advice for deploying AI in your SOC.

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Cybersecurity Best Practices Every Organization Should Follow

By Torq

May 30, 2025

8 Minute Read

What are Best Practices in Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity best practices are proactive measures, policies, and technologies designed to minimize your organization’s cyber risk. Adhering to these practices helps businesses stay secure by preventing breaches, ensuring compliance, protecting sensitive data, preventing data breaches, and maintaining business continuity.

Many cybersecurity frameworks emphasize the “5 C’s of cybersecurity”:

Change: Regularly updating security measures.
Compliance: Adhering to industry standards and regulations.
Cost: Balancing security spending and effectiveness.
Continuity: Ensuring ongoing business operations after incidents.
Coverage: Comprehensive protection across all digital assets.

To improve cybersecurity, companies must combine extensive policies, employee education, strong access controls, and real-time threat response, ideally powered by scalable Hyperautomation platforms.

10 Essential Cybersecurity Best Practices (and How Torq Hyperautomates Them)

Cyber threats move fast, and your defenses need to move faster. These ten best practices are non-negotiable for modern SOC teams. But implementing them manually? That’s where most organizations fall behind.

Torq Hyperautomation™ eliminates the friction by turning best practices into fully automated, always-on workflows. Whether enforcing access controls, responding to phishing attempts, or monitoring endpoints, Torq ensures each control is executed precisely and at scale.

Here’s what to put in place now — and how Torq helps you do it effortlessly.

1. Use Strong, Unique Passwords and a Password Manager

Passwords are often the first — and weakest — line of defense against cyber intrusions. Weak or reused passwords significantly increase the risk of account compromise, especially in credential stuffing and brute-force cyber attacks. Organizations should enforce strong password policies that mandate the use of long, complex, and unique passwords for every account.

To ease the burden on employees, deploy enterprise-grade password managers that generate, store, and autofill passwords securely. These tools reduce password fatigue and help prevent risky practices like writing down credentials or reusing them across platforms. Periodic password audits can also be automated with Torq, which can trigger alerts when passwords aren’t updated or don’t meet compliance standards.

2. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Everywhere

MFA is one of the simplest and most effective ways to prevent unauthorized access. It ensures that even if credentials are compromised, hackers can’t easily access sensitive systems without a second form of verification, such as biometrics, hardware tokens, or authenticator apps.

Torq enhances MFA implementation with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) automation workflows. Security teams can use Torq to enforce MFA across platforms, audit authentication events, and automatically revoke access for users who haven’t completed MFA setup, minimizing friction and oversight.

3. Keep All Software and OS Up to Date

Outdated systems often harbor unpatched vulnerabilities that threat actors exploit. From zero-day vulnerabilities in operating systems to neglected third-party apps, every unpatched asset is a liability.

Implement an automated patch management strategy. With Torq, security teams can set up workflows that monitor software versions across endpoints, flag outdated components, and trigger notifications or remediation actions when updates are overdue. Coupling this with scheduled audits ensures continuous hygiene and reduces attack surfaces.

4. Install Antivirus and Anti-Malware on Every Device

Endpoint protection remains critical in defending against a broad range of cyber threats including ransomware, malware, and trojans. Organizations should deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions that use real-time behavioral analysis, not just signature-based detection.

To ensure these tools stay effective, Torq can integrate with antivirus platforms to monitor endpoint health, validate update statuses, and automate quarantine or isolation actions in response to detected threats, speeding up remediation and reducing exposure windows.

5. Secure Networks with Firewalls and VPNs

Firewalls and VPNs help shield organizational networks from unauthorized access and malicious traffic. Firewalls block suspicious inbound/outbound traffic, while VPNs provide encrypted tunnels for secure remote access, especially critical in hybrid work environments.

Torq can enhance these protections by automating firewall rule updates, triggering alerts when unexpected changes occur, and monitoring VPN usage for anomalous patterns such as logins from unusual geolocations or times. This automation ensures your network security posture stays strong without requiring constant manual oversight.

6. Regularly Back Up Data to the Cloud and Offline

Cyberattacks like ransomware and accidental deletions can lead to devastating data loss. Regular backups are your safety net. Organizations should adopt a 3-2-1 backup strategy: three copies of data, two on different media, and one offsite.

Torq helps ensure backup best practices are followed by automating backup verification, alerting if a backup fails, and orchestrating regular backup operations. Teams can also use Torq to conduct post-backup security posture checks to ensure backups aren’t infected or misconfigured, ensuring they’re both usable and secure.

The human element remains the weakest link in cybersecurity. Regular security awareness training, including simulated phishing campaigns, is essential to prepare employees for common social engineering tactics.

