AI Hyperautomation Integrations

How to Turn a SOAR Migration into SOC Transformation

By Torq
March 24, 2025
5 Minute Read

Contents

SOAR is dead-dead (too inflexible, too complex, and too limited on integrations) — but it’s not quite buried in some SOCs where it’s only hanging on because migrating can feel daunting when mission-critical workflows are tied to the system.

AI-driven Hyperautomation from Torq is the SOAR killer. Our team has helped major enterprises from every industry make the switch, quickly and easily, to achieve true SOC transformation.

We chatted with Mark Carosella, Sr. Sales Engineer at Torq, to hear firsthand what surprises new Torq customers the most when they pull the plug on their SOAR and learn what it is about Torq that makes migrating from legacy SOAR not just fast, but also transformative.

1. Don’t Just Switch Platforms — Optimize

One of the first — and most striking — realizations for companies logging into the Torq platform for the first time is just how easy it is to build SOC workflow automations. For those who previously used code-heavy automation tools and had to manage thousands of lines of Python, Torq’s intuitive, drag-and-drop workflow designer and AI workflow builder is game-changing — enabling security teams to build and deploy Hyperautomated workflows faster than ever before. Users can also test each step of their workflow in real-time, gaining instant feedback and making adjustments on the fly.

With Torq, even customizing integrations with APIs or configuring various data sources becomes accessible to those without advanced dev skills, by using AI agents with expert coding logic and syntax for script writing, CLI, and data manipulation. 

When migrating existing workflows to Torq, the ease of use and robust scalability of the platform provides the opportunity to do things that simply weren’t possible with legacy SOAR. To escape tech debt and inefficient and outdated processes, Torq encourages new customers to think beyond a “lift and shift” mentality so they can optimize SOC processes, rather than replicating them exactly as they were. The result is a true SOC transformation, not just a platform change.

The Torq team has seen it all and has a vast store of expertise and experience to recommend best practices for optimizing security processes. Torq Hyperautomation makes it much simpler to combine traditional workbooks into seamless workflows that take advantage of the platform’s strengths, such as AI-driven remediation and dynamic case management. 

Most Torq customers are able to consolidate security processes during the migration —  achieving the same outcomes with significantly fewer and much more efficient automations.

2. Reclaim Control Over Your Security Stack

During Torq Proof of Concepts (POCs), new users consistently highlight the same recurring challenges with their legacy SOAR platforms: limited integrations and difficulty connecting to essential data within existing tech stacks. This often forced their teams to resort to extensive, time-consuming Python coding, a painful and difficult-to-scale process. 

In contrast, Torq enables rapid, limitless integrations. Companies can connect their entire security stack in record time by using AI to generate integrations in seconds, or they can maintain granular control with draggable, low-code or full-code capabilities. Even if your third-party API or data format changes (a recipe for disaster in legacy SOAR platforms), real-time API monitoring ensures none of your integrations are at risk of breaking, so your stack always stays connected for uninterrupted automation. 

In one example Mark shared, a customer needing specific SIEM technology functions — which were previously inaccessible through their SOAR platform —  achieved their goal in minutes by simply copying an API command into Torq’s intuitive workflow builder canvas, eliminating the need to wait months for a team to develop custom code to create the connection.

3. Accelerate Adoption and Time-to-Value 

“Whenever we talk to customers or to the folks that are POCing Torq and getting into the platform for the first time, there’s one word that comes up in every single engagement: intuitive.”

– Mark Carosella, Sales Engineering Manager, Torq 

Building security automation workflows in Torq’s drag-and-drop and AI-assisted interface is highly intuitive, which means teams quickly grasp the fundamentals to get up and running during onboarding. Mark shared that within a day or two, new users are often independently building custom automation workflows. This can feel like a major “aha” moment for users who came in with the perception of automation as a complex, code-heavy experience in legacy SOAR platforms. 

One Torq user shared, “My favorite thing about Torq is that concepts go from my head to a working reality in just a few hours, instead of a few weeks, largely in part to the no-code functionality.”

This ease of use empowers any user, regardless of their coding skills, to rapidly implement workflows and adapt their security operations, accelerating time to value.

Transform Your SOC: Get the SOAR Migration Guide

If you’re ready to finally pull the plug on your SOAR, get the Kill Your SOAR Migration Guide to plan ahead. It covers the big picture of what you need to know going into a migration, plus a migration success story from a leading security company, advice from a SOC manager who made the switch, and the top 3 POC use cases. 

With Torq, your migration isn’t just about switching platforms — it’s an opportunity to transform your security operations.

Get the Guide
Ready for SOC transformation? Get the Kill Your SOAR migration guide.
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Insights Research

SANS Survey: 5 Security Challenges Keeping SOCs in the Dark

By Torq
March 20, 2025
6 Minute Read
SANS Detection and Response Survey shows that SecOps teams are facing existential security challenges.

Contents

The 2024 SANS Detection and Response Survey sheds new light on some all-too-familiar security challenges: security operations teams are overwhelmed with alerts, struggling to respond fast enough, and tracking the wrong KPIs. Sure, automation adoption is increasing (64% of organizations now leverage it in some capacity), but most SecOps teams are still operating in slow, reactive, and heavily manual environments.

Five Security Challenges Faced by SecOps Teams

1. Security teams are stuck in semi-automation mode.

Most security operations teams think they have automated response mechanisms, but they’re really just babysitting inefficient, semi-automated workflows. The SANS Survey data shows that while 64% of teams have automated response mechanisms in place, less than a quarter have fully automated their processes. That means the vast majority still rely on analysts to manually intervene and execute responses.

2. Slow response times are leaving organizations exposed.

Speed matters. Attackers are betting you’ll take a while to respond to threats. SANS found that a whopping 32.8% of teams take hours to respond to threats, and 41.4% say they respond within minutes. In today’s reality, even minutes can be too slow. Recent data shows that lateral movement breakout times dropped from 62 minutes to 48 minutes, with the fastest recorded breakout happening in just 51 seconds. If a response takes more than a minute, the damage may already be done. 

3. Alert fatigue and data overwhelm are killing security team productivity.

It’s loud in the SOC. More than half of security teams say false positives are a huge problem, and 62.5% are overwhelmed by sheer data volume. Every second spent triaging junk alerts is a second not spent investigating real threats — meaning SOCs are burning through their most precious and expensive resource: human focus. Analysts’ expertise is critical for threat investigation and response, yet most of their time is wasted manually sorting through thousands of low-value alerts that should’ve been filtered out in the first place. This wastes time, burns out analysts, and, worst of all, lets real threats slip through. 

4. Security teams are still tracking the wrong KPIs.

The most surprising part of the survey responses is that more than 50% of security teams aren’t even tracking KPIs like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). ​​Instead, they’re tracking vanity metrics like the number of incidents detected  —  or, worse, they don’t have enough data to measure their own efficiency. Without the right data, SOC teams cannot optimize performance or reduce response times.

