Research Security Automation 101 Use Cases

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

By Torq
May 15, 2025
10 Minute Read
Torq enhances cyber threat hunting with automation and integration

Contents

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

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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AI Hyperautomation Security Automation 101 Use Cases

Automate SOC 2 Compliance: Stay Ready, Not Just Audited

By Torq
May 14, 2025
9 Minute Read

Contents

Information security is a top priority for every organization, especially those relying on third-party vendors like SaaS platforms and cloud providers. When sensitive data is mishandled, the risks are significant: data breaches, ransomware, and reputational damage.

For modern SaaS and cloud-first companies, compliance is a fundamental requirement to earn trust, win business, and prove operational integrity. Yet, for many teams, achieving and maintaining compliance readiness remains a slow, manual, and spreadsheet-heavy burden.

SOC 2 is a widely recognized auditing framework designed to ensure service providers securely handle data. For any business that values trust and transparency, SOC 2 compliance is the baseline when evaluating cloud-based partners.

Hyperautomation platforms offer a smarter, faster path to SOC 2 compliance, transforming compliance from an annual fire drill into an always-on, audit-ready advantage. 

What Is SOC 2 and Why Does It Matter Today?

SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls 2) is a voluntary compliance standard that specifies how service organizations should manage customer data to protect their security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. It’s a framework developed by the AICPA to help businesses demonstrate their commitment to data security and build trust with clients. 

SOC 2 compliance outlines how service providers should manage customer data based on five Trust Services Criteria:

  1. Security: Protect systems against unauthorized access.
  2. Availability: Ensure systems are operational and accessible.
  3. Processing Integrity: Guarantee complete, valid, accurate, and timely system processing.
  4. Confidentiality: Restrict access to sensitive information.
  5. Privacy: Govern the collection, use, and disposal of personal information.

There are two types of SOC 2 reports:

  • Type I: A snapshot in time that verifies whether controls are properly designed.
  • Type II: A more rigorous report that tests control effectiveness over a period (typically 3-12 months).

SOC 2 Type II has become the industry expectation for most SaaS vendors, especially when handling sensitive customer data. It signals a company’s commitment to long-term security and operational maturity.

Why is SOC 2 compliance important?

Builds trust: It demonstrates a commitment to data security and helps build trust with clients and stakeholders. 

Mitigates risk: It helps organizations identify and mitigate data security and privacy risks. 

Competitive advantage: SOC 2 compliance can be a competitive differentiator in some industries. 

Meeting client requirements: Many organizations require their vendors to be SOC 2 compliant. 

Regulatory compliance: While not a legal requirement, SOC 2 compliance can help organizations meet other regulatory requirements related to data privacy and security.

How does SOC 2 compliance work?

Getting a SOC 2 report isn’t a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process with distinct steps. Here’s a breakdown of how organizations achieve and maintain compliance.

  1. Choose relevant Trust Services Criteria: Organizations select which of the five criteria apply to their business and data handling practices. 
  2. Implement controls: Organizations implement controls to meet the selected criteria. 
  3. Undergo an audit: An independent CPA firm audits the organization’s controls and provides a report. 
  4. Maintain compliance: Organizations should continuously monitor their controls and undergo regular audits to maintain compliance.

Why Manual SOC 2 Compliance Is a Pain

  • Manual evidence collection takes forever. Most companies still rely on spreadsheets and screenshots to track audit artifacts. Gathering, reviewing, and validating evidence for auditors takes hundreds of hours across departments.
  • Tracking controls is inconsistent and hard to manage. Multiple teams often own security controls using disconnected tools. Tracking each control’s health, coverage, and effectiveness is fragmented and prone to gaps and oversights.
  • It’s not a one-and-done. SOC 2 Type II isn’t just about proving you were compliant once. It’s about showing your security practices are consistent over time. That means continuous evidence generation, alert monitoring, and policy enforcement daily.

SOC automation tools help teams map their security operations directly to these trust principles, automatically enforcing controls across hybrid, multi-cloud, and containerized environments.

How SOC 2 Compliance Automation Works

Achieving and maintaining SOC 2 compliance can be a manual, time-intensive process — but it doesn’t have to be. By leveraging AI and compliance automation, organizations can simplify how they meet and demonstrate compliance across the five Trust Services Criteria.

Integrates with Your Stack

What it means: Automation tools plug directly into your existing ecosystem — cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, identity providers like Okta, and collaboration tools like Jira and Slack, making compliance enforcement and monitoring seamless and real-time.

How Torq does it: Torq connects natively with your infrastructure, security, and productivity tools using out-of-the-box integrations. These integrations fuel automated workflows that pull relevant signals (e.g., IAM policy changes, unencrypted S3 buckets, open security groups) and act on them immediately. Whether it’s ingesting audit logs from AWS CloudTrail or pushing alerts to Slack, Torq bridges the gap between tools without manual configuration.

Maps to Trust Principles and Controls

What it means: Modern compliance platforms organize automation workflows around the Trust Services Criteria. This makes it easier to align security controls with compliance requirements and prove that each area is covered.

How Torq does it: With Torq, you can build a custom compliance runbook or use pre-built templates that map specific security checks to SOC 2 controls. Each runbook clearly logs which control it’s addressing, such as enforcing encryption standards or validating role-based access controls. This creates a structured, traceable link between your workflows and SOC 2 requirements, ready for auditor review.

Constant Monitoring, Not Periodic Check-ins

What it means: Compliance is an ongoing effort. Automation ensures that control monitoring happens in real time, continuously validating your posture and preventing drift.

How Torq does it: Torq runs real-time compliance checks through scheduled or event-driven workflows. For example, any time a new cloud resource is deployed, Torq automatically evaluates it against predefined compliance criteria. Misconfigurations trigger alerts, ticket creation, or even automated remediation.

Generates Audit-Friendly Evidence Automatically

What it means: Instead of compiling screenshots and hunting down logs days before an audit, automation systems gather and organize evidence as it’s created, giving you a full audit trail at any time.

How Torq does it: Torq logs every workflow execution, including input data, actions taken, and outcomes. These logs are stored in a structured format, ready to be presented to auditors as proof of continuous compliance. You can also export or share audit evidence directly through Torq’s reporting tools or integrate with ticketing systems for compliance task tracking.

6 Benefits of Automating SOC 2 Compliance

  1. Reduced audit prep time and cost: Automating evidence collection and control validation can shrink audit timelines by weeks and reduce consulting fees.
  2. Better visibility into control health: Dashboards and real-time alerts let you see which controls are compliant, which need attention, and where risk is growing.
  3. Fewer human errors: No more copy-pasting logs into spreadsheets. Automation ensures consistency and accuracy at every step.
  4. Always-on compliance posture: Your organization is ready for an audit at any time. Continuous monitoring makes compliance a state of operations, not a one-time event.
  5. Easier collaboration across departments: Automation brings security, engineering, and compliance teams onto the same platform with shared visibility and workflows.
  6. Increased trust with customers and partners: A real-time compliance program sends a powerful message to customers: Your organization takes data protection seriously.

How Torq Helps You Automate SOC 2 Compliance

Torq HyperSOCTM delivers a powerful, unified platform to streamline and scale your SOC 2 compliance program across your entire environment. Torq eliminates manual bottlenecks and transforms compliance into a continuous, self-sustaining process by orchestrating complex workflows across tools, teams, and time zones.

Integrations: Unified Visibility Across Your Stack

Torq connects to your entire cloud and security ecosystem in minutes using out-of-the-box integrations. Whether you’re running workloads in AWS, GCP, or Azure, managing identities in Okta, or tracking development workflows in GitHub and Jira, Torq can tap into these sources and extract the signals you need for compliance.

  • Monitor infrastructure changes in real-time (e.g., new EC2 instance launches, S3 bucket policy updates).
  • Ingest identity events from Okta or Azure AD to validate least-privilege access.
  • Track policy exceptions and code deployment events directly from GitHub or CI/CD tools.

Runbooks: Automate Evidence, Reviews & Enforcement

Torq’s no-code and low-code playbooks make automating key SOC 2 tasks easy without relying on engineering time.

  • Automatically collect audit evidence when key events occur, like provisioning new users, updating firewall rules, or completing access reviews.
  • Launch scheduled playbooks to ensure periodic checks (e.g., quarterly access audits) happen without fail.
  • Enforce policies across cloud, SaaS, and internal systems by detecting and responding to real-time misconfigurations.

Monitoring: Continuous Control Validation

Instead of ad hoc or periodic checks, Torq enables 24/7 control monitoring to ensure compliance with SOC 2 requirements.

  • Create detection workflows that monitor changes in cloud configurations, access policies, and security controls.
  • Trigger real-time alerts for violations, like unencrypted storage, public resources, or unauthorized privilege escalation.
  • Use control dashboards to see exactly which requirements are covered, which are failing, and what actions were taken.

Remediation: Automated Issue Handling

Not every compliance issue needs manual intervention. Torq’s team of AI Agents intelligently distinguishes between routine fixes and high-risk violations, so your team can focus on what matters most.

  • Auto-remediate common misconfigurations (e.g., remove public S3 access, disable unused accounts).
  • Escalate critical events to the right teams via Jira, Slack, or your preferred ticketing system.
  • Track remediation efforts as part of your audit log, ensuring every action is documented and reviewable.