Torq supports these efforts with automated phishing response workflows. When phishing attacks are reported or detected, Socrates, our AI SOC Analyst, rapidly investigates, auto-remediates the message, and updates the reporting employee, reducing response time and enabling analysts to focus on complex threats. Combined with training, this creates a layered defense against email-based attacks.

8. Use Encryption for Sensitive Data at Rest and in Transit

Encryption ensures that even if data is intercepted or accessed without authorization, it remains unreadable. All sensitive data — customer records, financial information, proprietary code — should be encrypted both at rest (on storage systems) and in transit (during transmission over networks).

Organizations should enforce the use of industry-standard protocols such as AES-256 and TLS 1.3, and regularly audit encryption configurations. Torq can automate policy enforcement and integrate with encryption management systems to verify encryption coverage and trigger alerts for unprotected data assets.

9. Limit User Access with RBAC and Least Privilege

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) limits access rights for users to the bare minimum necessary. Overprivileged accounts are a goldmine for cybercriminals and a major source of internal risk.

Torq’s RBAC capabilities automate access provisioning, ensure only necessary permissions are granted, and continuously audit user roles. If access privileges drift over time due to role changes or misconfigurations, Torq can automatically flag or correct them, helping prevent lateral movement in case of compromise.

10. Monitor for Suspicious Behavior and Automate Alerts

Traditional alerting often leads to analyst burnout due to high volumes of low-fidelity alerts. Modern threats demand intelligent monitoring that can identify anomalies and respond in real time.

Torq’s multi-agent system continuously monitors systems for signs of compromise and suspicious behavior. When an anomaly is detected, it automatically triages the event, enriches it with context, and initiates workflows to investigate or contain the threat, without requiring human intervention. This reduces MTTD and MTTR, keeping your defenses agile and proactive.

Common Cyber Threats Every Organization Faces

To understand why these security best practices matter, consider some of today’s most pressing cyber threats:

Ransomware: Ransomware attacks encrypt critical data, demanding payment for restoration. Organizations must maintain backups, enforce patch management, and automate threat detection to prevent such attacks.
Phishing: Attackers trick employees into revealing credentials or downloading malware. Continuous security awareness training and automated phishing remediation significantly reduce phishing-related breaches.
Insider Threats: Whether intentional or accidental, insider threats pose significant risk. Implement strong RBAC policies and continuous user activity monitoring to quickly detect suspicious behavior.
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): Attackers overwhelm your network or services with traffic, disrupting operations. Deploy firewall protections, traffic monitoring, and automated mitigation responses to maintain availability.

Hyperautomate Your Cybersecurity Best Practices with Torq Hyperautomation

Even the most extensive cybersecurity best practices can fall short without consistency, speed, and scalability. That’s where Torq Hyperautomation steps in.

Torq automates every layer of your security operations — from detection to remediation — without writing a single line of code. Whether you’re enforcing MFA, orchestrating real-time phishing response, or managing RBAC policies across hybrid environments, Torq executes it all with precision and speed.

Torq’s Hyperautomation platform empowers organizations to convert cybersecurity best practices into always-on, fully orchestrated workflows. Our agentic AI capabilities, including our multi-agent system led by Socrates, detect, triage, and respond to alerts instantly, without flooding your team with noise.

This means your security analysts spend less time on repetitive triage and more time focused on high-impact, strategic initiatives. And with a vast library of integrations and workflow templates, you can implement sophisticated security controls faster than ever.

Build a Stronger, Smarter Security Posture

Cybersecurity threats are growing rapidly, but so are the solutions to fight them. Adopting these cybersecurity best practices will strengthen your organization’s defenses against modern threats. However, manually managing every aspect of security is unsustainable.

Torq Hyperautomation gives your organization an edge by transforming security best practices into streamlined, automated operations. From employee training and endpoint protection to real-time threat response and compliance reporting, Torq ensures that your security posture isn’t just strong; it’s intelligent, adaptable, and future-ready.

Ready to strengthen your cybersecurity posture with Torq?

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The Multi-Agent System: A New Era for SecOps

By Torq

May 28, 2025

8 Minute Read

Three SOC Threats Solved in Minutes with Torq Hyperautomation

By Bob Boyle

May 22, 2025

5 Minute Read

The SOC Efficiency Challenge

If you’ve spent time in a SOC, these pain points are familiar:

Alert fatigue: Over half of security teams struggle with false positives and data overload.
Endless tickets: Legacy ticket systems and disjointed shift handoffs bog down response times.
Manual swivel-chairing: Analysts lose precious hours jumping between tools and logs.
Manual enrichment: Manually pulling threat intel and context is a major time-sink.