5. SOAR is holding teams back.

SOAR was supposed to be the answer to security automation… right? The majority of respondents use SOAR for threat response, but half still rely on manually running commands to respond to threats. This proves what we at Torq already know: SOAR hasn’t lived up to its promise. SOAR platforms were supposed to automate security workflows, but most teams still struggle with slow response times, rigid playbooks, and high maintenance overhead.

The Fix: An Autonomous SOC Powered by AI-Driven Hyperautomation

The answer to these existential security challenges isn’t manually tuning SOAR, tweaking detection rules hoping something works, or hiring more analysts (Be real: Where are you even finding them? The SANS Survey found the majority of security teams struggle with lack of skilled personnel). The real fix is an autonomous SOC powered by AI-driven Hyperautomation: a SOC that invests in AI and automation to eliminate inefficiencies, take action at machine speed, and, ultimately, shorten response times.

Comparison table showing how an autonomous SOC fixes 5 key security challenges.

1. Go autonomous. 

Ditch the scripts, stop the manual tuning, and let AI take over. An autonomous SOC removes the need for engineers to build, maintain, and tweak workflows with extensive coding. Instead, teams can simply describe a workflow, use case, or outcome using natural language to guide agentic AI as it implements workflows to secure the organization faster than ever before. An autonomous SOC can handle 95% of Tier-1 cases — allowing security teams to focus on critical, high-impact threats, rather than babysitting outdated playbooks or struggling with the limitations of rigid SOAR architectures.

“With Torq Agentic AI, the answer is yes to questions such as: Are analysts happier? Are they sticking around? Do they have time to focus on more interesting and complex investigations? Are MTTM and MTTR lower? Torq Agentic AI extends and enhances our team so it can make better decisions more quickly — resulting in stronger security all around.” 

– Mick Leach, Field CISO, Abnormal Security  

2. Slash response time.

With SOC automation, alerts don’t sit in a queue waiting for an analyst to take action. AI-driven Hyperautomation instantly takes action to investigate alerts, enrich cases, and contain threats  — isolating infected endpoints, disabling compromised accounts, and blocking malicious infrastructure before damage is done. Unlike SOAR’s static playbooks, an autonomous SOC leverages AI to tirelessly and intelligently analyze and remediate massive volumes of security incidents, shrinking response times from hours to seconds.

3. Eliminate alert fatigue.

AI Agents don’t just process alerts — they triage and prioritize them. AI-powered SOCs use sophisticated planning and contextual reasoning to filter out low-fidelity alerts, suppress false positives, and escalate only the alerts that matter. Analysts no longer have to sift through thousands of useless alerts  —  AI handles the noise so teams can focus on critical security risks.

4. Track the right KPIs.

An autonomous SOC should be able to measure security response and provide visibility into operations. Instead of requiring analysts to manually track and compile data, AI can capture and log detection times, response actions, and remediation speeds automatically. SOC leaders finally get a clear picture of what’s working, where bottlenecks exist, and what to optimize.

5. SOAR is dead. Ditch it.

SOAR is simply too slow, rigid, and high-maintenance to keep up with modern SOC demands. An autonomous SOC doesn’t rely on pre-scripted playbooks — it builds, executes, and adapts automation dynamically, all in natural language. With AI-driven Hyperautomation, security teams move faster than attackers, not the other way around. See the difference.

It’s time to move past the limitations of SOAR and slow, reactive security operations. Take your SOC autonomous — learn how easy it is to switch to AI-driven Hyperautomation from Torq.

Get the SOAR Migration Guide
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Insights

How to Automate Application Security Operations: 4 Ways

By Torq
March 19, 2025
5 Minute Read
Automate application security operations.

Contents

Maintaining an online business presence nowadays means that malicious actors are going to target and likely exploit any application vulnerabilities they can find sooner or later. According to the 2021 Mid Year Data Breach Report, although the number of breaches has declined by 24%, the staggering number of records that were exposed (18.8 billion) means that there is still room for improvement.

How can you protect your business from the constant threat of exposure and security breaches? One crucial step is to establish solid foundational layers of security controls that check and validate every part of the SDLC. By using automation when performing those checks, you can detect and prevent common security risks and exposures before they end up in production.

Keep reading for a comprehensive overview of application security automation, along with four ways to automate security ops to protect the core of your business from data breaches.

What Is Application Security?

The term application security (AppSec) refers to the series of processes and tools related to security controls that development teams use during SDLC. Creating secure software is hard, mainly because there are myriad risks involved. Attackers prefer to target web applications instead of infrastructure components because these applications offer a convenient way to access databases or other internal systems. Defenders need to plug up every conceivable hole, while attackers only have to find one vulnerable spot. This often results in an uneven playing field.

To counter that pervasive threat, development teams must adopt effective methodologies and best practices for developing secure software. One way to do this is to utilize tools to analyze the code both statically and dynamically to pick up any known insecure idioms. For example, a tool might flag code that is implementing unsafe casting, secrets that have been committed to VCS, or a failure to close streams after they have been used. Developers can manually review these issues and fix them before they get deployed to production.

Another strategy is to scan application dependencies. For example, when developing a financial app, developers might use an open source library that offers a convenient currency model. But how would they know that this library was safe? Dependency scanners monitor those dependencies and check to see if they are out of date or suffer from open CVEs. That way, they will know as soon as possible if anything changes.

Writing secure software starts with integrating proper application security controls and automating the process. We will explain that part next. 

Why You Should Automate Application Security: Main Benefits

As we mentioned earlier, there are several tools and processes that development teams employ to flag risks in their software repositories. Automating this task helps you make the most of this process. That’s because you can achieve better coverage when looking for threats and find them sooner when you eliminate the manual parts of the process.

In addition, you will be better equipped to respond to security incidents. Your AppSec teams will have all the context they need to address any issues. Finally, you can achieve better compliance and auditing scores, since this eliminates the risks involved in working manually, such as skipped events and slower response rates. 

Next, we’ll explain four important ways to automate application security operations.

Four Ways to Automate Application Security Ops

1. Trigger Automated Security Flows as Part of Your CI/CD Pipeline

The best place to start with automation is to implement shift-left security within the CI/CD pipelines. When we say CI/CD pipelines, we mean the various steps that are taken when pushing code in a remote environment. These steps include admission to VCS and triggering the CI pipeline, static code analyzers, security alerts, bots, and notification systems as well as external security integrations. Incorporating these steps will give you the best chance of protecting your application from exploits.

2. Validate/Enforce Requirements and Perform Periodic Checks When You Create Repositories, Components, and Cloud Environments 

When developers create new repositories or provision new clusters that operate company accounts, there should be a preliminary check to apply basic security templates and policies. This will prevent gaps or missed security controls from the moment you create those resources until you actually use them. You want to create default standards for all components that prevent them from existing in a sub-standard security state. 