Reporting: Audit-Ready, All the Time

Preparing for an audit shouldn’t be a fire drill. Torq automatically compiles and organizes evidence into structured, SOC 2-aligned reports.

  • Generate reports categorized by the five Trust Services Criteria.
  • Include timestamps, actor information, and remediation history for every logged event.
  • Export or share directly with auditors and GRC teams.

With Torq, your SOC 2 program becomes:

  • Always on: Continuous monitoring, detection, and evidence gathering.
  • Always improving: Automated feedback loops help eliminate recurring issues.
  • Always audit-ready: Pre-organized, verified data ensures you’re prepared year-round.

SOC 2 Compliance, the Hyperautomated Way

SOC 2 isn’t just a regulatory hoop to jump through. It reflects how seriously your company takes security, privacy, and operational excellence. But maintaining that standard manually is a recipe for burnout, errors, and missed risks.

Torq HyperSOC gives you the power to turn SOC 2 from a painful annual scramble into a seamless, always-on system. Faster audits. Lower risk. Greater trust.

Ready to make SOC 2 compliance effortless? Read the SOC Efficiency Guide to see how leading teams are transforming SecOps with Torq.

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AI Hyperautomation Security Automation 101 Use Cases

What is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)? Why Hyperautomation is Better

By Torq
May 13, 2025
10 Minute Read
Learn what SOAR is, where it fails, and why Torq’s Hyperautomation Platform is a smarter, faster alternative for modern security.

Contents

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) promised streamlined workflows, rapid incident responses, and reduced security analyst workloads. But as cybersecurity threats grow more sophisticated, legacy SOAR solutions revealed their critical limitations. Static, rigid workflows and cumbersome integration processes have left many SOCs overwhelmed, struggling with slow response times, high security alert fatigue, and fragmented security toolsets.

Today, traditional SOAR platforms are becoming obsolete, unable to keep pace with rapidly evolving cyber threats. Legacy SOAR solutions typically rely on static playbooks and manual script updates, which quickly become outdated, failing to adapt dynamically to new threats or changing environments. Additionally, traditional SOAR platforms often come with steep learning curves, extensive deployment timelines, and hidden cost, which limit their practicality and reduce their overall ROI.

Hyperautomation and advanced agentic AI tools like Torq offer a powerful alternative, transforming security operations by automating dynamically, intelligently, and at scale. Unlike legacy SOAR, Hyperautomation provides flexibility with no-code workflows, real-time contextual enrichment, and seamless integrations, eliminating the need for extensive manual intervention and continuous maintenance. By leveraging advanced AI-driven tools, SOC teams can proactively manage threats, dramatically reduce analyst fatigue, and significantly improve response times.

What is SOAR in Cybersecurity?

SOAR

Legacy Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) was built to stitch together security tools — but relies on brittle scripts and static playbooks. It promised efficiency but delivered complexity, blind spots, and burnout. It’s dead because the modern SOC demands dynamic, AI-driven action, not legacy code and lag time. See why SOAR is dead.

SOAR is composed of three components: 

  1. Orchestration: Orchestration connects disparate security tools into a cohesive ecosystem. SOAR tools coordinate actions and share data across multiple platforms by integrating various security solutions..
  2. Automation: Automation enables SOC teams to execute repetitive security tasks without human intervention. Common automated actions include blocking IP addresses, isolating infected endpoints, or generating reports..
  3. Response: Security orchestration and automation provide the foundation for response. Response is where detection turns into action.

How Does SOAR Work?

Data collection: SOAR aggregates alerts and telemetry from SIEMs, firewalls, cloud environments, endpoints, and threat intelligence sources to provide centralized visibility.

Data analysis: It applies correlation rules or basic machine learning to identify indicators of compromise (IOCs), anomalies, or attack patterns.

Enrichment: Alerts are enriched with contextual data like user behavior, asset value, or known threat intelligence to support investigation.

Triage and investigation: Automated playbooks classify incidents by type or severity. Analysts manually investigate with supporting evidence and logs.

Response: Once verified, predefined playbooks carry out static actions like isolating devices, disabling accounts, or opening IT tickets.

By orchestrating and automating these stages, SOAR platforms aimed to improve incident response times, reduce human error, and standardize security operations. However, traditional SOAR often falls short due to rigid playbooks, brittle integrations, and high maintenance requirements.

Why SOAR Fell Short — and How Hyperautomation Delivers

SOAR was supposed to be the silver bullet for overloaded SOCs, promising faster response, streamlined workflows, and fewer manual tasks. But, in practice, legacy SOAR platforms introduced new complexity, slowed response times, and failed to adapt to real-world threats.

Torq Hyperautomation™ was purpose-built to fix what SOAR broke. It eliminates the inflexible playbooks, easy-to-break integrations, and alert overload that plague traditional platforms, replacing them with intelligent, adaptable workflows that actually deliver on the promise of automation. Here’s how they compare.

Response Time to Incidents

Reality: SOAR workflows are code-heavy, slow to implement, and difficult to adapt, significantly limiting response speed.

Torq Advantage: Torq uses real-time, no-code/low-code workflows that adapt instantly, enabling immediate response without extensive engineering or programming expertise.  Security teams can respond to threats the moment they’re detected, without delays.

Analyst Fatigue

Reality: SOAR solutions require extensive manual setup, continuous maintenance, and scripting, further burdening analysts.

Torq Advantage: Torq’s AI-assisted automation is ready out-of-the-box and requires minimal upkeep, significantly alleviating SOC analyst fatigue by automatically handling repetitive tasks.

Fewer False Positives

Reality: Static correlation rules in legacy SOAR platforms often lack necessary context, resulting in a high volume of false positives that inundate analysts.

Torq Advantage: Torq dynamically enriches alerts with real-time, contextual intelligence, automatically prioritizing legitimate threats and dramatically reducing false positives.

Centralized Visibility and Control

Reality: Legacy SOAR platforms typically require cumbersome custom integrations, causing data silos and fragmented visibility.

Torq Advantage: Torq integrates seamlessly with hundreds of security tools, delivering immediate unified visibility and actionable insights from the start.

Collaboration Across Teams

Reality: SOAR isolates SOC teams with dashboards that don’t effectively bridge departmental gaps or workflow handoffs.

Torq Advantage: Torq proactively shares enriched alerts and contextual data directly via collaboration tools like Slack, Jira, and Teams, enabling cross-departmental efficiency and accelerated decision-making.

Efficiency and ROI on Existing Security Tools

Reality: Complex SOAR deployments often result in shelfware due to their slow implementation, limited scalability, and difficulty in maintenance, severely restricting efficiency and ultimately ROI.

Torq Advantage: Torq provides immediate deployment, effortless scalability, increased SOC efficiency, and continuous enhancement of existing security tools, resulting in quick, measurable ROI improvements.

SIEM Integration

Reality: Legacy SOAR systems were meant to complement SIEM by responding to alerts faster. Instead, they add friction, slowing down triage and overwhelming analysts with manually tuned workflows that can’t scale with modern SIEM telemetry.

Torq Advantage: Torq seamlessly ingests SIEM alerts and enriches them with real-time context from across the security stack, automatically prioritizing, triaging, and triggering response workflows without manual effort. It transforms SIEM data from noise into action, accelerating time-to-response and eliminating the bottlenecks SOAR was supposed to solve.

Repeatable, Scalable Response Workflows

Reality: Static SOAR playbooks become outdated and ineffective as threats evolve and environments shift.

Torq Advantage: Torq’s dynamic workflows adapt automatically, staying continuously effective in combating evolving threats and environmental changes, ensuring resilience and scalability for any size organization.

Threat Intelligence Automation and Utilization

Reality: Traditional SOAR tools struggle to utilize threat intelligence effectively, resulting in missed opportunities for proactive measures and a reactive security posture

Torq Advantage: Our platform automatically correlates threat feeds with real-time alerts and events, instantly enriching cases with context that would otherwise take hours to collect. Analysts get a full picture of the threat landscape without leaving their workflow, enabling faster, smarter decisions and more successful threat hunting.

Integrated Vulnerability Management

Reality: SOAR platforms keep vulnerability management in a silo, disconnected from the broader incident response cycle. 

Torq Advantage: Torq bakes vulnerability management directly into incident response. Our platform continuously pulls in vulnerability data, prioritizes it based on live threat intelligence, and automates the next best action — whether that’s patching, escalating, or isolating impacted systems. That means zero delay between discovering a weakness and neutralizing it.

Optimized Threat Hunting Capabilities

Reality: Threat hunting with SOAR often means toggling between tools, manually stitching together clues, and hoping nothing slips through the cracks. It’s slow, disjointed, and easy to get wrong.

Torq Advantage: Torq brings everything together, from data sources to actions, in a single, Hyperautomated workflow. Analysts can launch cyber threat hunts with one click, rely on Torq to handle enrichment and correlation, and focus their time on analysis and response. 

Keep Up With Threats You Haven’t Seen Yet

Reality: As cyber threats continue to evolve, traditional SOAR solutions are unable to keep pace, leaving SOC teams at a disadvantage. 

Torq Advantage: Torq HyperSOCTM is built for change. With a no-code interface, AI architecture, and agentic AI, SOC teams can adapt to new threats in minutes. Whether onboarding a new tool, facing a new TTP, or launching an entirely new use case, Torq gives the agility to do it at machine speed.