These pain points slow your team’s reaction times and increase risk. But these barriers disappear when Hyperautomation, AI, and smart case management are unified.

Use Case #1: Neutralize a Reverse Shell Command & Control (C2) Attack

When a Ruby-powered reverse shell (courtesy of njRAT) targeted an EC2 Linux instance, Socrates got to work. As Torq HyperSOC’s Omniagent, Socrates detected anomalous process behaviors and network connections, flagging the reverse shell command within seconds.

Without waiting for analyst input, Socrates quarantined the EC2 host. The platform harvested file hashes, process trees, and destination IPs, then enriched them via threat intel feeds and internal CMDB lookups.

Through a deep understanding of the environment and analysis of the remediation runbook associated with the detected use case, Socrates autonomously killed the malicious process in its tracks before the bad actor was able to spread laterally, exfiltrate sensitive data, or cause any further damage.

In under two minutes, the HyperSOC dashboard included an AI-generated incident report with prioritized next steps and detailed documentation of every AI-driven action taken.

Result: The threat was detected and neutralized without manual intervention, allowing analysts to move swiftly to higher-priority tasks.

Use Case #2: Reduce MTTR with Automated MITRE ATT&CK Tagging

Manually identifying and tagging MITRE ATT&CK tactics, techniques and procedures is time-consuming. Socrates streamlined this process by automatically linking and tagging threats with relevant MITRE ATT&CK tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

The AI Agent parses case data, file hashes, process names, network connections, and behavior patterns, and distills them into discrete observables. Socrates cross-references each observable against the latest MITRE ATT&CK framework — pinpointing not just the primary tactic but also related sub-techniques and procedures.

For each matched TTP, Socrates auto-tags the case, links to relevant playbooks, and correlates with past incidents that used the same methods.

Finally, the AI generates a concise report section that shows:

Tactic: TA0011 – Command and Control
Technique: T1219 – Remote Access Software
Procedure: njRAT reverse shell delivered via Ruby script on EC2 instance.
Confidence: 92%
Potential Impact: Successful execution of these TTPs can lead to unauthorized access and control of critical systems, leading to data breaches or disruptions.
Next Steps: Trigger the containment playbook, notify the Tier-2 SOC analyst team, and run a full asset sweep.

Result: Analysts no longer spend time manually tagging or correlating cases, which helps reduce MTTR and increase consistency across investigations.

Analysts no longer spend time manually tagging or correlating cases, which helps reduce MTTR and increase consistency across investigations. — Socrates auto-tagged MITRE ATT&CK TTPs for a reverse shell incident, cutting MTTR and surfacing next steps in seconds.

Use Case #3: Investigate and Close an Impossible Travel Alert in Minutes

Okta flagged suspicious logins from Austria, Singapore, and Brazil for a single user within a 30-minute window, an impossible travel scenario indicating potential compromise.

Socrates autonomously checked the user’s leave status in Workday and calendar systems. Next, Socrates messaged the employee on Slack, capturing their response directly into the case notes. Simultaneously, it enriched each login IP against external threat intelligence feeds, scoring them for risk and historical malicious activity.

Socrates then compared the session details against the user’s normal behavior baseline to spot anomalies. Finally, because the user had confirmed the unusual travel and all IP reputations returned legitimate, Socrates marked the alert as a benign true positive, documented the reasoning, and closed the case.

Result: This workflow took under three minutes, reducing MTTR and giving analysts hours back by eliminating manual checks and unnecessary escalations.

This workflow took under three minutes, reducing MTTR and giving analysts hours back by eliminating manual checks and unnecessary escalations. — Socrates investigated suspicious Okta logins, cross-checked HR systems, messaged the user, and closed the alert autonomously.

You Wanna See Some Real Speed?

These aren’t theoretical benefits — they’re proof points from the frontlines of modern AI-powered SOCs. When the powers of Hyperautomation, AI, and intelligent case management are combined in Torq HyperSOC, your team doesn’t just move faster; they move smarter.

Instead of being bogged down, analysts are empowered to lead, strategize, and scale across complex environments. That’s how you reduce risk, retain talent, and prove real value.

Want to see HyperSOC in action? Book a demo now — and don’t miss our Field CISO’s guide full of practical advice for building a more efficient SOC.

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CISOs’ Unconventional Criteria for Evaluating AI SOC Analysts

By Noam Cohen

May 19, 2025

10 Minute Read

Noam Cohen is a serial entrepreneur building seriously cool data and AI companies since 2018. Noam’s insights are informed by a unique combination of data, product, and AI expertise — with a background that includes winning the Israel Defense Prize for his work in leveraging data to predict terror attacks. As the Head of Artificial Intelligence at Torq, Noam is helping build truly next-gen AI capabilities into Torq’s autonomous SOC platform.