3. Orchestrate Follow-Ups for Application Security Findings, Assign and Escalate Issues, and Validate Fixes 

Once the system pinpoints security issues in your resources, you should use a separate mechanism to capture those events and store them in a threat intelligence platform. As we explained in this article on the basics of threat intelligence, you can pull and combine those indicators, run customized workflows, and deliver the information you collected to the system of your choice.

4. Automate Updates to Infrastructure-as-Code and Configuration Settings

Finally, consider your usage of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and your configuration settings. These internal tools are part of the developer tooling, and they are also susceptible to exploitation. You will have to enforce the same kind of rules and policies when using those programs. It’s even better if you have an automated tool that monitors and updates only the development tools in your infrastructure. This way, you will not risk exposure or a major upgrade process if some of them become outdated or are found to contain a known vulnerability.

Next Steps: Automating Application Security Ops with Torq

The best way to automate application security ops is to create a strong foundation of tools, processes, and techniques. Attackers are constantly trying to exploit vulnerable applications. However, automating application security ops doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, security and DevOps teams should be able to use a low-code platform to achieve those targets.

Torq offers a complete no-code platform for automating application security ops using threat intelligence, threat hunting, security bots, and workflow modules. You can request a demo here.

 

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AI Hyperautomation

What is Hyperautomation?

By Torq
March 18, 2025
5 Minute Read
Diagram explaining what is Hyperautomation in cybersecurity

Contents

Hyperautomation is an efficiency-driven, strategic process that integrates across business technology stacks to rapidly automate and orchestrate as many business and IT operations as possible. It uses advanced technologies such as AI and low-code/no-code platforms for greater speed and ease of use.

Hyperautomation Definition

So, what is Hyperautomation? It’s a strategic business approach that unifies multiple automation technologies to streamline and speed up complex processes end to end. While traditional automation focuses on repetitive, rules-based tasks, Hyperautomation layers in intelligence, adaptability, and orchestration for machine-speed efficiency — transforming how teams work across IT, business, and cybersecurity.

Learn more about security Hyperautomation > 

Automation vs. Hyperautomation

At a glance, automation and Hyperautomation sound similar, but they solve very different problems in cybersecurity. Traditional automation handles simple, repetitive tasks. Hyperautomation spans systems, layers in AI-driven decision-making, and coordinates human-machine collaboration at scale. It’s about full lifecycle automation — detection, triage, enrichment, response, and resolution — across multiple domains.

In cybersecurity, this means moving beyond automating password resets or phishing reports. Hyperautomation empowers your security operations center (SOC) to autonomously detect threats, prioritize alerts, trigger tailored responses, and continuously optimize based on results.

How Hyperautomation Tools Work

Hyperautomation isn’t one tool — it’s a coordinated ecosystem. It connects multiple Hyperautomation technologies into a single framework, typically combining:

  • GenAI and agentic AI for decision-making and contextual awareness
  • Low-code/no-code platforms for fast workflow building without extensive coding
  • Business process management for orchestrating complex workflows
  • Integration platforms for connecting apps, tools, and systems
  • Analytics and reporting tools for measuring performance and optimizing automations over time

Hyperautomation can adapt — systems can dynamically adjust workflows, update rules based on new data, and seamlessly coordinate human and machine collaboration.

The Hyperautomation Advantage

Hyperautomation technology transforms SecOps by delivering faster, smarter, and more scalable operations. Here’s a quick look at the biggest Hyperautomation benefits:

  • Ease of use: With drag-and-drop interfaces and no coding required, anyone on the security team can create powerful automations in minutes. Complex threat responses become easy to build, deploy, and scale across teams without relying on the complexity of legacy SOAR solutions or waiting for custom coding.
  • Lower costs: Dedicated expert support with no surprise consulting fees.
  • Secure on-prem connectivity: Zero-trust agents connect hybrid environments securely.
  • Flexible, full-stack automation: Integrate and automate anything across cloud, infrastructure, and on-prem systems.

From Automation to Hyperautomation 

Security automation started with promise — but hit its limits fast. Legacy SOAR tools were designed to orchestrate basic security actions but broke down under the weight of modern security demands. Static playbooks, brittle integrations, and clunky interfaces turned what was supposed to be “automation” into yet another bottleneck.

Security teams needed a new way forward as threats grew faster, more dynamic, and more complex. Unlike SOAR, Hyperautomation doesn’t just automate a few steps; it transforms the entire SOC workflow. 

It connects tools across your technology stack, enables context-aware decisions, and executes actions quickly. And because it’s built with low-code/no-code at its core, it empowers any analyst, not just engineers, to build, test, and deploy workflows in minutes.

Where SOAR failed to scale, Hyperautomation moves 10x faster with infinite extensibility, seamless integrations, and built-in case management to reduce noise and prioritize what matters. It enables SOCs to go from “human-in-the-loop” to “human-on-the-loop,” directing strategy while AI and automation handle the grind.

When paired with agentic AI, Hyperautomation becomes the foundation of the autonomous SOC, which is a SOC where alerts are triaged, threats are hunted, incidents are remediated, and analysts stay focused on the big picture.

Hyperautomation Use Cases in Cybersecurity

Hyperautomation doesn’t just make your SOC more efficient — it can transform how your team works. Here are some ways where Hyperautomation delivers major impact for cybersecurity teams.

1. Incident Response
Hyperautomation enables end-to-end incident response without human bottlenecks. From initial detection and triage to investigation, enrichment, and remediation, intelligent SOC automation accelerates every phase of the process — reducing mean time to respond (MTTR) from hours to minutes.

2. Phishing
Phishing is a top entry point for attackers. Hyperautomation instantly identifies suspicious messages, quarantines affected inboxes, revokes compromised credentials, and notifies users — all without requiring analyst intervention.

3. Just-in-Time (JIT) Access Provisioning
Managing administrative privileges across a hybrid infrastructure can be a nightmare. Hyperautomation grants and revokes access dynamically based on workflows and business rules, reducing privilege creep and improving security posture.

4. Threat Hunting
With Hyperautomation, SOCs can continuously search for threats using AI agents across SIEMs, EDRs, and identity platforms. It’s proactive defense — and it’s fast.

5. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
From self-service access validation to automatic account cleanup, Hyperautomation brings control and consistency to identity workflows, ensuring alignment without added complexity.

Hyperautomation with Torq

Torq Hyperautomation™ combines agentic AI, low-code/no-code workflow building, and multi-system security orchestration into one unified experience. Whether you’re deploying across cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments, Torq makes it easy to automate your entire SOC — without needing a single line of code.

Key benefits of Hyperautomating your security operations with Torq include:

  • AI-native: Orchestrate AI agents that triage, investigate, and remediate alerts.
  • Low-code simplicity: Use drag-and-drop or natural language prompts to build advanced workflows in minutes.
  • Massive integration library: Connect with any tool in your security stack and beyond.
  • Built-in case management: Prioritize and enrich alerts automatically, route decisions to the right people, and track everything.