The Pitfalls and Shortcomings of Traditional SOAR Platforms

So, where did SOAR go wrong? Despite its early promise, legacy SOAR platforms are buckling under the weight of today’s security demands, plagued by technical debt, operational friction, and outdated architecture. Here’s where they fall short:

  • Steep learning curve and complexity: SOAR solutions often require specialized knowledge, making them difficult and time-consuming to deploy and manage.
  • Static playbooks: Playbooks built in traditional SOAR tools lack flexibility, quickly becoming outdated and ineffective.
  • Poor integrations and limited interoperability: Integration complexities frequently result in limited interoperability, leaving critical data fragmented across isolated tools.
  • Disconnected tools, fragmented data: Despite promises of centralization, many SOAR platforms leave vital security tools disconnected, exacerbating inefficiencies.
  • Alert overload: Without dynamic context, traditional SOAR platforms struggle to differentiate legitimate threats from noise, overwhelming security analysts.
  • Long implementation timelines: Implementing SOAR solutions can take months, significantly delaying any potential benefits.
  • High cost with limited ROI: Legacy SOAR investments often fail to deliver sufficient value due to high upfront costs, ongoing maintenance expenses, and poor usability.
The SOAR is Dead Manifesto: Why Hyperautomation is What’s Next. Download the Manfesto

SOAR is Dead, Thanks to Hyperautomation

As cybersecurity threats grow more advanced and SOC teams face escalating pressure, legacy SOAR simply can’t keep up. Torq’s Hyperautomation platform replaces outdated SOAR with a smarter, faster, and far more adaptive solution. Built for the modern SOC, it combines AI-native automation, limitless integrations, and scalable cloud architecture to solve problems SOAR was never designed to address.

Torq Hyperautomation transcends traditional SOAR capabilities by introducing:

  • Hyperautomation and dynamic workflows: Unlike traditional SOAR platforms with rigid, linear playbooks, Torq’s Hyperautomation workflows are built to support complex logic. This enables security teams to design multiple response paths within a single workflow. This allows teams to easily look for exceptions, outliers, and conditional scenarios without rewriting or reconfiguring playbooks each time a threat or environment changes. 
  • No-code/low-code integrations: Security teams can integrate any tool or data source in minutes, eliminating the development bottlenecks and vendor lock-in associated with traditional SOAR.
  • AI-assisted decision-making: Torq’s multi-agent system, led by Socrates the AI SOC Analyst, doesn’t just follow rules — it plans, adapts, and makes autonomous decisions based on contextual awareness. It handles most Tier-1 tasks without human input and elevates complex cases with intelligent summaries and prioritization.
  • Context-aware playbooks: Legacy SOAR relies on static if/then logic. Torq replaces that with workflows that adjust actions based on threat intelligence, user identity, behavioral context, and risk level.
  • Cloud-native, scalable architecture: SOAR’s monolithic architecture creates scaling headaches and performance ceilings. Torq’s elastic, event-driven architecture scales horizontally with guaranteed SLAs, real-time API sync, and zero performance degradation, whether you’re processing 10 events per hour or 10,000 per second.

The result is a complete transformation of security operations. Hyperautomation doesn’t just automate response; it enables continuous detection, intelligent triage, enriched case management, and full-lifecycle resolution.

Where SOAR added layers of complexity, Torq removes them. Where SOAR overwhelmed security analysts, Torq augments them. And where SOAR promised outcomes it couldn’t deliver, Torq is delivering those outcomes.

Move Beyond SOAR to Hyperautomation

While SOAR was a significant step forward in security automation, its limitations are evident. Modern SOC teams require dynamic, adaptive, and intelligent tools that can scale effortlessly and deliver immediate value.

Hyperautomation, as delivered by Torq, empowers SOCs to achieve true operational agility, dramatically faster response times, and improved overall security posture, without the complexity and rigidity of traditional SOAR.

Luckily, if you’re already using a SOAR platform, Torq makes migration effortless. Torq Hyperautomation can ingest your existing workflows, integrate with your current tools, replicate, and radically improve your existing use cases.

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Customers Hyperautomation Use Cases

Stop Retail Cyberattacks with SOC Automation

By Bob Boyle
May 12, 2025
9 Minute Read
Learn how retail cybersecurity SOCs are using security Hyperautomation to streamline operations and defend against threats.

Contents

Retail companies are high-value targets for cybercriminals. With sprawling infrastructures, complex supply chains, and large amounts of customer data, retailers are a goldmine for bad actors. In 2024, the With massive volumes of customer data, sprawling store networks, vulnerable point-of-sale systems, and complex supply chains, retail businesses are prime targets for ransomware, phishing, credential theft, and supply chain intrusions. 

At the same time, cybersecurity teams are under intense pressure to protect operations, uphold compliance, and respond to cyber threats instantly, all without disrupting customer experience. Traditional security tools can’t keep up. 

That’s why more retailers are turning to security Hyperautomation to transform their SOCs, eliminate manual work, and defend against today’s most sophisticated threats. This blog explores the top use cases for cybersecurity in the retail industry and shows how a leading global fashion retailer scaled their SOC with Torq.

Why Cybersecurity in Retail Demands a New Approach

Retail has become one of the most targeted industries, accounting for one in four cyberattacks. With sprawling networks, complex digital supply chains, and massive amounts of sensitive customer data, the retail industry accounted for 24% of all cyberattacks in 2024 — more than any other vertical. The average cost of a data breach in retail has climbed to $3.28 million.

Cybersecurity in the retail industry is becoming more difficult to manage due to the rise in e-commerce (84% of consumers now shop online), omnichannel platforms, and distributed teams. Cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in POS systems, third-party vendors, and cloud environments using tactics like phishing, ransomware, and credential theft.

Cybersecurity Challenges in the Retail Industry

High alert volumes with limited analyst headcount: Retail SOCs work with thousands of alerts daily, many of which are false positives or low-priority noise. With small teams stretched thin across locations and time zones, critical threats can easily slip through the cracks. This alert overload leads to burnout, slower response times, and dangerous blind spots in the attack surface.

Manual ticket handling and case management: Legacy workflows rely heavily on human intervention, from assigning tickets to gathering evidence and escalating incidents. This manual process is time-consuming and error-prone, making it nearly impossible to keep up with today’s speed and complexity of threats. SOC analysts spend more time managing systems than securing them.

Access and identity control challenges: Retail businesses must manage thousands of users across stores, warehouses, and corporate systems. Controlling access is a daily challenge, especially for temporary or third-party users. Without SOC automation, granting and revoking admin rights or privileged access becomes inconsistent, increasing insider risk and potential compliance violations.

Customer service expectations and compliance demands: Downtime is not an option in retail. Customers expect seamless transactions and real-time digital experiences, while regulatory bodies demand strict adherence to data privacy and security standards (e.g., PCI DSS, GDPR). Security teams must ensure continuous protection without disrupting customer-facing operations, a delicate balancing act made harder by outdated tools and manual processes.

Top Cyber Threats Targeting Retailers

  • Ransomware attacks: Threat actors deploy file-encrypting malware to lock critical retail infrastructure, such as inventory databases and POS systems, and then demand cryptocurrency payments in exchange for decryption keys. This often stops operations and disrupts revenue streams.
  • Phishing campaigns: Adversaries use targeted social engineering and spoofed domains to deliver payloads or harvest credentials, enabling lateral movement, privilege escalation, and subsequent exploitation across retail IT and cloud environments.
  • Point-of-sale (POS) malware: POS malware infiltrates endpoints via vulnerable network paths or infected third-party software, intercepting unencrypted track data and exfiltrating payment card information to command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.
  • Supply chain compromise: Attackers exploit weak security controls in upstream vendors or software suppliers to insert backdoors or manipulate trusted integrations, providing persistent access into the retailer’s internal systems and customer databases.
  • Insider threats: Authorized users — either negligently or maliciously — circumvent access controls, exfiltrate sensitive data, or introduce malware into the network, exploiting gaps in monitoring, logging, and least-privilege enforcement.

These mounting threats and operational challenges reveal a simple truth: retail cybersecurity can’t keep relying on manual effort and legacy tooling. The sheer volume, speed, and sophistication of attacks demand real-time detection, automated response, and continuous enforcement of access policies across a sprawling ecosystem. 

By replacing reactive, fragmented workflows with intelligent, end-to-end automation, Torq Hyperautomation empowers retail SOCs to instantly triage alerts, investigate threats, and respond autonomously — at scale. It’s not just faster; it’s the only sustainable path forward.

How Torq Hyperautomation Solves Retail’s Biggest SOC Challenges

1. Automating Security Case Management to Fight Breaches

Torq automatically ingests and prioritizes open security incidents from tools like Wiz, enriches them with actionable context, creates complete cases, and routes them based on severity and team workflows, eliminating the need for repetitive, manual triage.

Workflow Steps:

  1. Filter Wiz event data to select incidents with status ‘OPEN’ and severity ‘MEDIUM’, ‘HIGH’, or ‘CRITICAL’.
  2. Transform data using Data Agent (AI-generated data transformation) operator to prepare it for case creation.
  3. Create a new case with detailed incident information and links.
  4. Add a quick action button to the case for advancing investigation phases based on the assigned runbook.
  5. Extract indicators of compromise (IOCs) from incident alerts.
  6. Populate observables within the security case with the newly extracted IOCs.
  7. Update case severity based on incident severity and:
    1. IF case severity changes to ‘CRITICAL’ or ‘HIGH’, change the case state to ‘TRIAGE’ and assign the case to the appropriate Tier-2 analyst. 
    2. IF case severity changes to ‘MEDIUM’ or ‘LOW’, change the case state to ‘TRIAGE’ and assign the case to Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, for remediation.