Still obsessing over compliance certifications and data volumes when choosing your AI SOC analyst? You might as well be that guy at the dealership kicking tires and demanding V8 specs while ignoring the self-driving capabilities.

Today’s CISO battlefield isn’t won with yesterday’s metrics. While AI security vendors sell you on training corpus size and customization options, you should be demanding zero-day detection without signatures and unified threat visibility.

Let’s be brutally honest: the blistering pace of AI innovation means your current AI SOC evaluation checklist is obsolete. GenAI marked an inflection point; now, agentic AI is completely disrupting SecOps. This means the real competitive edge lies in capabilities your procurement team isn’t even asking about.

So, what should CISOs look for in an AI SOC analyst? Below, we break down 8 key capabilities that you might not have considered but are crucial to ensure AI trust and effectiveness in your SOC.

What to Look for in an AI SOC Analyst Evaluation

1. AI That Simplifies and Communicates Context

Look for: Next-gen AI for the SOC that shows sophistication beyond query-response models, demonstrating a nuanced understanding and delightful communication of organizational context, ongoing security incidents, and specific scenarios.

Rather than summarizing in a generic “TL;DR” format, the AI should communicate about logs, case artifacts, and indicators of compromise (IOCs) through a cybersecurity-oriented UI that highlights key information for the specific security context.

Ask:

Can the AI maintain contextual continuity across analyst shifts and SOC handoffs?
How does the chat UI maintain context for the user when referencing information-heavy items like logs and cases?
Does the AI have different user views for summarizing actions, IOCs, and alerts?
Where can I embed our knowledge and policies to guide the AI’s interactions?

General example:

AI SOC Evaluation example: Example: simplified context communication — General example showing how a smart reference summarization popup from Arc (The Browser Company) helps users quickly understand selected text or an entire webpage without leaving their current browser.

2. AI for the Entire Team

Look for: Practical AI capabilities mapped explicitly to real-world SOC workflows and use cases.

The AI SOC analyst should do the actual, gritty tasks your SOC team performs daily — from initial triage to investigating alerts, hunting for threats, and remediating problems. This isn’t about general intelligence; it’s about directly supporting actual analyst workflows from end to end. If you use a multi-agent system (MAS), the AI SOC analyst should act as an OmniAgent to coordinate and collaborate with multiple specialized AI agents to accomplish these complex security goals.

Ask:

What analyst-level jobs does the AI accelerate (e.g. query writing, unstructured enrichment, and response recommendations)?
How does the AI SOC agent accelerate threat hunting and detection engineering through intelligent hypothesis generation?
Is the system capable of auto-healing errors in security workflows the way a good security engineer can?

General example:

Example of AI for cross-functional teams — *General example showing how Gemini’s Gem store features different chatbots for Marketing, Sales, and Developers.*

3. AI That Explains What It’s Doing

Look for: AI that grounds its findings and recommendations in clear, structured explanations showing its sources.

CISOs increasingly prioritize “explainability” in AI decisions as a pragmatic imperative for achieving cognitive alignment between the AI SOC analyst and the human security team. To foster trust, adoption, and effective action, your security team must have a line of sight into the AI’s reasoning, not just its conclusions.

Ask:

Does the AI SOC analyst clearly explain why particular security events are flagged or escalated?
How easily can human analysts validate or challenge the AI’s recommendations? For instance, can they request source links, exact quotes, or highlighting?
Do we have visibility into the AI agent’s self-critique step?
What validation guardrails does the AI implement?

General examples:

Example of AI that explains what it's doing — *General examples showing how two AI models show the data it relies on. Perplexity shows a snippet of the source while NotebookLM highlights the exact sentence it used from the source.*

4. AI That’s Easy to Interact With — Without Training

Look for: A SOC-specific user interface that is genuinely intuitive, innovative, and frictionless and that directly enhances analyst productivity, retention, and job satisfaction.

Even the most powerful AI can be hampered by a clunky or difficult interface, undermining your team’s effectiveness and morale and discouraging AI adoption. A truly innovative interface should feel natural to use and streamline workflows, not add complexity or friction to processes. An intuitive design enables analysts of any level to quickly access insights and take action without specialized skills or knowledge.

Ask:

How much do our human analysts need to be familiar with AI hacks and general prompt engineering, such as knowing when to use deep search options, ask for a specific data format, or open a new conversation thread?
Does the AI SOC analyst support conversational SIEM queries and natural-language threat exploration?
How does the AI communicate its planning and thinking process?
In autopiloting, can I interrupt the investigation before the AI is done?

