The future of SOC automation is dynamic and rapidly evolving, promising to revolutionize how security operations centers (SOCs) tackle their most pressing challenges. As cybersecurity threats grow in volume and sophistication, SOC teams are increasingly overwhelmed by alert fatigue, false positives, and a critical shortage of skilled professionals.

We recently sat down with Cybersecurity Researcher and Analyst Francis Odum to discuss his report exploring trends in SOC automation and how Torq HyperSOC™  solves the challenges legacy solutions failed to deliver on. 

The Evolution of SOC Automation

Early Days: Bespoke Scripts

In the early days of SOC automation, bespoke scripts were the primary tools used to streamline security operations. These scripts were often handcrafted by experienced analysts to automate repetitive tasks such as log parsing, alert triaging, and basic threat detection. While these custom scripts provided some level of efficiency, they had significant limitations. They were often brittle, difficult to maintain, and heavily reliant on the expertise of individual analysts who created them. This made scaling automation across the SOC challenging. Moreover, the scripts lacked the intelligence and adaptability to handle the growing complexity and volume of cyber threats. Despite these drawbacks, bespoke scripts laid the groundwork for future advancements in SOC automation, highlighting the potential for automation to alleviate some of the workload from human analysts.

The Rise and Fall of SOAR Platforms

As the limitations of bespoke scripts became apparent, we saw the emergence of Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms. Legacy SOAR platforms were designed to bring a more structured and scalable approach to SOC automation. They integrated various security tools and data sources, enabling automated workflows that could handle complex threat scenarios more effectively. SOAR platforms made hefty promises of increased efficiency and scalability in the SOC. Unfortunately, SOAR’s monolithic, rigid architecture led to a lack of integrations, limited flexibility, and major complexity issues. Today, SOAR solutions are being phased out by SOC teams looking for a more modern, scalable approach to security automation.

Torq HyperSOC™: The First Purpose-Built Hyperautomated SOC Solution

Hyperautomation represents the next frontier in SOC automation, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Unlike earlier approaches, hyperautomation aims to automate virtually every aspect of SOC operations, from threat detection and response to compliance and reporting. By leveraging AI and machine learning, hyperautomation can continuously learn and adapt to new threats, making SOCs more resilient and proactive. Additionally, hyperautomation platforms can orchestrate complex workflows that involve multiple tools and systems, providing a unified approach to cybersecurity management. As organizations face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, Torq HyperSOC™ offers a scalable and robust solution, enabling SOCs to operate at peak efficiency while freeing human analysts to focus on more strategic tasks.

What’s Next in SOC Automation

Automating Tier-One Analyst Tasks

Tier-one tasks, such as initial alert triage, data enrichment, and basic investigation, are often repetitive and time-consuming. Analysts can focus on more complex and critical issues by automating these processes. Automation not only speeds up response times but also reduces the chance of human error. Furthermore, it helps maintain high productivity even during high alert volumes, preventing burnout among analysts. Torq HyperSOC™ offers automation capabilities that ensure tier-one tasks are completed swiftly, allowing SOC teams to allocate their resources more strategically. This leads to a more effective security operation, where skilled professionals can focus on tasks that truly require their expertise.

AI Integration: LLMs and Beyond

AI integration has become a cornerstone of modern SOC automation, with large language models (LLMs) leading the way. These advanced AI models can process and analyze vast amounts of textual data, providing deeper insights into threat intelligence and incident reports. LLMs can assist in generating detailed incident summaries, recommending remediation steps, and even automating threat-hunting activities. Other applications of LLMs include unlocking the ability to create new integrations or build out automations using natural language, removing the barrier of entry for analysts who don’t have the necessary coding skills demanded by SOAR connectors and integration builders. Beyond LLMs, AI integration encompasses various machine learning algorithms designed to detect anomalies, predict potential threats, and optimize response strategies. The ability of AI to learn from historical data and adapt to new threat landscapes makes it an invaluable asset for SOCs. Furthermore, AI-driven analytics can correlate data from disparate sources, offering a more comprehensive view of the security environment. As AI technology continues to evolve, its integration into SOC operations will undoubtedly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of cybersecurity measures. 