2. Real-Time Threat Intelligence to Combat Phishing and Ransomware Attacks 

With integrations like CrowdStrike and threat intelligence tools (VirusTotal, Recorded Future), Torq analyzes command line activity and extracts IOCs using AI. It flags risks early and updates case observables in real time to stop evolving ransomware attacks and phishing before damage occurs.

Automate the process of retrieving, analyzing, and managing threat intelligence data from CrowdStrike alerts, integrating AI Task Agent operator analysis, and updating case observables.

Workflow Steps:

  1. List Crowdstrike case events and filter them based on [custom] criteria.
  2. Create a session with CrowdStrike, retrieve alert details, and add to case.
  3. Filter and process command line data using the AI Task Agent for analysis.
  4. Extract and filter IOCs from alert details.
  5. Compare new IOCs with existing case observables and identify unique ones.
  6. Trigger a secondary nested workflow to check observables with threat intelligence (Workflow: Parallel Execution – VirusTotal, Recorded Future, AlienVault).
  7. Revoke the CrowdStrike session token and exit.

3. Enriching Alerts for Faster Detection of Retail Cyber Attacks

Torq aggregates data from endpoint and asset platforms like SentinelOne, Axonius, and Azure AD to provide rich, multi-source context for every alert. AI-generated summaries accelerate understanding, reduce noise, and enable accurate, automated decision-making.

Workflow Steps:

  1. Execute parallel processes to gather endpoint details from multiple sources.
  2. Retrieve agent details from SentinelOne using an API call with specified parameters.
  3. Extract key information from SentinelOne data using a JSON query.
  4. Fetch device details from Axonius with a POST request and process the response to extract relevant attributes.
  5. Generate an access token for Microsoft 365 and retrieve device information from Azure AD based on display name.
  6. Compile the gathered data from SentinelOne, Axonius, and Azure AD using AI Task Agent to create a formatted summary of results.

4. Automating Identity and Access Requests to Secure Retail Networks 

Retail SOCs can automate the entire process of requesting, approving, and granting temporary admin access across distributed store locations — from Slack initiation to device matching and IT approval, ensuring compliance, timely revocation, and stronger retail network security.

Workflow Steps:

  1. Search for a Slack user’s email address based on the provided username.
  2. If the email is found, prompt the user to provide a reason for requesting temporary admin rights on their Mac.
  3. Depending on the user’s response, either proceed to find computers and store locations associated with the user’s email, or end the request.
  4. If approved computers are found at the current location, ask the user to select which Mac they need admin rights on.
  5. Request IT approval for granting admin rights.
  6. If approved, temporarily grant admin rights on the selected Mac and notify the user.
  7. After 15 minutes, revoke the admin rights and notify the user of the expiration.
  8. If not approved, notify the user about the denial.

5. Daily Health Checks to Prevent Vulnerabilities and Breaches

Torq automatically monitors security cases and detections across tools like CrowdStrike, scanning for unassigned incidents, missed escalations, and SLA violations. Summarized updates are sent to Microsoft Teams, helping SOC teams stay ahead of vulnerabilities and prevent breaches.

Workflow Steps:

  1. Query Crowdstrike events for specific states and severities, starting a custom SLA timer for each based on severity.
  2. Retrieve the current date from each event; check if it is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday to proceed with further actions.
  3. Search for unassigned detections and incidents older than specified hours/days.
  4. Filter and process detection and incident data, collecting details for each unassigned detection and incident.
  5. Summarize findings and send to Microsoft Teams.

Case Study: How a Fast Fashion Retailer Transformed Cybersecurity Efficiency

One of the world’s largest fast-fashion retailers was struggling under the weight of manual processes, siloed tools, and a legacy SOAR platform. With thousands of alerts coming in every day, their team was spending most of their time chasing false positives and combing through disjointed systems, leaving little time for meaningful response and strategy. 

The retailer turned to Torq Hyperautomation to modernize their cybersecurity processes. With Torq’s intuitive workflow builder, analysts at all skill levels could build automations in minutes. Torq’s case management system and integrations with the team’s existing security solutions streamlined alert enrichment, triage, and response. They were also able to automate their just-in-time access across OS systems, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring a streamlined process for administrative workflows.

The retailer now solves end-user tickets in minutes and automates admin access across globally distributed teams. Read the full case study for more >

Retail Cybersecurity Demands Hyperautomation

Retail businesses can’t afford to fall behind in cybersecurity. Cyber threats like ransomware, phishing, and data breaches are growing more sophisticated, and legacy tools simply can’t scale.Torq Hyperautomation empowers retail SOCs to detect potential breaches faster, respond automatically, and maintain secure, compliant operations across global environments without waiting on developers or ripping and replacing systems.

Ready to see how Torq can help you stop retail cyberattacks before they escalate? 

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AI Hyperautomation Security Automation 101 Use Cases

Cut the Compliance Hassle: Automate It for Real‑Time Compliance Monitoring

By Torq
May 9, 2025
7 Minute Read
Torq compliance automation transforms slow, manual processes into real-time, audit-ready workflows.

Contents

Security compliance isn’t just checking boxes; it’s business-critical to keeping your organization secure, reputable, and operational. Yet, despite how critical regulatory compliance is, many organizations still wrestle with manual compliance management checks. Meet Torq Hyperautomation™: the best thing for streamlining security and compliance regulations.

Imagine waving goodbye to spreadsheets, endless manual tasks, and frantic pre-audit scrambles. Compliance automation replaces outdated methods with security automation tools, freeing your SOC teams to focus on what matters most — securing your organization.

Why Compliance is Still Done Manually

If compliance management is so important, why are many organizations still stuck managing it manually?

Legacy Systems, Siloed Non-Centralized Teams, and Spreadsheets 

Organizations frequently rely on legacy systems designed before modern regulations and threats. These outdated tools often don’t integrate smoothly with newer systems, making automation challenging. Add to that the problem of teams — including finance, IT, HR, and security — all working in isolation and independently tracking compliance tasks through spreadsheets and manual logs. The result is a fragmented, error-prone compliance management process that wastes time and resources.

Constantly Evolving Regulations (HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR)

On top of internal challenges, industry regulations like HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, and others are always changing. Keeping pace manually is nearly impossible. Changes to compliance frameworks are frequent and complex, demanding continuous updates to policies, procedures, and reporting. Manual processes simply can’t keep up, resulting in risks of non compliance and potential fines or reputational damage.

What is Compliance Automation?

Compliance Automation

Compliance automation is using technology to streamline and automate the process of adhering to regulatory standards and internal policies. It involves leveraging software and AI to manage compliance-related tasks, reducing manual effort and improving efficiency. This includes automating tasks like documentation, risk assessments, reporting, and controls testing.

Key features of compliance automation include:

  • Automated evidence collection: Automatically gathers data and logs across systems to demonstrate compliance with industry standards and frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or GDPR.
  • Real-time monitoring: Continuously monitoring configurations, access controls, and activity logs to detect violations, vulnerabilities, and enforce real-time policy adherence.
  • Workflow orchestration: Executes predefined actions when compliance issues are detected (e.g., revoking access, sending alerts, and opening tickets).
  • Audit readiness: Maintains organized, timestamped documentation and audit trails to simplify preparation and reduce disruption.
  • Cross-system integration: Connects with critical tools to centralize compliance efforts and eliminate data silos.

With Torq, compliance automation becomes more than just a productivity boost. Torq connects with all your critical tools, orchestrates tasks across systems, and ensures nothing slips through the cracks — from missed access revocations to failed encryption checks.

How Does Compliance Automation Work?

Compliance automation leverages software and integrations to streamline the compliance lifecycle, from continuous monitoring and reporting to remediation and documentation. Here’s how it works.

Integrations

Compliance automation pulls critical data from existing security and operational tools like SIEMs, Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems, cloud platforms, and endpoint protection tools. This creates a centralized view of your regulatory compliance posture, eliminating manual data gathering.

Automated Workflows

Automated workflows replace tedious manual tasks, such as collecting evidence for audits, scheduling routine security checks, or sending alerts when compliance thresholds are breached. Tasks that once took hours or days happen automatically, accurately, and consistently.

Continuous Monitoring

Automated compliance continuously monitors environments, detecting and flagging policy violations, vulnerabilities,  or deviations. Immediate detection means security teams can address issues swiftly, preventing minor oversights from escalating into major incidents.

Reporting Dashboards

With automated compliance reporting, audit-ready dashboards and reports are generated instantly. You no longer need to spend days compiling documentation; it’s continuously available, making internal and external audits smooth and stress-free.

Remediation and Orchestration

Automation doesn’t stop at identifying issues. It can automatically remediate certain policy violations or vulnerabilities, such as adjusting misconfigured cloud settings, or route complex matters to the appropriate teams along with detailed context, dramatically reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

7 Benefits of Compliance Automation

As regulatory landscapes grow more complex and the risks of noncompliance increase, organizations are turning to automation to ensure control, consistency, and clarity across their compliance programs. Here’s how automated regulatory compliance software delivers measurable value.