General example:

AI SOC Evaluation: example of AI that is intuitive to use — *General example showing how Perplexity creates a simpler user experience by auto-choosing the model according to its research, rather than making the user choose a model by task/prompt.*

5. AI That Helps You Get Ahead

Look for: An AI SOC analyst that doesn’t only react to known threats but proactively guides SOC teams towards improving security posture and operational effectiveness.

Think of your top analysts — the ones who are always one step ahead, anticipating your team’s needs and suggesting improvements without being asked. Agentic AI that performs at this advanced level can act as a virtual extension of your team, identifying weaknesses and suggesting optimizations to elevate your security operations.

Ask:

Can the AI SOC analyst proactively detect and suggest SOC operational improvements, such as recommending repetitive manual processes that are ripe for automation?
Can it automatically correlate cases with incident history and recommend improvements?
Has your AI ever caught a missing step in its instructions and fixed it (or asked about it) before executing?
Can the AI automatically tag and store important information from your interactions that can help in future cases?
Will the AI suggest changes to the detection rules, workflows, or playbooks? How often does your AI flag inefficiencies in workflows?

General example:

Example of AI that proactively recommends optimizations — General example of ChatGPT maintaining context after you’ve told it that you are an AI product manager in San Francisco. When asking it to brainstorm messaging for a social post celebrating an achievement, ChatGPT already knows where to start.

6. AI That Understands What You Really Want (and Can Figure Out How to Do It)

Look for: Deterministic, agentic AI that understands how to break a user intent into multiple tasks, which may require different execution plans.

Good AI gets a task and starts working. Great AI first looks for communication gaps, understands the goal, and asks for more instructions when needed. Ideally, the user shouldn’t have to think like the AI to ensure the AI grasps their intent — the AI should understand how the user thinks and ask clarifying questions when needed.

A structured execution scheme reduces ambiguity and improves the accuracy of the AI’s planning and orchestration, eliminating the likelihood of the AI agent skipping steps, going out of order, selecting incorrect tools, or misinterpreting instructions.

Ask:

When I give the AI a vague or complex instruction, does it ask clarifying questions — or just charge ahead?
How does it use screens, user information, and past sessions to better understand the user’s specific intent?
Can your AI break down a high-level goal (‘Investigate this alert’) into a sequence of logically ordered tasks — and tell you why?
Can your AI explain its execution plan in plain language before it starts and adjust if you push back?

General example:

AI SOC Evaluation: Example of AI that asks clarification questions — *General example showing how ChatGPT asks clarification questions before building a report in Deep Research.*

7. An AI Assistant That You Don’t Need to Babysit

Look for: Agentic AI capable of autonomously chaining together multiple actions without constant human prompts.

Your human analysts don’t want to click through 10 steps every time they need the AI to take action. While human oversight of critical decisions is important, to efficiently investigate an alert end-to-end and even initiate containment, an AI SOC analyst must be capable of independently stringing together a sequence of relevant subtasks — like log collection, enrichment, reverse engineering, and containment suggestions — in pursuit of a high-level goal.

Ask:

Can the AI SOC analyst complete a multi-step investigation with one high-level instruction?
Can the AI write and execute deterministic workflows when needed?
Does it pause and check with human analysts before executing sensitive tasks (e.g., blocking users or IPs)?
When given a high-level goal or non-playbook scenario, does the AI independently decide which steps to take and in what order?
How does the AI identify when not to act — and escalate to a human when it hits a confidence or authority threshold?

General example:

AI SOC Evaluation: Example of AI that defines when it needs to loop humans in — *General example of how Intercom’s Fin interface defines the moments where a human needs to be looped into the convo.*

8. AI That Gets More Helpful Through Human Feedback

Look for: An AI SOC analyst that continuously learns and improves by observing and incorporating feedback from human analyst behavior.

The best AI SOC analysts learn from human analyst behavior to become more effective and accurate over time. Think of it as shaping the ideal analyst that shadows your team, watches how they triage alerts, write queries, and handle false positives — and gets smarter with every interaction.

Human analysts should be able to fine-tune and correct AI as threats evolve rather than treating it as a black box. In practice, features like thumbs-up/down ratings, interactive retraining, or the ability to override AI decisions make the human–AI loop tighter and more effective.

Ask:

How does the AI SOC analyst adapt based on human analysts’ corrections or preferences over time?
Can I adjust the AI’s prioritization or response style via feedback?
How can the user flag a successful conversation with the AI to make future sessions easier and more effective?
Can you review and audit what the AI has learned from your team?