As threats grow faster, more complex, and more automated, your response strategy has to evolve just as quickly. Whether you’re replacing legacy SOAR, reducing alert fatigue, or scaling your SOC, Torq’s Hyperautomation platform gives you the speed, intelligence, and flexibility to stay ahead.

Feeling the pressure to get more done faster across your security operations? 

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Hyperautomation Use Cases

Combating Ransomware, Phishing, and Zelle Fraud at Financial and Bank SOCs

By Bob Boyle
March 12, 2025
7 Minute Read
Learn how financial services and bank SOCs are using security Hyperautomation to replace spreadsheets, defend against phishing, and combat Zelle fraud.

Contents

Banking and financial services companies sit on a goldmine of sensitive customer data, making them a prime target for phishing and ransomware attackers hoping to strike a payout. 

Even with defenses like MFA and security training, human error continues to be a critical point of failure for financial institutions — a 2024 report found that 3 out of every 1000 individuals working in banking click on a phishing link each month. This stark reality of risk highlights the industry’s urgent need for more proactive, automated security processes.

Below, we break down the top financial and bank SOC use cases for security Hyperautomation and cover how a major regional bank successfully reinstated Zelle services by automating account lockdowns for fraud alerts.

The Automation Imperative in Finance and Bank Security Operations

Two of the most common — and critical — security operations priorities for CISOs we’ve talked to at banks and financial services companies are to:

  • Mitigate risk by quickly responding to, containing, and remediating attacks.
  • Maintain materiality by focusing on the most important security issues that could cause the biggest problems and by being able to accurately assess when a cybersecurity incident requires SEC reporting.

Achieving these requires reducing Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), ensuring swift and effective remediation, and gaining visibility across all identities and security assets. However, manual processes, a jungle of spreadsheets, and siloed data compound operational challenges at financial and banking organizations. 

To modernize their financial and bank SOCs, forward-thinking CISOs are embracing Hyperautomation as a way to unify their security stack and automate incident response. Integrating solutions like ServiceNow or Snowflake with Torq’s AI-driven Hyperautomation platform can provide a single source of truth and streamline security operations for a stronger security posture and greater visibility across the SOC. 

Top 5 Bank SOC Challenges Solved by Hyperautomation

Below are the top use cases being Hyperautomated by Torq’s financial services customer base, along with real-world examples of the workflows they have built.

1. Phishing Alert Analysis

Automate the extraction and aggregation of URLs, file hashes, and message headers from Outlook messages and attachments, providing a comprehensive data set for further security analysis. 

Workflow Steps:

  1. Receive potential phishing alert from Microsoft 365.
  2. Execute parallel tasks to extract URLs from the email body, retrieve message headers, and process attachments (if present).
  3. For the email body, extract all unique URLs and collect them.
  4. Retrieve message headers using Microsoft Graph API and store them.
  5. If the email has attachments, list them and filter out non-file attachments.
  6. For each file attachment, retrieve detailed information and extract URLs from the content if available.
  7. Collect and combine URLs from various sources (e.g. body and attachments). Set default values if no URLs are found.
  8. Link message headers from the email and attachments, setting default values if none are found.
  9. Generate a structured output containing URLs, file hashes, and message headers.
  10. Nested Workflow: Case Management

2. Ransomware Case Creation and Categorization

Automate the ingestion and processing of CrowdStrike threat data by creating a comprehensive case in Torq. Once the case is created, notify the security team via email while categorizing the threat and adding relevant observables for further analysis. 

Workflow Steps:

  1. Extract specific fields from the incoming CrowdStrike event data into a sparse JSON object.
  2. Flatten the JSON object for easier processing and format it for a markdown table.
  3. Convert the event’s creation date to a specified format.
  4. Create a markdown table from the formatted data.
  5. Use a switch-case structure to categorize the threat as malware or ransomware, setting a variable accordingly.
  6. Create a case in Torq using the extracted and formatted data, including custom fields and tags.
  7. Add observables to the case, such as file hashes, with specified reputation scores.
  8. Query historical cases and link any closed cases with matching observables. 
  9. Generate an access token for Microsoft 365 and send an email notification about the new case to the specified recipient list.

3. Automated Threat Analysis and Enrichment 

Automate the process of extracting and analyzing threat intelligence data based on specific commands submitted by the security team — e.g. “Check IP”, “Check Hash”, or “Check Host”. Facilitate communications through Microsoft Teams to trigger the workflow and receive the enriched threat analysis. 

Workflow Steps:

  1. Evaluate incoming event text to determine the command type (!checkip, !checkhash, !checkhost).
    • For !checkip: Extract IP address using regex and retrieve information for each IP from AbuseIPDC
    • For !checkhash: Extract patterns using regex, retrieve analysis reports from AnyRun and get threats from SentinelOne
    • For !checkhost: Extract patterns using regex and initiate a scan on SentinelOne agents, wait for a specified duration, then retrieve threats from SentinelOne.
  2. Reply with the information gathered to the thread in the originating Microsoft Teams channel. 

4. Case Management

Automate the process of checking for existing cases and creating new cases if necessary, ensuring efficient case management and reducing duplicate cases. This workflow is a valuable and repeatable tool for any case management program. Consider using a “nested workflow” attached to other Hyperautomated use cases (for example, see Phishing Alert Analysis above).

Workflow Steps:

  1. Query existing cases to check if a case already exists with the specified name, event data, or observable submitted.
  2. If a case exists, attach the new observable to the case and exit the workflow with the existing case ID.
  3. If no case exists, create a new case with the provided details such as title, SLA, severity, and state.
  4. After attempting to create a case, check the creation status.
  5. If the case creation is successful, exit with the new case ID.

5. Fraud Detection

Automate the process of locking or unlocking a user account based on suspected fraud event data. Update your CRM with relevant fraud activity and notify the appropriate stakeholders with contextual information about the actions taken.

Workflow Steps:

  1. Set workflow parameters to include user ID and notification email addresses.
  2. Check if required fields are present in the event data.
  3. Verify the user’s status via an API call and determine if the user should be locked or unlocked.
    1. If lock: Execute an API call to lock the user and set a variable indicating the action taken.
    2. If unlock: Execute an API call to unlock the user and set a variable indicating the action taken.
  4. If the lock/unlock action is successful, query Salesforce to retrieve the user’s account information.
  5. Add a “fraud task” to the user’s account in Salesforce and notify the specified email addresses of the action taken.
  6. If adding the activity to Salesforce fails, send a failure notification to the specified email addresses.

Case Study: Automating Zelle Fraud Detection and Lockdown from End to End

A major regional U.S. bank with billions in assets faced an urgent, compliance-driven requirement to automate their detection and response to fraud alerts in Zelle, a customer-facing payment service that had been suspended by the SEC due to a surge in fraudulent activity.  

With Torq’s Hyperautomation platform, the bank’s SOC quickly automated the end-to-end process of locking down accounts triggered by fraud alerts, enabling them to reinstate Zelle services. Torq also automates CRM updates, giving customer service immediate context when talking to customers about account lockdowns.