1. Reduced Compliance Risks

Manual processes leave room for human error, delays, and oversight. Compliance automation software, with automated monitoring and remediation, ensures that violations and misconfigurations are detected and resolved at machine speed. This ensures data protection and minimizes the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and data breaches, especially in fast-paced, cloud-native environments where change happens rapidly.

2. More Efficient than Manual Processes

Automation removes the manual burden from repetitive, time-consuming tasks like evidence gathering, access reviews, control verification, and report generation. This allows security and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams to focus on higher-value work like risk management and strategic policy development. It also improves scalability, making it easier to ensure your environment stays compliant even as your organization grows.

3. Real-Time Data in One Dashboard

Compliance automation platforms provide a centralized, unified dashboard that aggregates metrics, control health, policy violations, and remediation status. This real-time visibility eliminates the need to dig through multiple tools or spreadsheets and empowers teams to make faster, data-driven decisions about risk posture and compliance gaps.

4. Simplifies the Audit Process

Instead of scrambling to prepare evidence during audit season, automation ensures audit-ready documentation is always available on demand. Whether you’re using AuditBoard, Hyperproof, or your own system, automated audit logs and audit trails keep everything neatly recorded and ready to go. 

Detailed logs, timestamps, access histories, and control status reports are automatically maintained and updated, making it easier for auditors to verify compliance and significantly reducing the cost, time, and stress associated with internal and third-party audits.

5. Continuous Monitoring of Control Health

Automating compliance provides continuous control, performance, and configuration validation, unlike periodic checks. This ensures that security controls like multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access controls (RBAC), encryption, and access policies remain effective. Automation can trigger alerts or remediation workflows instantly, turning compliance management from a static checkbox into a living, breathing process if a control becomes misconfigured or fails.

6. Centralized Single Source of Truth

Compliance automation tools are a centralized repository for all compliance-related activities like tracking issues, documenting resolution workflows, and maintaining immutable audit trails. This unified view eliminates siloed team efforts, improves accountability, and supports a long-term compliance strategy. With all evidence and activity accessible in one place, organizations spend less time searching for data and more time optimizing their security posture.

7. Built-in Scalability

As your business grows, managing compliance becomes more complex. With compliance automation software, scaling doesn’t mean hiring more people — it means deploying more intelligent workflows that extend your reach across every cloud, region, and team.

Real-Time Compliance Monitoring With Torq

Automation tools like Torq Hyperautomation make compliance seamless by enabling real-time monitoring across hybrid and cloud environments. With support for security and compliance workflows out of the box, Torq delivers rapid value to overworked SOC and GRC teams.

With Torq, enterprises gain:

  • Limitless integrations: Immediate data sync with tools like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IAM solutions, and more.
  • Customizable automation workflows: Tailor workflows to your organization’s specific compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, NIST, GDPR,  HIPAA, and SOC 2.
  • Continuous visibility: Continuous monitoring of your security compliance state, with immediate notifications and contextual information when issues are detected.
  • Automated evidence collection and reporting: No more scrambling for audits — automated regulatory compliance software from Torq automatically captures, organizes, and generates audit documentation.
  • Intelligent remediation: Automatically address compliance issues or escalate them to human teams with complete contextual data, reducing MTTR and ensuring continuous compliance.

Ready to Ditch Security Compliance Stress? Automate It with Torq.

Compliance automation delivers immediate wins in efficiency, visibility, and risk reduction.

This automation transforms compliance management from a slow, manual burden into an efficient, automated, accurate, and real-time process. By reducing risk, cutting costs, and streamlining operations, compliance automation software lets your security team refocus on strategic initiatives instead of paperwork.

Torq Hyperautomation simplifies security compliance in modern, complex environments. Torq enables teams to effortlessly maintain continuous compliance, secure, scalable, and compatible with hybrid and cloud-based infrastructures.

Ready to automate security compliance and reclaim your time?

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AI Customers Hyperautomation

First, They Killed Their SOAR. Then They Joined Torq.

By Torq
May 7, 2025
6 Minute Read
Former SOAR users who found the ideal SOAR replacement with Torq

Contents

Before Torq, they were trapped. Buried under alerts. Drowning in old playbooks. Burned out by legacy SOAR tools that promised automation and delivered chaos. Then they discovered Torq, not just as a solution, but as a better way to work. They became power users, rebuilt their workflows, and transformed their SOCs.

Now? They’re former legacy SOAR users — thriving with the ultimate SOAR replacement: Torq.

Meet the team. Hear their stories. And see why switching to Torq wasn’t just the best move they made for their SOC; it was the best move they made for their careers.

Meet the Team That Escaped SOAR Hell

PO shares his SOAR replacement story
Patrick “PO” Orzechowski
Field CISO

PO is Torq’s Field CISO, bringing his years of experience and expertise as a SOC leader to our customers. PO is a seasoned security veteran with a deep understanding of the modern security landscape. You can find him talking to SOC leaders and CISOs from major brands at cybersecurity events worldwide.

Superpower: Connecting across teams, balancing priorities, and helping people align on what matters.

João Ceron
Solution Architect

João is a Solutions Architect at Torq with 15+ years in SOC and network security. He holds a PhD with research on DDoS and IoT security, has published at USENIX Security, and contributed to projects for the Dutch government and U.S. DHS. At Torq, he helps clients implement AI-driven SOC automation.

Superpower: Processing massive amounts of data and turning it into actionable value.

Rich Chen
Sales Engineer

To borrow a line from Wayne’s World, Rich’s career could be summed up as “an extensive collection of name tags and hairnets.” Over nearly 20 years, he’s done it all — teacher, helpdesk, sysadmin, VMware wizard, cybersecurity engineer, and manager. Rich brings deep technical knowledge and a teaching mindset to every customer conversation as Sales Engineer at Torq.

Superpower: Teaching. Whether it’s a teammate or a customer, Rich is always teaching at Torq.

Kyle Dalton
Director, Solutions Architecture

Kyle is the Global Head of Solution Architecture at Torq, where he helps organizations reimagine the modern SOC through security Hyperautomation and agentic AI. A former analyst and engineer with deep hands-on experience, Kyle spent years in the trenches. Today, he brings that frontline perspective to help security teams operationalize response, eliminate burnout, and amplify human impact with Torq HyperSOC™.

Superpower: Listening and turning real-world pain points into better solutions.

Why They Replaced SOAR with Torq

Partnership: “The level of attention and partnership from Torq was unlike anything else. Every meeting and interaction was consistently positive. And it wasn’t just about features — it was about the willingness to build what we needed.” – Patrick Orzechowski

Intuitive user interface: “We were looking at a few vendors. Torq had the most intuitive UI, the best pricing model, and a clear commitment to delivering case management features we needed.” – João Ceron

Built for analysts: “I needed something my analysts could actually use. With Torq, everything just made sense. But honestly, it was the team that sold me. It felt like a true partnership.” – Rich Chen

Pride in every detail: “I could feel the pride that the team takes in the product, and that was huge for me. The team was really committed to the partnership.” – Kyle Dalton

Compare AI-driven Hyperautomation to legacy SOAR >

The Problems Legacy SOAR Couldn’t Solve — But Torq Did

Before joining Torq, Patrick’s team bought into the SOAR promise — that it would automate everything, integrate with everything, and even replace analysts. Instead, it became a scalability nightmare. The platform was slow, clunky, expensive to maintain, and unusable for entry-level analysts. With Torq, everything changed. It was fast, intuitive, and actually usable from day one.

Kyle shared a similar experience. 30% of his team’s time was spent managing an on-prem SOAR implementation. It wasn’t event-driven, which made scaling painful. With Hyperautomation as their SOAR replacement, they quickly expanded integrations and were able to rebuild complex workflows in just hours instead of weeks.

“We were burning 30% of our team’s capacity just managing an on-prem SOAR. That’s how we knew we needed something to replace SOAR. Shifting to Hyperautomation completely changed everything — we dramatically expanded integrations and met customers where they are. What really sealed it was rebuilding a workflow that used to take a week and a half… in under four hours.”

– Kyle Dalton, former legacy SOAR user

Rich brought receipts on how Torq made a massive difference outside traditional SecOps. His team was bogged down by daily manual processes, pulling data from multiple platforms, transforming CSVs, and uploading them all again. Torq eliminated that friction, automating workflows across security and IT operations.

João pointed to a major shift in team autonomy. Before Torq, every automation request had to go through engineering. With a modern SOAR replacement, his team could build what they needed on their own: faster processes, better data correlation, and complete control over their workflows.

Learn how to make the switch like PO, João, Rich, and Kyle did.

Get the SOAR Migration Guide

Favorite Features and Go-To Tools

When asked which Torq features sealed the deal, each team member had a clear favorite — and a very good reason why.

PO pointed to case routing: “When you manage thousands of cases and a hundred analysts, things get missed. Torq’s case management made things manageable and improved the analyst experience overall.” Case management and Socrates, the AI SOC analyst, remain his go-to zones in the platform.

João loves the Collect operator: “It made my life so much easier.” Collect streamlines data gathering, making it simpler to manage and reference results across complex workflows. You’ll usually find him deep in workflow builds and data transformation.

Rich is all about nested workflows: Reusable, modular automation that keeps things clean and scalable. He spends his time on Canvas, where he builds POCs and custom demos.