General example:

AI SOC Evaluation: Example of AI that continuously improves — *General example showing how Cursor’s Coding Rules feature helps developers continuously improve and adapt their preferences using natural language.*

Next-Gen AI for the SOC is Here — Are You Ready?

Don’t be the security leader who marvels at a shiny paint job while ignoring the revolutionary engine. When evaluating AI SOC analysts, focus on explainable intelligence, seamless integration into your team’s workflow, and deterministic AI that can independently plan and orchestrate all of the actions required to complete a high-level goal from end to end.

Finding an AI SOC analyst that truly understands context, empowers your analysts, and acts with proactive autonomy will ensure you’re not just keeping up with the latest tech but investing in a force multiplier for your security team.

Get the AI or Die Manifesto to learn strategic considerations, get insights from a CISO, and learn red flags and more questions to ask for an AI SOC evaluation.

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What is Cyber Threat Hunting? How to Stay Ahead of Attacks

By Torq

May 15, 2025

10 Minute Read

Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated as threat actors continually sharpen their tactics and upgrade their tools. Defending against these evolving threats is increasingly complex, especially in a landscape where cybersecurity ROI is measured in loss prevention rather than revenue generation.

Cyber threat hunting offers a proactive way to secure your environment by actively seeking out threats that evade traditional defenses. However, manual threat hunting is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and complicated by a growing shortage of skilled professionals.

In this blog, we’ll unpack everything you need to know about cyber threat hunting and show how Hyperautomation can help your team stay ahead of attackers by streamlining detection, investigation, and response without requiring massive overhead.

What is Threat Hunting in Cybersecurity?

Cyber Threat Hunting

Cyber threat hunting is a proactive cybersecurity process where trained individuals, called threat hunters, actively search for malicious cyber activities and potential threats that might have evaded traditional security measures. It involves going beyond automated security tools and alerts to investigate and identify hidden threats within a network or system.

The value of cyber threat hunting lies in these key properties:

Proactive approach: Unlike traditional security measures that react to alerts, threat hunting is a proactive process. Threat hunters actively seek out potential threats rather than waiting for them to be detected or, worse, erupt into a critical incident.
Augmenting automated systems: Threat hunting complements automated security tools by identifying threats that may have slipped past those systems.
Human expertise: It relies on the knowledge and skills of threat hunters who use their expertise, tools, and methodologies to identify malicious activities.
Targeted searches: Threat hunters develop hypotheses about potential threats based on threat intelligence, known attack techniques, and other factors, then they search for evidence to validate those hypotheses.
Focus on advanced threats: Threat hunting is beneficial for identifying advanced persistent threats (APTs) and other sophisticated attacks that can evade traditional security measures.

Why is Cyber Threat Hunting Important?

Most SOC tools operate reactively — they wait for indicators of compromise (IOCs) or known attack signatures to trigger alerts. However, today’s adversaries are stealthy, often residing in networks undetected for weeks or months. Cyber threat hunting flips the script.

Threat hunting proactively searches for unknown, suspicious behavior and zero-day threats that traditional detection tools miss. The benefits include:

Early threat detection and response: Threat hunters spot anomalies before damage occurs, enabling rapid, contained responses to reduce breach impact. Early detection and response can significantly reduce the potential damage and costs associated with cyberattacks.
Identification of persistent and complex threats: Advanced persistent threats (APTs) often evade SIEMs or endpoint detection and response (EDR). Threat hunting reveals long-dwelling attackers using subtle tactics.
Improved incident response efficiency: Hunting improves context and decision-making for incident response (IR) teams, reducing mean time to investigate (MTTI) and resolve (MTTR). By identifying and mitigating threats proactively, threat hunting strengthens an organization’s overall security posture.
Enhanced threat intelligence: The insights gained from threat hunting can also improve an organization’s threat intelligence and help them better understand their adversaries.

How Cyber Threat Hunting Works: 6 Methods

Cyber threat hunting isn’t a single technique — it’s a flexible, proactive approach that combines human expertise with data, context, and tooling. Depending on your team’s goals, tools, and maturity level, different methodologies can be used to uncover hidden threats and eliminate adversaries before they cause damage. Here are six of the most effective threat hunting methods in use today.

1. Hypothesis-Driven Hunting

This method begins with a well-formed theory about how an adversary might be operating within your environment. Hunters often base these hypotheses on current threat intelligence, past incidents, or a known threat actor’s tactics.

For example, a threat hunting team may ask, “Is an attacker using PowerShell for lateral movement across endpoints?” They then query logs, examine user activity, and look for anomalies that might validate or disprove that theory. This structured, scientific approach allows analysts to pursue purposeful leads and systematically uncover sophisticated threats.