And that’s not all they achieved with Torq — read the case study for the full story of how they published over 100 workflows in just 3 months and reduced their Mean Time to Investigate (MTTI) from hours to minutes.

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AI Hyperautomation

AI SOAR Alternative: Why SOAR is Dead and What’s Next

By Torq
March 6, 2025
6 Minute Read
Torq is the leading AI SOAR alternative for SOC automation.

Contents

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) was once hailed as the answer to a more efficient and automated Security Operations Center (SOC). The idea was compelling: automate repetitive tasks, reduce manual workloads, and speed up response times. 

But fast-forward to today, and despite generations of SOAR evolution, SOCs are still battling familiar challenges. Here’s why SOAR is dead — and why AI SOAR alternatives like Hyperautomation have replaced it.

What is SOAR? 

SOAR first emerged in the mid-2010s, promising to automate SOC tasks and improve operational efficiency. It aimed to accelerate incident response, reduce manual workloads, and unify siloed tools. 

While SOAR platforms were able to automate simple tasks like phishing response and threat intel propagation, they ultimately fell short in addressing the core challenges of modern SecOps: threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR).

SOAR platforms were designed to orchestrate tools, automate workflows, and respond to alerts more efficiently. Theoretically, they should unify disparate technologies into a cohesive system where incidents can be enriched, triaged, and remediated through pre-built playbooks. So what went wrong?

Why SOAR Failed to Automate the SOC 

To understand why SOAR hasn’t met expectations, examining the nature of SOC work is important. Security operations involve a combination of two types of tasks:

  • Thinking tasks: Interpreting alerts, determining scope and impact, and creating response plans.
  • Doing tasks: Activity-based tasks like taking response actions, updating systems, and notifying stakeholders.

SOAR platforms were pretty good at automating “doing” tasks, but they struggle with the more complex, judgment-driven “thinking” tasks. Here’s why:

  • Too complex: Thinking tasks require deep understanding, data synthesis, security expertise, and decision-making. Replicating these traits with static playbooks is nearly impossible.
  • Unpredictable: Security operations deal with highly variable inputs, which leads to an ever-expanding set of edge cases that are difficult to account for in playbooks.
  • Not customizable: Out-of-the-box playbooks rarely meet an organization’s specific needs, leading to expensive custom coding and high maintenance burdens.

Over 80% of organizations agree SOAR is too complex, costly, and time-consuming — and nearly 90% admit that building even basic automation requires a huge upfront investment in time and resources. 

Even GenAI advancements aren’t enough. SOCs need security automation that can adapt and understand the complexities of threat detection and investigation. Automating the “thinking” tasks is the key to achieving true SOC automation.

Instead of solving problems, legacy SOAR platforms created new ones: rigid architectures, limited integrations, disconnected defenses, and overwhelmed analysts drowning in alert noise. Built on monolithic, non-cloud-native infrastructure, SOAR can’t scale, can’t adapt, and definitely can’t keep up with modern threat landscapes.

SOAR isn’t  just outdated — it’s holding security teams back. See why SOAR is dead.

Introducing Hyperautomation: The Only AI SOAR Alternative

As organizations reach their breaking point with traditional SOAR’s shortcomings, they’re turning to the only effective AI SOAR alternative — Hyperautomation. This next-gen approach fuses Gen AI, agentic AI, low-code/no-code orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure into a single, adaptive engine for modern security operations.

Unlike traditional automation or AI SOAR point solutions, agentic AI-driven Hyperautomation doesn’t just execute tasks — it thinks, learns, and scales. It mimics the analytical reasoning of human analysts, turning high-effort “thinking” functions into fully autonomous, intelligent workflows. From real-time triage to dynamic response, Hyperautomation redefines what’s possible in the modern SOC.

Hyperautomation + AI Agents = A Happy SOC

At the heart of a Hyperautomated SOC are AI agents. While Hyperautomation connects and automates the entire security stack, agentic AI brings the cognitive power — making independent decisions, adapting, and continuously learning from every signal.

This combination transforms traditional automation into something far more powerful: a fully autonomous SOC workflow that mimics human judgment at machine speed. The outcome isn’t replacing human analysts — it’s making their lives in the SOC less stressful and more engaging.

Benefits of AI agents in the SOC include:

  • Finding more real threats: Agentic AI can process and correlate every alert at machine speed, allowing SOCs to uncover real threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
  • Reducing MTTR: By eliminating manual bottlenecks in triage and investigation, agentic AI can drastically reduce response times, helping SOC teams resolve incidents in minutes instead of days.
  • Boosting analyst productivity: Automating repetitive tasks frees up analysts to focus on higher-value work, such as investigating complex incidents or working on strategic initiatives.
  • Increased efficiency: With agentic AI handling the mundane tasks, analysts can shift their focus to more meaningful work, improving job satisfaction and reducing burnout.

Leading Analysts Agree: SOAR is Dead

Leading industry analysts, including Gartner, GigaOm, and IDC agree that legacy SOAR platforms are obsolete. Modern cybersecurity demands flexibility, speed, and intelligence that only Hyperautomation can provide.

In their recent report, IDC confirms what security teams already know: Legacy SOAR promised efficiency but delivered complexity. IDC specifically highlights AI SOAR replacement, Torq Hyperautomation™, as a game-changing platform that goes beyond automation and enters the realm of true autonomous operations — powered by agentic AI, built-in case management, and real-time orchestration across the entire security stack.

“Hyperautomation is the answer to existing SOAR platforms. Torq’s Hyperautomation capabilities can help improve the efficacy of security teams now and in the future. The agentic AI architecture is disruptive.”

Chris Kissel, Vice President, Security & Trust Products, IDC Research

Why Torq HyperSOC™ is the Definitive SOAR Replacement

Legacy SOAR platforms promised security automation. Torq HyperSOC delivers it at a scale, speed, and intelligence legacy systems simply can’t match. 

Torq HyperSOC is the industry’s first fully autonomous SOC platform, powered by a Multi-Agent System (MAS) that triages, investigates, and remediates threats. It doesn’t just respond to alerts — it thinks, acts, and learns like a human analyst, but faster and 24/7.

Our cloud-native, AI-powered SOC platform delivers:

  • Limitless integrations: Torq connects with virtually any tool in your security ecosystem — EDR, SIEM, IAM, cloud, SaaS, or legacy — with no-code simplicity. You can integrate and automate stack-spanning workflows in minutes, not months.
  • Real-time threat response:  Powered by agentic AI, Torq doesn’t just wait for alerts — it autonomously triages, investigates, and remediates threats as they emerge.
  • Proactive defense: Torq detects patterns, identifies risks before they escalate, and automates preemptive actions to neutralize threats at the source.
  • Unmatched scalability: Whether you’re processing 100 or 100,000 alerts daily, Torq’s cloud-native, event-driven architecture handles it without sweat.