Kyle highlighted Torq’s ability to convert any step to HTTP as a game-changer: “Way less overhead than scripting in legacy tools.” Lately, he’s been spending time exploring Interact workflows and pushing new features to the edge.

Life at Torq: What Surprised Them Most

One of the biggest surprises for PO, Joao, Rich, and Kyle after joining Torq was how closely the internal culture mirrored the customer experience. PO noted how refreshing it was to see the same positivity and partnership behind the scenes that he had experienced as a customer. 

João was surprised by how much customer feedback directly influences the roadmap, realizing that Torq isn’t just listening, it’s actively building with its users. Rich was blown away by the pace of innovation, sharing how HyperSOC launched and then evolved rapidly within weeks. For Kyle, he knew he was boarding a rocket ship — but didn’t expect it to be going that fast.

“The pace of innovation at Torq is insane. HyperSOC came out — and within weeks, even more functionality was being rolled out.” 

– Rich Chen, Sales Engineer, Torq

Want to join the team that killed SOAR?

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AI Hyperautomation News & Events

Torq Drops Jaws at RSAC 2025

By Britt Wittfeldt
May 5, 2025
5 Minute Read
A roundup of highlights from RSAC 2025

Contents

Torq roared into RSAC 2025 in our usual style: all gas, no brakes. Our team traveled in from around the world to set up an unmissable, unforgettable booth featuring Grave Digger that instantly became the talk of the show. (We also unleashed our Junior Media Intern, Trevor, on San Francisco, for which we apologize). But the real game-changer was our unveiling of new agentic AI innovations in Torq HyperSOC™ — with the demo that set RSAC on fire.  

Here are all the best moments.

Torq Steals the Pre-Show Spotlight

In the lead-up to RSAC, Torq announced the acquisition of stealth Israeli startup Revrod, whose multi-agent RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) advancements are now incorporated into HyperSOC™. This latest release makes HyperSOC-2o our most autonomous model to date and the first truly agentic SecOps platform. 

This was followed by the announcement of another Torq “first” for autonomous security operations: becoming the first platform to support a Model-Context Protocol (MCP) natively in its architecture. 

Torq was also featured in the latest “new and notable” Microsoft Sentinel integrations ahead of RSAC. Rounding out the pre-conference press blitz, Forbes published an article detailing how Torq stands out in cybersecurity thanks to “bold branding and a fearless aesthetic… bringing edge, energy and authenticity to an industry known for playing it safe.”

“What really sets Torq apart is its effort to blend cultural relevance and brand identity with technical innovation.”

– Tony Bradley, Senior Contributor, Forbes

The RSAC Booth Sensation: “Just, Wow.”

Yes, we really put all 12,000 pounds of the iconic Grave Digger monster truck in our booth. LinkedIn post after LinkedIn post declared it “the best booth at RSAC,” and the hype was electric. 

Forbes hailed the Torq booth’s visual elements as “more reminiscent of streetwear brands and music festivals than typical enterprise security vendors.” Security Weekly said that Torq “pulled out ALL THE STOPS MONSTER TRUCK LASER SKULLS F*&CK YEAH, that’s how you do it!” Chainsaw through the noise? Check.

The Demo That Set RSAC on Fire

While Grave Digger drew people in, it was Torq’s technology that kept hundreds of security pros around our booth for demo after demo. 

Leading up to RSAC, HyperSOC’s agentic AI innovation was validated by industry analysts, with IDC’s new report stating: “Torq is working on all SOC fronts while improving MTTD, MTTR, threat hunting, and remediation actions impactfully. The agentic AI architecture is disruptive.” 

We also got a shout-out ahead of RSAC from Cyber Research Analyst Francis Odum, who stated: “Torq HyperSOC makes the potential of AI in a SOC attainable and sustainable by connecting AI with the SOC’s full range of tools and processes. Torq HyperSOC is a huge game-changer for enterprises.”

To top it all off, mid-conference, Torq won the 2025 SC Media Award for Best Emerging Tech by SC Media for our platform’s agentic AI capabilities, which were described as “the forefront of next-gen security automation.”

“Everyone says ‘agentic AI,’ but that’s the first demo I’ve seen actually working live.”
– Heard at RSAC

Beyond the Moscone Center

On the first night of the conference, two of Torq’s co-founders — CTO Leonid Belkind and CINO Eldad Livni — hosted an exclusive Founders’ Dinner at Michelin-star restaurant Boulevard with CISOs and security leaders from major brands around the globe.

Moving into day three of RSAC, Torq CMO Don Jeter sat down with George Kamide and George Al-Koura from the Bare Knuckles & Brass Tacks podcast to talk through how Torq’s marketing blew up from a small 10×10 booth RSAC just a few years ago to this year’s monster display. When the Georges asked how Torq built such “a fundamentally cool brand”, Don shared that it all started with the fierce belief that SOAR is dead and then telling that story boldly — which hit a community nerve to create “something that people want to be a part of.”

Watch the episode here >

“Tech is lame. Torq is cool.”

– George A., Bare Knuckles & Brass Tacks podcast

Unleashing the Most Feral Channel Program in Cybersecurity

During the conference, ​Sheldon Muir, Torq’s AVP of Global Channels, spoke with MSSP Alert about how our disruptive partner program prioritizes customer outcomes — driving results, incentives, and value for our partners. More on this coming soon!

“Great tech — which I obviously believe Torq has — has to be met by great marketing. And the third leg of the stool is you gotta have something disruptive on the channel side.”

– Sheldon Muir, AVP of Global Channels, Torq

On to the Next

Thousands of steps logged, energy drinks downed, and Bone Bucks handed out later, the Torq team said goodbye to the Moscone Center, but that’s not the end of the road for Torq + Grave Digger. Torq has partnered with Monster Jam® for a 6-city tour this summer. Find your city and save your seat here.

Want to see the HyperSOC demo that set RSAC on fire? Request a demo.

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Security Engineering

gRPC-web: Using gRPC in Your Front-End Application

By Konstantin Ostrovsky
May 1, 2025
7 Minute Read
Simple image description that includes the SEO keyphrase.

Contents

This blog was originally published in October 2021. It was last updated in May 2025.

At Torq, the AI-native autonomous SOC and security Hyperautomation leader, we use gRPC as our one and only synchronous communication protocol. Internally, microservices communicate with each other using gRPC. Externally, our frontend application uses gRPC-Web to communicate with the backend APIs via an API Gateway. 

While gRPC offers many benefits, its adoption in frontend development lags behind REST API and GraphQL. This disparity can pose challenges for front-end developers accustomed to using the built-in Chrome Network Inspector for traffic analysis.

Originally published over three years ago, this blog post now addresses the introduction of ConnectRPC, a new protocol for frontend-to-backend communication via gRPC. ConnectRPC resolves certain limitations of gRPC-Web and offers enhanced code generators for TypeScript and JavaScript. 

Importantly, adopting these new generators does not necessitate a complete switch of transport protocols, as the generated client and server code provide support for both gRPC-Web and the newer ConnectRPC protocol. We switched to using those code generators at Torq and are extremely pleased with the improved developer experience.

This article explains how to enable communication between a frontend application and a gRPC backend using the gRPC-Web protocol, demonstrated by leveraging the connect-es proto plugin generated for the client.

What is gRPC-Web?

gRPC-Web is a JavaScript client library that enables web applications to directly communicate with gRPC services. It allows browser-based applications to leverage the benefits of gRPC’s efficient protocol buffers serialization, bidirectional streaming, and HTTP/2-based transport, despite browsers not fully supporting HTTP/2 bidirectional streaming. gRPC-Web implements a compatibility layer that translates between browser HTTP/1.1 requests and gRPC’s HTTP/2 protocol.

Backed by the CNCF community, gRPC stands out as a popular and active project. It offers official support for over ten programming languages and well-defined best practices, making it an excellent option for API development. These characteristics aligned perfectly with Torq’s needs when selecting an API protocol.

gRPC offers a straightforward approach to service definition. Developers define services and methods using proto files. Subsequently, the proto compiler facilitates the generation of server and client interfaces compatible with various programming languages. This includes TypeScript and Go, the primary languages employed internally at Torq.

From a technical perspective, gRPC-Web requires a proxy (like Envoy or Caddy) that sits between the web client and the gRPC server to handle protocol translation. The client generates JavaScript code from the same .proto service definitions used by the backend, but uses a slightly different wire format and doesn’t support all gRPC features (like full bidirectional streaming). It supports both binary protobuf and JSON serialization formats, and can work with modern frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.

What is ConnectRPC?

Connect is a suite of libraries designed to create APIs compatible with both browsers and gRPC. It offers a JSON-based protocol as an alternative to native gRPC, supporting features like streaming, trailers, and error details.

The ConnectRPC project launched a new protocol along with multiple proto-compilers for major programming languages. The resulting code is not only compatible with this new protocol but also maintains full interoperability with existing gRPC and gRPC-Web implementations.

Connect-es, its proto compiler, produces high-quality code, offering frontend developers an excellent experience through language-native gRPC interfaces both in the backend and the browser.

ConnectRPC introduces a JSON-based text protocol over HTTP, addressing gRPC challenges such as caching.