2. Indicator of Attack (IoA)-Based Hunting

Rather than reacting to alerts, IoA-based threat hunting proactively searches for signs of attacker behavior that signal malicious intent — even if no breach has occurred. Analysts look for behavioral patterns and tactics often used by adversaries, such as a sudden surge in failed login attempts, suspicious registry modifications, or abnormal user behavior during off-hours.

By focusing on indicators of attack (IoAs) instead of indicators of compromise (IoCs), teams can identify active intrusion attempts earlier in the kill chain, often before data exfiltration or lateral movement occurs.

3. Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning

Threat hunting at scale benefits significantly from security automation, particularly through advanced analytics and machine learning (ML). These AI models are trained on historical attack data and behavioral baselines, helping analysts identify statistical anomalies and outliers across massive datasets.

For example, suppose a user suddenly begins downloading gigabytes of data from an unfamiliar endpoint. ML-driven tools can flag the deviation from normal behavior in that case, even if no specific IoA has been defined. This method increases speed and coverage, especially in cloud or hybrid environments.

4. Structured Hunting

Structured threat hunting leverages formal models and frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to organize and guide investigations. By using well-defined tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), analysts can systematically scan for known threat behaviors across endpoints, identities, and networks.

This method is beneficial for standardizing team processes, ensuring knowledge sharing, and aligning with compliance or threat modeling requirements. It also enables better documentation and repeatability of hunts, making it a valuable tool for maturing a cybersecurity program.

5. Unstructured Hunting

Unstructured hunting relies more on analyst intuition and real-world experience than on formal rules or frameworks. In this method, seasoned hunters follow their instincts, identifying suspicious patterns, log entries, or correlations that don’t match any known indicators — but still “feel off.”

This open-ended approach can surface novel attacks, zero-day behaviors, or insider threats that evade automated detection. While more time-consuming, unstructured hunting is crucial in developing hypotheses for future structured hunts and refining detection rules.

6. Situational or Entity-Driven Hunting

This method prioritizes hunting based on specific contexts — such as critical assets, high-risk users, or sensitive business functions. For example, threat hunters may target systems housing personally identifiable information (PII) or monitor executive accounts likely to be targeted in phishing or business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

Situational or entity-driven hunting ensures security teams protect what matters most by focusing on high-value targets and contextual threat intelligence. It can also quickly act on suspicious activity that might otherwise get lost in the noise.

Cyber Threat Hunting Process

Effective threat hunting follows a straightforward process. Here’s how top-performing teams approach it.

Trigger: A hunt often starts with a clue — a suspicious login, a new TTP from a threat intel feed, or a hunch. Triggers inform what to investigate.
Investigation: Hunters use SIEM, EDR, network traffic, and log data to dig deeper. Enrichment, correlation, and historical context help determine risk.
Resolution: If a threat is confirmed, it’s escalated for response, and hunting insights are used to improve detection rules and workflows in the future.

Cyber Threat Hunting Tools & Technologies

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): Aggregates logs across systems to provide a centralized view and real-time alerts.
EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response): Monitors and records activity on endpoints to uncover suspicious behavior.
MDR (Managed Detection and Response): Outsources threat detection and response to external experts, ideal for resource-limited teams.
Hyperautomation: Goes beyond basic automation. Combines AI, orchestration, and no-code/low-code tools to scale SOC threat detection and response with minimal manual effort. Hyperautomation platforms like Torq can enrich alerts, orchestrate threat investigations, and even automate entire cyber threat hunting workflows.

4 Cyber Threat Hunting Challenges & How to Navigate Them with Torq

Cyber threat hunting is an essential pillar of modern cybersecurity strategy, but it’s not without its obstacles. Today’s SOC teams face increasing complexity, resource constraints, and alert overload, which can hinder their ability to detect and respond to threats proactively.

Below are four of the most common challenges security teams encounter in threat hunting, along with how Torq’s Hyperautomation platform directly addresses them with AI-driven precision and scale.

1. Integrating Disparate Data Sources

The Challenge: Threat hunters rely on data from SIEM, EDR, firewalls, and cloud environments, which are often siloed.

How Torq Helps: Torq Hyperautomation breaks down these silos by integrating your entire security stack into a unified, low-code automation engine. With hundreds of pre-built integrations, Torq enables real-time data normalization, enrichment, and orchestration across all sources. Threat intel from platforms like VirusTotal or Recorded Future can be automatically enriched into alert streams, providing analysts with actionable context — fast. This consolidated view eliminates blind spots and empowers threat hunters to act confidently and quickly.