This isn’t just an AI SOAR — it’s a whole new category. Torq Hyperautomation isn’t trying to fix legacy problems with band-aid solutions. It’s built from the ground up for the AI era, where speed, intelligence, and adaptability aren’t nice-to-haves — they’re SOC survival essentials.

The Torq Difference: What Sets Us Apart from SOAR Vendors

SOAR is Dead: Long Live Hyperautomation

The era of legacy SOAR is over. Organizations are increasingly making the switch to Torq Hyperautomation, the true AI SOAR alternative that can meet the modern SOC’s demand for speed, autonomy, and adaptability.

Ready to step into the future of security operations? Our team has helped major enterprises from every industry make the switch, quickly and easily.

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Ready for SOC transformation? Get the Kill Your SOAR migration guide.

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What is the Pyramid of Pain in SOC Automation?

By Patrick “PO” Orzechowski
March 4, 2025
7 Minute Read
Explore each level of the SOC Automation Pyramid of Pain.

Contents

Patrick Orzechowski (also known as “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 around the world.

How to Solve Common SOC Pain Points With AI-Driven Hyperautomation

About 10 years ago, Alex Pinto came up with the idea of the threat intelligence “Pyramid of Pain” in the talk Measuring the IQ of Your Threat Intelligence Data at at DEF CON ‘22. I love this idea and I think it applies to a lot of aspects of cybersecurity, especially as we move towards a more autonomous, less human-involved security operations center (SOC).

Looking to automate your SOC? Below, I walk through each level of the Pyramid of Pain applied to the security automation journey as a framework for reducing business risk and accelerating incident mean time to respond (MTTR). 

The SOC Automation Pyramid of Pain: From Bottom to Top

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Level 1: The Basics — Integrations, Enrichment, and Context

The promise of legacy SOAR was to automate the core functions of a SOC, especially from a Tier-1 and Tier-2 perspective. These are the most basic aspects of automating security operations and have been around forever, dating back to Perl scripts! Whether you use Python, Go, or any other automation capabilities including PowerShell, these capabilities have existed since security operations centers have been a thing.

Any automation platform that you implement should have these enrichment capabilities inherently built into them to enhance and contextualize indicators of compromise (IOCs), identities, and assets. They’re the foundation of automation and the core of security operations. Crucially, they should also enable the humans who work in your SOC to be as efficient and effective as possible when it comes to responding to threats, new vulnerabilities, and systems that exist in your environment. 

Difficulty: Low
Business risk impact: Low

Time savings: 80-90% reduction in manual data enrichment, saving 1-2 hours per SOC analyst daily.Cost efficiency: Up to 730 hours saved per analyst annually (based on 2-3 hours of manual tasks per day). At an average hourly rate of $50, this equals $36,500 saved per analyst per year, or $365,000 for a 10-analyst team.Productivity gains: 30-50% faster triage due to immediate access to enriched data.Overall risk reduction: Fewer missed IOCs due to consistent enrichment (priceless!).

Level 2: Moving Up — Collaborative Case Management

Case management is an essential piece of any security operations automation platform. Legacy SOAR and traditional case management systems do not take into account all of the other teams and functions that are involved in a typical incident response scenario. 

In contrast, Torq’s case management system in HyperSOC™ allows collaboration between teams’ workflows and workspaces that enable different organizations to enrich and contribute to an incident response scenario.

Difficulty: Low
Business risk impact: Low

Time savings: 25-50% reduction in time spent managing cases due to automated workflows.Cost efficiency: Avoiding the need to hire one additional analyst saves $100K-$150K annually (varies by location), including salary and benefits.Productivity gains: SOC analysts can consistently handle 2-3x more cases at the same time without additional headcount.Reduced Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): Automation reduces MTTR by up to 50-70%, allowing faster incident containment and remediation.Risk reduction: Faster response minimizes the potential financial impact of a breach. The average cost of a data breach was $4.88M in 2024.

Level 3: Automated Reporting — KPIs and SOC Metrics

SOC metrics have consistently posed a challenge for enterprises. Metrics such as Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to X, and other similar measurements often fail to capture the true scope of business risk. 

To address this, an automation system should facilitate collecting metrics across all security tools and the entirety of an enterprise’s security stack. This provides a comprehensive view of the SOC’s activities, processes, and resulting business outcomes — ensuring that the impact of security operations is clearly understood.

Difficulty: Low
Business risk impact: Medium

Time savings: Up to 90% reduction in time spent generating compliance and audit reports.Reporting accuracy: Minimal to no errors in reporting, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks like GDPR and PCI-DSS.Fine avoidance: By ensuring reporting accuracy and compliance, companies could avoid, for example, $50K-$100K per month for PCI-DSS violations (depending on the transaction volume and duration), or up to €10 million or 2% of global annual revenue, (whichever is greater) for GDPR non-compliance.

Level 4: Basic Automated Response — Point Solution Capabilities

Every security vendor, whether endpoint, firewall, email, or any other point solution, should prioritize robust API capabilities to enable automated response and remediation. 

At this point in the security automation journey, enterprises should be able to automate responses to critical incidents, such as host isolation, malicious processes, stolen or compromised identities, and assets that have been identified as vulnerable to critical Internet-exposed vulnerabilities.

Difficulty: Medium
Business risk impact: High

Response time improvement: 80%+ faster containment for malware infections, phishing attacks, and account compromises.Overall risk reduction: Significantly decreased threat exposure window through automated response actions within seconds to minutes.Increased employee satisfaction: Reduced analyst burnout as analysts focus on complex threats instead of repetitive tasks. 89% of employees report higher job satisfaction after adopting automation solutions.Savings through talent retention: With a global shortage of 2.3M+ SOC analysts, retaining talent is paramount. More satisfied analysts leads them to stay around longer — and not needing to hire an additional single SOC analyst saves between $50-$100K (varies by region), including recruitment, training, and lost productivity.  Companies using Hyperautomation report retention as a key ROI metric for 43% of leaders.

Level 5: The Point of the Spear — Fully Automated Remediation Across the SOC

At the highest level of security automation maturity, organizations should be bringing together all of the capabilities of their security stack. This integration should extend to IT security operations, DevOps, cloud communications, and cloud capabilities, as well as any on-premise or custom applications, enabling a comprehensive automated response to threats and vulnerabilities. 

The aim is to streamline and automate all processes that are identified to reduce business risk and improve MTTR, integrating the entire IT and security stack to achieve autonomous remediation. This paves the way for an autonomous SOC that handles routine security responses, with human intervention reserved for critical decisions.

Difficulty: High
Business risk impact: High

MTTR reduction: Up to 70% decrease in MTTR, minimizing business disruption during high-severity incidents.Risk elimination and consistency: Near-zero human error ensures consistent, immediate investigation and remediation of critical incidents.Operational scalability: SOCs can handle a 200-300% spike in incident volume without adding headcount.Labor cost savings: Near-zero human intervention required for routine remediation actions saves thousands of hours annually, equivalent to $300K-$500K in labor costs (region dependent).