The Vision of a Fully Hyperautomated SOC

A fully Hyperautomated SOC has already become a reality as we look at the modern security landscape. The modern SOC relies heavily on Hyperautomation to amplify the capabilities of human analysts, not replace them. Envision a system where sophisticated AI algorithms are continuously informed by vast troves of historical and real-time data, with humans providing the strategic oversight necessary to navigate the evolving threat landscape. This is precisely what Hyperautomation is already delivering and where SOAR solutions failed to rise to the challenge. In this modern Hyperautomated SOC, technology not only detects and counteracts threats faster but also forecasts and preemptively strengthens defenses against potential vulnerabilities. This level of human-guided automation promises to improve the speed of incident detection and mitigation, delivering expedited yet carefully vetted responses to emerging threats. A human-centric, hyperautomated SOC would ensure seamless compatibility with broader enterprise systems, promoting an integrated security orientation that comprehensively covers an organization. 

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The security operations center, or SOC, is the backbone of modern security operations. By centralizing security monitoring, detection, and response, SOCs help organizations manage security risks more efficiently and effectively.

But simply setting up a SOC doesn’t guarantee optimal security workflows. To get the very most from your SOC, you must automate its operations as much as possible. SOC automation allows teams to manage security threats with even greater speed, efficiency, and accuracy than they can in a SOC that relies on manual operations.

Keep reading for a dive into how SOC automation works, how to define SOC playbooks and workflows for your SOC, and which benefits automation in the SOC provides to both security teams and the business as a whole.

What Is a SOC?

A SOC (pronounced “sock”) is the part of a business that is responsible for managing security threats. A SOC is made up of the people and tools that handle:

• Threat intelligence, meaning the collection of data about potential security threats and risks.
• Security monitoring, which allows security teams to detect active risks and breaches.
• Security analysis, or the process of investigating threats and breaches in order to identify their root cause and plan a response operation.
• Security response, meaning the processes by which the security team reacts to identified threats.
• Recovery, which involves restoring systems to a secure state following a security incident.
• Post-incident reporting and analysis, which teams use to evaluate why an attack occurred and plan strategies for preventing a similar incident from happening again in the future.

Although the term “security operations center” may seem to imply that the SOC is an actual facility or physical location, that’s not always the case. Ultimately, a SOC is an organizational function. You don’t need all of your security analysts to sit in the same room in order to have a SOC. As long as there is a team within your business that handles the security tasks described above, you have a SOC in place.

What Is SOC Automation?

SOC automation is the process of automating some or all aspects of SOC operations. When you automate your SOC, you replace manual security workflows with automated ones.

For example, SOC automation might entail automatically collecting and parsing threat intelligence reports in order to identify which threat intelligence data is most relevant to your business based on the types of resources it relates to and the types of risks it addresses. You could perform this process manually, but SOC automation allows you to do it faster and with fewer staff resources.

As another example, SOC automation could take the form of automated security analysis. Instead of relying on engineers to investigate and analyze a threat manually, you could automate that SOC function using tools that assess the threat’s potential impact and trace it back to its root cause.

The Benefits of SOC Automation

The main reasons to consider SOC automation include:

• Speed: Automation helps security teams detect and respond to incidents faster.
• Efficiency: Automation allows the SOC to do more with fewer staff resources.
• Scale: Relatedly, automation helps the SOC to contend with threats of increasing volume and complexity without having to scale up the size of the security team.
• Better use of human capital: By automating routine aspects of security response, SOC automation allows engineers to apply their skills where they matter most: solving complex problems that require original thought and analysis, as opposed to performing mundane, repetitive tasks.

These advantages of automation in the SOC reflect the benefits of automation in general. However, given that the ability to respond quickly and efficiently is particularly critical in the context of security, automating the SOC arguably delivers even more value than automating other parts of the business. It’s nice to automate, say, the deployment of an application to a server, which would save a bit of time and effort. But it’s not absolutely critical. By contrast, detecting and remediating threats in as little time as possible with the help of security automation is absolutely essential for preventing risks from turning into active breaches. 

Aren’t SOCs Always Automated?

It’s worth noting that, to a certain extent, virtually every SOC has some level of automation.

For example, security monitoring, which is one of the core functions of a SOC, is typically performed using tools that automatically collect and analyze data to reveal anomalies that could be the sign of a threat. SOCs may also automate some of the auxiliary processes required to drive security workflows, such as providing communication channels between stakeholders.