2. Alert Fatigue

The Challenge: Analysts drown in noisy, low-value alerts, making it difficult to spot real threats.

How Torq Helps: Torq uses agentic AI to combat alert fatigue. Torq ensures that only high-confidence, context-rich alerts reach analysts by filtering out noise, deduplicating alerts, and applying real-time prioritization logic. Low-risk or redundant alerts are automatically suppressed, and high-severity incidents are escalated to the right person or team through customized workflows. This triage process reduces alert volume by up to 95%, allowing teams to focus on what truly matters — critical threats that require human judgment.

3. False Positives

The Challenge: Traditional tools generate too many “maybe” threats — wasting time and delaying response. In fact, more than half of security teams say that false positives are a huge problem.

How Torq Helps: Torq uses intelligent case automation and prioritization to differentiate between real threats and false alarms intelligently. By analyzing historical resolution data, Torq can fine-tune playbooks to automatically suppress known false positives while continuously learning and adapting to your unique environment. This self-optimizing capability reduces alert fatigue and improves detection, cutting through the noise to surface high-priority incidents faster.

4. Limited Resources

The Challenge: Skilled threat hunters are in short supply — and expensive.

How Torq Helps: Torq HyperSOC empowers teams of all skill levels to participate in advanced threat hunting. Its intuitive low-code interface allows junior analysts to build and execute workflows without needing deep coding experience. Meanwhile, Torq’s AI agents led by Socrates, automatically handle routine triage, enrichment, and correlation, freeing up senior analysts to focus on deep-dive threat analysis and strategic improvements. The result is an autonomous SOC that can scale without scaling headcount.

The Bottom Line

Cyber threat hunting is too important to be slowed down by fragmented tools, noisy alerts, or stretched resources. Torq Hyperautomation modernizes the threat hunting process by combining unified data integration, real-time alert intelligence, and agentic AI, enabling any SOC team to hunt smarter, faster, and more efficiently.

Ready to eliminate your threat hunting roadblocks? See Torq Hyperautomation in action and learn how to evolve from reactive to proactive security today.

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Contents

What is a SOC Tool?

SOC Tools

5 Core Capabilities of Security Operations Center Tools

1. Continuous SOC Monitoring

2. Log Collection and Analysis

3. Threat Detection

4. Incident Response

5. Automation

The Top 10 SOC Tools in 2025

1. Log Collection and Management

2. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

3. Vulnerability Management

4. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

5. Email Security

6. Threat Hunting

7. Threat Intelligence

8. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

9. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

10. Automation

How Automation Transforms SOC Tools

How Torq Hyperautomation Transforms the SOC

Seamless Integration with Your Entire Security Stack

AI Agents That Work Like SOC Analysts

Natural Language-Driven Automation

Hyperautomation at Enterprise Scale

Built to Flex with Your Needs

Hyperautomation is the SOC Tool You Need Today

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Get AMP’d: Introducing the Torq Alliance & Momentum Partner Program

Torq + SSDLC: Where Secure Automation Begins

Contents

Hyperautomation: A SOC Must-Have

1. Endpoint Detection and Response

EDR Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and SentinelOne

2. Email Security

Email Security Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and VirusTotal

3. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM Hyperautomation in Action: Torq and Okta

Fast, Scalable Results… In Days

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Get AMP’d: Introducing the Torq Alliance & Momentum Partner Program

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Contents

Manual Phishing Triage: A Losing Battle for SOC Teams

What is Automated Phishing Response?

6 Hyperautomated Phishing Response Strategies and Tactics

1. Perimeter Defense: Hardening the Email Gateway

2. Identity and Access Control: Protecting Your People

3. Endpoint Security: Containing the Impact

4. The Human Element: Empowering Users as a Line of Defense

5. Data Protection & Incident Response: Minimizing the Damage

6. Continuous Improvement: Learning from Every Attack

Example Automated Phishing Alert Analysis Workflow in Torq

Case Study: Lennar Cuts Phishing Resolution from Hours to Minutes

Win the Phishing War with Automated Phishing Response

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Get AMP’d: Introducing the Torq Alliance & Momentum Partner Program

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Contents

What Is SecOps Automation?

Traditional SecOps Is Broken

Why Lean Teams Need SecOps Automation

Five Ways Automated SecOps Helps Level the Playing Field

1. Phishing

2. Threat Intelligence Enrichment

3. Incident Response

4. Vulnerability Management (VM)

5. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

SecOps Automation = Big Results for Lean Teams

Torq: The Leading Platform for SecOps Automation

What SecOps Automation Looks Like

Check Point

Global Retailer

Lennar

Scale Your Security Without Scaling Your Team

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