The Value of Automating SOC: How Much You Can Save

Pyramid of Pain LevelTangible Value and Metrics
1. Enrichment and API Integration80-90% time savings on data enrichment
$50K-$100K cost savings
30%-50% faster triage
2. Collaborative Case Management25-50% time savings on case management
3x case handling capacity
$100K+ annual savings
50-70% MTTR reduction
3. Metrics/KPIs and Automated Reporting90% time savings on generating reports
Regulatory non-compliance fine avoidance
4. Basic Automated Response80%+ faster response
Higher employee retainment and satisfaction
Improved threat containment 
5. Fully Automated RemediationNear-zero manual effort
Scalable security operation
$300K-$500K in labor cost savings

More Autonomy, Less Pain

By harnessing the power of agentic AI on a Hyperautomation engine, Torq’s platform combats SOC killers like alert fatigue, manual workflow building, inefficient case workloads, and wading through pages of logs to write case summaries and reports. Autonomous triage, investigation, and response reduces MTTR and frees up analysts to focus on the fun stuff like strategic projects and complex, critical incidents. 

This is the promise of the autonomous SOC — and it’s the pitch that won Torq the Innovation Sandbox competition at CPX 2025. 

Want to chat about how to reach the top of the SOC Automation Pyramid of Pain?

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Torq Named One of America’s Best Startup Employers By Forbes and Business Insider

By Ofer Smadari, CEO & Co-Founder
February 28, 2025
3 Minute Read
Looking for the best startups to work for? Torq is named one of Forbes' America’s Best Startup Employers.

Contents

I couldn’t be more proud of our employees and the unique corporate culture we’ve established at Torq since we began this journey in 2020. In 2024, we hit 200% in employee growth along with 300% revenue growth as our Agentic AI and autonomous SOC solutions gained dramatic Fortune 500 adoption. 

And the world has taken notice with Forbes naming us to its America’s “Best Startup Employers 2025” list and Business Insider calling us one of the “43 startups to bet your career on in 2025.”

High Octane Culture & Careers 

Having these top-tier publications validate and reflect what every Torq employee feels when they start work every day is truly gratifying. We established this company as one where employees could achieve their career goals, significantly enhance their skills and knowledge, and have a whole lot of fun in the process.

This culture was prominently on display at our Sales Kickoff a few weeks ago in Madrid, where employees from across the globe gathered to plan how the year unfolds and celebrate our incredible momentum and accomplishments to date. The enthusiasm at the event was electric and contagious as we drove our “All Gas, No Brakes” theme across every element of the organization.

Photo of Torq CEO Ofer Smadari at Torq's 2025 Sales Kickoff in Madrid — one of the best startup employers to work for.
“All gas, no brakes”: Torq CEO Ofer Smadari and team at the company’s 2025 Sales Kickoff in Madrid.

One of America’s Best Startup Employers 

Forbes chose Torq for its list by analyzing a set of KPIs that correspond to company growth and workplace satisfaction. After gathering more that 7 million data points from over 20,000 eligible companies, 3,000 employers qualified for in-depth analysis. In the end, only 500 employers were included in the ranking, including Torq. Each employer’s final evaluation was based on three key criteria: employer reputation, employee satisfaction, and company growth.

A Startup to Bet Your Career On

Business Insider researched startups that have strong founding teams and investor dollars, with a focus on AI. It determined Torq was among a handful of companies advancing by leaps and bounds across sales and employee growth, along with technological prowess.

These accolades belong to every single Torq employee that’s contributed to this amazing journey to date. This is a place where people come to do their best work, push the technological envelope as far as it can go, and where every idea is given an open forum for consideration. 

Thanks again to Forbes and Business Insider. And thanks to Torqers worldwide. We’re just getting started!

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Torq’s AI-Native Autonomous SOC Wins Check Point’s CPX 2025 Innovation Sandbox Competition

By Torq
February 27, 2025
4 Minute Read
Torq took home the top prize at Checkpoint’s CPX 2025 Innovation Sandbox competition. Get highlights from the winning pitch.

Contents

Torq took home the top prize at Check Point’s 2025 Innovation Sandbox Competition during their annual CPX conference in Las Vegas. Chris Coburn, Torq’s Sr. Director of Tech Alliances, faced off against 13 other companies to pitch Torq’s AI-native autonomous SOC to a panel of judges and voting audience.

As the Sandbox Innovation winner, Chris earned the opportunity to deliver a main-stage keynote to thousands of security professionals and leaders, sharing how Torq’s game-changing agentic AI and Hyperautomation capabilities are saving SOC analysts from burn out while strengthening overall security posture.

“We are witnessing a new era in cybersecurity, and we are thrilled with the innovation throughout the ecosystem. It’s clear that AI and machine learning will play a critical role in shaping the future,” said Brian Linder, Head of Cyber Evangelists in the Office of the CTO at Check Point. “We congratulate Torq on winning first place in the competitive Innovation Sandbox at CPX 2025 Americas and look forward to following their journey as they continue to innovate as an emerging player in cybersecurity.”

The Pitch: AI or Die — Saving the SOC with Agentic AI and Hyperautomation

“It’s time to adopt AI  or die. Everybody’s saying it — AI’s here now and it’s going to be a massive part of cybersecurity going forward. Torq is using AI to help solve everything that is killing our SOC teams every day.” 

– Chris Coburn, Sr. Director of Tech Alliances, Torq

SOCs are in crisis. Security teams are getting buried by alerts and they spend way too much of their time trying to make different tools communicate with each other and trying to get different data formats to make sense with each other. Even when analysts find a true positive alert, the investigation, communication, and remediation steps can be disjointed and painful. This overwhelm causes alerts to be missed, leaving organizations vulnerable to attacks and breaches.

To combat these SOC killers, Torq is offloading all of the mundane, highly repetitive tasks to Hyperautomation and AI — turning down the volume so human analysts can focus in on critical threats, with enriched insights to accelerate their decision-making. 

Torq’s AI-native autonomous SOC is made up of three components:

  1. A foundation of enterprise security-grade architecture built completely on zero trust, cloud-native, extensible software. 
  2. A Hyperautomation engine which makes building automations as easy and powerful as possible, integrated across your entire security stack.
  3. AI agents that act as accelerators for SOC operations. These include an AI Workflow Builder that rapidly generates custom automation workflows using natural language prompts, AI Case Summaries that deliver concise, structured summaries so your team can get up to speed faster, and Socrates, Torq’s agentic AI SOC Analyst that can autonomously triage, investigate, and remediate 95% of Tier-1 cases. 

AI-driven Hyperautomation changes the picture for SOCs today. With Torq, 95% of Tier-1 incidents can be autoremediated, allowing human security analysts to focus on the strategic and engaging work that they actually care about. 

This is the promise of the autonomous SOC — and Torq is making it happen.

Explore Torq's winning autonomous SOC pitch for Check Point CPX 2025's Sandbox Innovation competition.