A Quick Overview of Our Architecture

We use a microservice architecture at Torq. Our backend APIs are accessible by an API Gateway (Backend for Frontend),  which is built in Go and provides services such as: 

  • Smart routing to internal services
  • Aggregator pattern that allows combining data coming from multiple internal services into a single response 
  • gRPC-Gateway proxy, which we use to allow REST API access to our public APIs 
  • gRPC-Web proxy that translates requests coming from the frontend application using the grpc-web protocol to gRPC requests.

Our application utilizes an API Gateway as the sole entry point for all external traffic. This gateway centralizes API access and comprises a collection of gRPC services. The continuous integration (CI) process for the API Gateway repository includes the automatic generation of TypeScript client libraries.

Building gRPC-Web Clients Using Connect-es Plugin

As mentioned above, at Torq, we generate TypeScript clients for all our external APIs as part of our CI (GitHub Actions) continuous integration build process, which is a component of the API Gateway service. 

We previously used a bash script for pre-installing proto compiler plugins and running the protoc command. Over the last two years, we transitioned to the Buf CLI tool, which has streamlined the process. Buf allows us to define proto-generation rules in a single YAML file, eliminating the need for local protoc plugin installations.

For our gRPC-Web client, we utilize the Connect-es protoc plugin to generate TypeScript files. These files are then packaged as an npm package and published to the GitHub package repository. Our frontend applications integrate this package using the standard `npm install` command.

Go Server, VueJS, and gRPC-Web client example

Below is the gRPC service definition:

This gRPC service defines a simple TimeService. It provides a method for getting the current time via the GetCurrentTime rpc method. The time is returned in the ISO 8601 format.

Generating Clients and Servers

To generate client and server code from the proto file, we will utilize the Buf CLI tool. While the `protoc` compiler could also be used, Buf CLI streamlines this process by reducing friction. We will employ the Go and TypeScript proto-compilers to generate code for these specific languages.

To generate the code, we will use the following `buf.gen.yaml` file:

The generated files for go will be placed under ./time/goclient and the JavaScript ones will be in /frontend-ts/src/jsclient.

gRPC in the Backend

Our backend is a very basic Go server implementation. We spin up the gRPC server listening on  0.0.0.0:8080. It implements the TimeServiceServer interface and returns time.Now().Format(time.RFC3339) for each request

gRPC in the Frontend

Using the Connect-ES library, calling gRPC-Web endpoints is straightforward. Simply initialize the client with the gRPC-Web server address and then invoke its methods.

For easier debugging of gRPC web traffic in your browser, consider installing the gRPC-Web Devtools Chrome extension. This tool provides an inspection capability similar to Chrome’s built-in Network Activity Inspector.

Envoy Configuration

gRPC-Web requires a proxy for gRPC translation. Envoy offers built-in support, as demonstrated by the provided configuration. A frequent issue is CORS configuration. The example below shows a permissive wildcard domain setting, which is not recommended for production. However, it can be adapted for specific production needs with minor adjustments.

A Five Year Perspective on gRPC-Web

This blog post aims to provide an accessible introduction to gRPC-Web, a valuable technology for those already invested in gRPC. Since the original publication, the gRPC-Web ecosystem has matured considerably with the introduction of powerful tools. Notably, the Buf CLI has streamlined the command-line interface and configuration for compiling proto files into client and server-side code. Furthermore, the Connect-ES proto compiler plugin enhances the development experience by generating more natural and intuitive client-side code.

Our team has leveraged gRPC-Web for five years, appreciating the advancements in tooling that have emerged during this time. For further exploration, the source code referenced in this article is accessible here.

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AI Autonomous SOC Hyperautomation Security Automation 101

AI SOC, Explained: How AI-Powered SOCs Transform SecOps

By Torq
April 29, 2025
9 Minute Read
What is an AI SOC? Get the definition, components, use cases, and benefits of an AI-powered security operations center.

Contents

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are the command center of an organization’s frontline cybersecurity defenses — responsible for monitoring threats, prioritizing alerts, and orchestrating remediation. However, today’s SOCs are facing an existential crisis: an overwhelming volume of increasingly complex and sophisticated threats combined with a shortage of skilled analysts. This perfect storm is pushing SOCs to their breaking point, burning out their teams and leaving their organizations vulnerable.

Legacy security automation solutions struggled to keep up with the evolving threat landscape, especially at scale. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been hailed as a game-changer for SOCs, offering the potential for unprecedented efficiency gains.

But what does effective use of AI in the SOC look like? Below, we show top use cases for leveraging AI in the SOC and explore how AI is transforming security operations.

What is an AI SOC?

An AI-powered SOC is a security operations center that leverages artificial intelligence to automate processes, enhance threat detection, accelerate incident response, provide contextual insights, and optimize resource allocation —  resulting in greater efficiency and accuracy, improved decision-making, faster time to remediation, and a more proactive security posture.

The Technical Foundations of an AI-Powered SOC

Security automation has evolved way past SOAR — with Hyperautomation and AI Agents forming the new cornerstones of the modern autonomous SOC.

  • AI-driven Hyperautomation: By seamlessly integrating your security stack and instantly automating any security process using thousands of pre-built integration steps and AI-generated workflows, Hyperautomation offloads routine tasks, reduces analyst burnout, and accelerates threat response.
  • Multi-Agent System: Specialized AI Agents automate incident response by interpreting natural language instructions and collaborating to autonomously execute tasks such as alert triage, containment, and remediation actions. Human analysts can interface with the AI agents using natural language for accelerated enrichment, investigation, and recommended next steps.

What’s the Difference? All the AI in the SOC, Explained

This new landscape of AI in the SOC comes with a LOT of similar-but-different terminology. GenAI, AI Agents, OmniAgents, agentic AI, multi-agent systems — we get it, it can be confusing. 
Here’s a breakdown of all the AI powering modern security operations, what each one does, and how Torq HyperSOC™ puts them all to work.

TermDefinitionWhat It DoesHow Torq HyperSOC™ Uses It
GenAIGenAI creates content, code, text, images, or predictions in response to natural language promptsEnhances SOC operations with automated case summaries, enrichment, and workflow generationDrafts incident summaries, generates workflow templates, and speeds up case documentation
Agentic AIAgentic AI is autonomous, goal-driven AI that plans, adapts, and executes multi-step security workflows across time and toolsPowers AI agents with autonomy and adaptability to handle tasks like detection, triage, and response in real-timeSocrates, the AI SOC Analyst, coordinates and makes workflow decisions autonomously without human-triggered actions
AI AgentAn AI Agent is a single AI entity that independently handles a specialized taskPerforms specific security tasks such as isolating endpoints, locking accounts, or enriching threat intelligence based on predefined triggersPowers single-task automations: pulling threat intel, scanning suspicious emails, updating ServiceNow or Jira tickets
Multi-Agent System (MAS)A Multi-Agent System is composed of multiple autonomous AI agents that collaborate to achieve complex goalsDeploys specialized AI agents in parallel across the SOC to handle triage, investigation, containment, and case managementMAS architecture: Runbook Agent, Investigation Agent, Remediation Agent, and Case Management Agent, all coordinated by Socrates
OmniAgentAn OmniAgent acts as a “Super Agent” orchestrating the activities and interactions between specialized AI Agents in a MASUses sophisticated iterative planning and reasoning to solve complex, multi-step problems autonomously through the coordination of multiple AI AgentsSocrates identifies prioritizes, and remediates threats across the entire organization by controlling and coordinating the Runbook, Investigation, Remediation, and Case Management Agents

Top Use Cases for AI in the SOC

By analyzing vast amounts of data from across your security stack and executing intelligent automations, AI unlocks efficiency gains across SOC functionalities such as:

  • Incident investigation: Analyze massive volumes of alerts to identify patterns, suppress low-fidelity alerts, and automate triage and validation, accelerating the investigation process from start to resolution. 
  • Case management: Streamline the process of prioritizing, tracking, and managing security incidents by intelligently enriching and automating cases.
  • Workflow generation: Prompt AI with a natural language description of your use case to instantly build security automation workflows — no code required.
  • Case summarization: Analyze all relevant data points associated with a security alert to provide easy-to-digest, evidence-backed summaries of complex security cases, improving SOC analysts’ efficiency and collaboration.
  • Documentation: Automatically generate documentation for complex automated processes, increasing both efficiency and accuracy from shift-handovers to compliance audits.
  • Executive reporting: Prompt the system to generate case info in the right tone and level of information for a specific persona, such as for a non-technical executive or board member. 
  • Team collaboration: Automatically alert Slack or Teams channels when a case is created, escalated, resolved and more.
  • Resource optimization: Use AI to assign cases to an available analyst based on workload and shift schedules. 
  • Data correlation: Combine and correlate data from all of the tools in your security stack, providing a holistic view of your security environment.
  • Threat response: Automate tasks like threat detection and containment for faster incident resolution.

How Do AI-Powered SOCs Transform Traditional Security Operations? 

Scaling SOC operations: AI agents can handle an influx of security events: triaging, investigating, and remediating the majority of Tier-1 and Tier-2 alerts. This frees up analyst bandwidth to focus on urgent incidents and strategic projects, enabling SOCs to efficiently scale their operations without increasing headcount (which is vital amidst today’s shortage of skilled cybersecurity talent).

Shifting to a proactive security posture: Agentic AI goes beyond just detecting and counteracting attacks by applying real-time intelligence to identify patterns and detect emerging threats. This allows SOCs to adopt a less reactive, more preemptive approach to address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited or breached. 