However, the typical SOC relies mostly on manual operations for handling more complex tasks. It doesn’t automate work like security analysis or response. Those processes are harder to automate because every threat or risk requires a different analysis and response process, so many teams perform them manually.

The goal of SOC automation, then, is to automate those aspects of a SOC that teams have conventionally managed using a manual approach. So, if your SOC is automated, you go above and beyond basic security automations; you automate the more complex and less predictable components of your security operations.

The Role of Playbooks in SOC Workflows

A fundamental building block of SOC automation is the security playbook. A playbook defines a security workflow by outlining the steps teams will take to handle different types of security incidents. By developing SOC playbooks ahead of time, teams avoid having to make a response plan every time an incident occurs.

That said, simply having playbooks on hand doesn’t mean that you’ve automated your SOC. In order to enable complete SOC automation, your playbooks must integrate with other security tools and workflows so that your teams can deploy the playbooks easily and efficiently.

For example, in a fully automated SOC, monitoring tools might detect a certain type of risk, then identify the playbook that the team should use to respond to it. Then, the SOC can automatically keep track of the team’s progress as it works through the steps defined in the playbook. The SOC may also generate automatic post-incident reports based on the procedures laid out in the playbook.

What If There Is No Playbook for My Cyber Incident?

Of course, it’s impossible to create SOC playbooks ahead of time that address every type of incident. There will always be situations that your team didn’t anticipate, and for which it therefore didn’t prepare a playbook.

Even in those situations, however, the playbooks you do have can be useful for minimizing the manual effort required to respond to a security incident. During the response planning stage, your team can build on or borrow from existing SOC playbooks to craft a response strategy for a novel threat.

As a basic example, imagine you have a cyber incident playbook that defines a response plan for handling malware after you discover it on a server, but the security incident you’re dealing with involves malware inside a Kubernetes environment, not a standalone server.

These are different scenarios because they involve fundamentally different types of infrastructure or hosting environments. However, there is still likely to be a lot of overlap in the response process to each threat. In both instances, your team would need to identify the type of malware, then determine the most efficient way to remove it.

So, although the removal process would probably be different if you’re dealing with containers (where you could most likely replace the infected containers with new containers based on clean images) as opposed to a server (where you may need to scrub the malware from the server because you can’t just drop a new server into place), the initial stages of the response process would be more or less the same. The playbook for server malware response could therefore serve as the basis for responding to an incident involving malware on containers, saving your SOC from having to plan a response totally from scratch.

Of course, in order to automate the response process, your SOC would still need to be able to recognize the similarities between a malware incident in both types of environments, then alert your team to the relevant playbook. This can be done, but it requires nuanced, sophisticated SOC automation. Automation that is based on simple rules (like linking monitoring alerts to specific playbooks) wouldn’t be enough in this case to help the SOC automate the response process as much as possible based on the available resources.

What is the difference between cyber security and SOC?

A SOC is part of a company’s overall cybersecurity strategy – it’s the heart of security operations and where key functions like security monitoring, detection, and response occur. 

But a SOC is not the sole component of cybersecurity. It is one pillar of a complete cybersecurity strategy.

What is a SOC tool?

A SOC tool is any cybersecurity tool that is used in the security operations center.

What are the key tools in a SOC?

A SOC can comprise a number of different security solutions. Most modern SOCs include a combination of security automation and hyperautomation, endpoint protection/endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and intrusion detection systems (IDS), networks security solutions, cloud SIEM/log management platforms, extended detection and response (XDR) platforms, mobile device management (MDM), asset discovery, vulnerability assessment and more.

What is the difference between SIEM and a SOC?
Security information and event management (SIEM) is a technology that supports threat detection, compliance, and security incident management. It collects and analyzes security events. While both SIEM and a SOC monitor for security events, SIEM is just one component of a SOC strategy and is often used as one tool within a SOC to detect and manage threats. 

Conclusion

Building a SOC is one step toward modernizing security operations, but it’s not enough on its own. Organizations should seek to automate SOC as much as possible – even in cases where there is no preexisting playbook to guide response operations. SOC automation helps security teams work faster while also maximizing their chances of shutting down threats before they cause harm to the business.