Reducing alert fatigue and analyst burnout: By autonomously triaging alerts and reducing false positives, AI agents reduce the number of irrelevant alerts that analysts must wade through. And, by automating tedious, repetitive tasks and auto-remediating most low-level alerts, AI-driven Hyperautomation helps senior analysts gain back the time and capacity to focus on more rewarding work like strategic projects. 

Speeding up MTTR: All of the efficiency gains from leveraging AI in the SOC translates to more alerts resolved, faster. 

Will AI Replace Humans in the SOC?

Adopting AI in the SOC is not about replacing human SOC analysts — it’s about augmenting and empowering them. With a looming 4 million+ cybersecurity talent shortage, organizations must not only retain their existing analysts, but also help them work more efficiently. On top of that, organizations are recognizing that human-only defenses are inadequate to counter the evasive and persistent threats posed by AI-driven attacks.

AI reduces analyst burnout: A multi-agent system can reduce the strain on SOC teams by offloading rote tasks, auto-remediating the majority of Tier 1 tickets, and upleveling the skills of junior analysts. This frees up senior analysts to focus their expertise on critical threats and strategic projects, helping their organization achieve a stronger overall security posture.

Human expertise must remain the final line of defense: Done the right way, AI-powered SOCs keep humans “in the loop” as the ultimate decision-makers for high-stakes threats following rigorous, multi-tiered AI evaluation and case enrichment that helps human analysts take informed, decisive action.

“By 2028, multiagent AI in threat detection and incident response will rise from 5% to 70% of AI implementations to primarily augment — not replace — staff..” 

Source: Gartner Inc.

How Torq’s AI Capabilities Supercharge SecOps

Torq has been very deliberate in how we’ve extended the capabilities of the Torq platform using AI to solve real problems for SOCs with products and features like:

  • Socrates, the OmniAgent AI SOC Analyst: Socrates intelligently automates alert triage, incident investigation, and response, extending your SOC teams’ capabilities and improving response times across the board. Socrates coordinates a full Multi-Agent System (MAS) — planning, investigating, remediating, and managing security cases with human-like decision-making and machine-speed execution. 

    Socrates can auto-remediate 95% of cases within minutes. For critical cases that require human intervention, your analysts can collaborate with Socrates using natural language to summarize case details, enrich cases with additional investigation and threat intelligence, and trigger remediation workflows
  • AI Workflow Builder: Simply describe your desired security automation workflow in natural language, and Torq’s AI Workflow Builder will generate a tailored solution in seconds. Rather than spending hours manually building workflows from scratch, your team is freed up to focus on more strategic security initiatives.
  • AI Case Summaries: Help your team make the right decisions quickly by presenting them with a concise, insightful, and verifiable AI-generated summary of each case. No more wading through pages of logs and incident details! The easy-to-read summaries empower SOC teams to work faster, make informed decisions with confidence, and seamlessly transition between shifts by giving the incoming team clear case context backed by citations.
  • AI Data Transformation: Simplify complex data manipulation for security operations by easily transforming complex JSON data using natural language — no coding required. Each transformation is broken down into precise, testable micro-transformations that users can edit, validate, and modify individually.
  • Runbook Execution: Intelligently plan customized investigation and response strategies based on the organization’s historical outcomes and adapt to new threat vectors, ensuring faster containment.
  • Deep Research Investigations: Uncover hidden attack patterns across disparate data sources, perform detailed root cause analyses, and dynamically assess threat impact — giving SOC teams context previously out of reach without hours of manual digging.

Torq now has multi-agent RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) incorporated into HyperSOC™ which has supercharged its ability to do deep research, analyze threats, and coordinate responses at machine speed — and is the first autonomous security platform to support a Model-Context Protocol (MCP) natively in its architecture. These advancements make our latest HyperSOC release our most autonomous model to date and the first truly agentic SecOps platform. 

The Future of the SOC: Better, Faster Human Decision-Making Through AI Automation and Insights

When deployed effectively, AI in the SOC extends and enhances the capabilities of your existing staff so they can make better decisions faster. 

So, what does the future of SOC automation look like? Sophisticated multi-agent AI continuously learns from historical data and real-time incidents to generate insights and recommendations, automate routine security tasks, and auto-remediate the majority of alerts, with a top layer of human analysts providing strategic oversight for critical cases. This means faster, more proactive responses to threats and vulnerabilities — and a more secure future for organizations everywhere.

Want to learn how to deploy AI in the SOC the right way? Read the AI or Die Manifesto to learn CISO considerations, fake AI red flags, and evaluation questions.

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AI Autonomous SOC Hyperautomation Use Cases

Artificial Intelligence in Case Management for Security Teams

By Torq
April 25, 2025
5 Minute Read
Traditional security defenses are failing. Learn how AI case management from Torq combats the crisis of overburdened SecOps teams and escalating threats.

Contents

Case management for modern SOCs can be a maze of endless alerts, overwhelming data, and intense pressure. Legacy solutions often exacerbate these issues with rigid workflows, limited automation capabilities, and a lack of real-time adaptability, leaving teams ill-equipped to handle the growing complexity of threats. The volume of cases, manual workflows, and processes leave analysts overwhelmed, exhausted, and struggling to keep pace. Traditional approaches just don’t cut it and leave teams feeling stuck in a constant state of frustration.

How Agentic AI Helps With Case Management

Torq HyperSOC is an AI-driven case management solution crafted by industry veterans with decades of experience leading SOC transformations and developing cutting-edge security solutions. With a deep understanding of operational pain points, Torq built a robust platform to address these challenges. By Hyperautomating mundane, time-consuming case management tasks, Torq’s system of AI Agents acts as a reliable team of analysts who never tire. 

This AI-driven approach to case management cuts through the noise, prioritizes what truly matters, and speeds up the entire security operations lifecycle so human analysts can redirect their energy toward strategic thinking and complex investigations.

Torq’s Agentic AI, combined with the power of Hyperautomation, turns traditional case management chaos into a coordinated, manageable effort.

Here’s How:

Socrates, the AI SOC Analyst

Socrates, Torq’s AI SOC Analyst, follows your organization’s established runbooks and remediation protocols to orchestrate critical tasks such as endpoint quarantines and account lockdowns. Socrates analyzes historical case data, enriches cases with third-party threat intelligence, and autonomously handles 95% of Tier-1 cases.

For critical cases that do require human-in-the-loop remediation, Socrates coordinates your subject matter experts, escalates cases through the appropriate collaboration channels, and eliminates operational silos to streamline decision-making.

This seamless integration of Agentic AI into the DNA of your case management strategy ensures swift and coordinated responses, so nothing slips through the cracks, like having a trusted colleague who never sleeps and is always ready to jump in and handle the heavy lifting at machine speed.

AI-Generated Case Summaries

With so many incidents to handle, digging through endless lines of raw data can be overwhelming — especially when time is of the essence. Through AI-generated case summaries, Torq’s Case Management Agent distills intricate datasets into concise, actionable insights.

These AI case summaries quickly give analysts the essence of complex incidents without having to sift through mountains of logs, IOCs, and other event data linked to the case. By organizing and contextualizing case details into a consistent structure — i.e., “what”, “when”, “impact”, and “key indicators” — these summaries drastically reduce the time it takes for a human analyst to get caught up and take decisive response action, especially in situations like SOC shift transfers. It’s like having a seasoned mentor beside you, simplifying complicated cases so anyone, from a Tier-1 to a Tier-3 analyst, can make high-impact decisions more quickly and confidently.

Event Ingestion and Correlation

Imagine a security tool that consolidates over 300 data sources. Torq HyperSOC does just that. It gathers massive amounts of information in seconds and synthesizes data from your SIEM, EDR, IAM, and more while creating contextual cases at scale — without impacting the availability or usability of the case management platform.

This intelligent aggregation not only speeds up the discovery of threats but also dynamically updates existing cases as incidents unfold. AI-driven case management prioritizes what matters, filtering out the noise so analysts can focus on pressing issues without being bogged down by irrelevant data.

Achieving Autonomous Case Management

By combining Agentic AI with a powerful Hyperautomation engine, applied to a purpose-built case management platform, Torq HyperSOC automates routine triage and remediation processes with surgical precision.

Consider a simple but common headache of handling phishing responses. Torq’s AI swiftly analyzes suspicious emails, flags malicious links, and employs URL sandboxing to neutralize threats within seconds. Torq also automates account remediation, ensuring that compromised accounts are contained quickly to prevent further damage. By doing so, Torq frees up analysts to concentrate on more complex, high-stakes challenges, reducing manual workload and minimizing fatigue.

What Does AI Case Management Mean for the Future of Security Operations? 

Torq’s AI-driven case management capabilities remove security teams from a constant reactive mode. It does so by leveraging historical data and real-time analysis to detect anomalies that might signal trouble ahead. Maybe a sneaky vulnerability is lurking in your network, or a misconfiguration is about to open the door to bad actors — AI can spot these issues instantly, sometimes even before anyone else does.

By embedding AI into every case management stage, Torq HyperSOC transforms security teams’ operations, enabling human analysts to step in only when their experience is truly needed. Tasks that once took days are done in seconds, human errors shrink, and teams can finally breathe a little easier knowing the Autonomous SOC is within their reach.

Curious how this works in action? Schedule a demo and see firsthand how AI case management can speed up SOC operations, reduce stress, and make dealing with cybersecurity threats more manageable.

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