Want more where this came from? Get the AI or Die Manifesto > 

Check Point Speeds Up Their SOC with Torq HyperSOC™ 

“With Torq HyperSOC, we can react automatically to problems before they become security incidents.” 

– Jonathan Fischbein, CISO at Check Point

Check Point was facing a challenge that many security teams can relate to: too many alerts and too few analysts. When Check Point’s CISO Jonathan Fischbein went on the hunt for a security automation solution, feedback from fellow CISOs and CIOs led him to bypass legacy SOAR products in favor of Torq’s HyperSOC solution.

Key ‘wow factors’ for Check Point included:

  • Easy-to-use UI centered around the SOC analyst experience to make their jobs easier
  • Days-fast deployment of dozens of AI-driven playbooks, automating responses to some of the organization’s most repetitive security alerts
  • Integrations that “fit like a glove” with Check Point’s existing security stack 

Today, Torq’s AI-driven HyperSOC investigates, triages and remediates many of Check Point’s internal security alerts without any human intervention. If an alert meets certain parameters based on security policies, the platform autonomously takes action, such as initiating an MFA challenge or locking out a suspicious user. High-priority incidents are routed for human intervention, with intelligent case insights and recommendations that help analysts make better decisions, faster.

The end result? Dramatic efficiency gains and reduced alert fatigue.

Read Check Point’s Story
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The Dawn of Agentic AI in the SOC

By Torq
February 25, 2025
7 Minute Read
What is agentic AI in the SOC? Get an overview of agentic AI for cybersecurity, how it can benefit security operations, and strategic considerations.

Contents

Now that six in ten security leaders view AI as a “game changer” across all security functions and 85% of security professionals report increased AI investment and usage in the past year, it’s clear that AI is no longer a fringe technology in security operations.

But the AI conversation has evolved recently as a new buzzword has taken over: agentic AI. Underlying the hype are real advancements that have the potential to transform security operations by adding autonomous, goal-oriented decision making to AI-powered SOCs. Gartner even named agentic AI one of the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2025.  

Agentic AI is especially promising for security operations as a way to tackle persistent challenges such as alert fatigue, analyst burnout, and an ongoing talent shortage. Additionally, as increasingly automated attacks intensify the stakes for SOC teams, agentic AI will be a pivotal technology to counteract evolving threats through improved proactiveness and scalability. 

What is Agentic AI in the SOC? 

Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that operate with enhanced autonomy to execute tasks and make decisions. Agentic AI can pursue complex goals and execute workflow tasks with limited direct human supervision. It uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to solve complex, multi-step problems on its own, adapting to real-time data and learning from its environment.

Agentic AI can transform SOCs through the ability to independently triage, investigate and remediate threats —  accelerating incident response and enhancing overall security posture. 

When combined with Hyperautomation, agentic AI can help achieve the autonomous SOC, in which AI handles the vast majority of Tier-1 and Tier-2 alerts, freeing up human analysts to focus on complex, high-priority incidents and strategic projects (aka the rewarding, engaging, and impactful work that analysts actually want to spend their days doing, rather than wading through false positives and writing reports).

2 Key Use Cases for Agentic AI in the SOC 

1. Agentic AI in Phishing Response

Phishing continues to plague SOCs as one of the most common attack vectors for data breaches and ransomware. Agentic AI can elevate phishing response capabilities by streamlining triage, investigation, and containment once detections are flagged by external systems. 

Through seamless integrations with email security, identity management, threat intelligence, EDR, CMDB, and SIEM solutions, Torq’s Agentic AI can autonomously:

  • Examine recipients, email content, links, attachments, IOC reputations, and related case and threat information to determine scope and impact, identifying users who received, opened, or interacted with an email. 
  • Execute environment-wide sweeps for malicious payloads and correlate data to reveal compromised accounts or systems.
  • Initiate containment steps such as quarantining emails, resetting credentials, terminating sessions with enforced MFA, and blocking malicious domains or IPs.  

2. Agentic AI in EDR Response

Experts predict that 20% of new malware strains will be AI-assisted by 2025. Agentic AI can bolster malware detection and response by orchestrating rapid analysis, scoping, containment, and eradication once suspicious activity is flagged by external platforms. 

Torq’s Agentic AI integrates with EDR, CMDB, SIEM, and threat intelligence tools to autonomously:

  • Analyze file behavior (including hashes, signatures, and sandbox results), monitor endpoint resource usage, and detect suspicious persistence mechanisms or privilege escalations.
  • Correlate anomalies across multiple endpoints to identify the scope of compromise, pinpointing infected hosts, associated IOCs, and potentially affected privileged accounts.
  • Swiftly isolate infected endpoints, disable compromised accounts, and kill malicious processes. Malicious file hashes and IP addresses are then added to deny lists for continuous monitoring. Eradication actions can include removing malicious files, cleaning up affected systems, or re-imaging endpoints, ensuring a thorough remediation. 

Torq’s Multi-Agent System: Agentic AI in Action 

When you peel them back, many “AI SOC Agents” on the market are simply ChatGPT-style natural language chatbots. They may be capable of running steps and workflows but lack deep integrations and autonomous capabilities. 

In contrast, Torq’s Multi-Agent System is deeply integrated across the full security stack and able to take complex action and tackle multi-step tasks. At the helm is Socrates, Torq’s agentic AI SOC Analyst which can conduct fully autonomous case investigation, enrichment, and remediation from start to finish, as well as generating contextual recommendations. Alongside Socrates, Torq’s other AI agents provide AI-generated workflows, code, data transformations, case summaries, and more — helping SOC teams get more done, faster.

The Agentic AI ‘Wow Factor’ for Security Operations

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

– Mick Leach, Field CISO, Abnormal Security

  • Boosting analyst engagement and retention: Rather than replacing human analysts, agentic AI can actually help make their day-to-day work in the SOC more rewarding and engaging by eliminating many of the “SOC analyst killers” that bog them down, such as alert fatigue, summarizing cases, and writing reports. This is crucial in a cybersecurity field that continues to deal with an ongoing talent shortage.
  • Augmenting human expertise: For complex and high stakes cases that require human intervention, analysts can collaborate with agentic AI to make faster and better-informed decisions. This is thanks to agentic AI’s ability to correlate information from multiple tools, signals, and third-party threat intelligence to contextually enrich cases and provide deeper insights.
  • Improving security posture: Through its ability to identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate malicious activity, agentic AI improves threat detection and response, enabling SOCs to proactively mitigate threats. Automated incident response and alert triage can reduce mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and mean time to containment (MTTC), minimizing the impact of security incidents.
  • Enhancing operational efficiency and scalability: By handling Tier-1 and Tier-2 alerts and automating routine tasks, agentic AI frees up human analysts to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as threat hunting and vulnerability management. Agentic AI also enables SOCs to scale more efficiently, managing a higher workload without adding headcount.

Considerations for Building Trust in AI in the SOC

SOCs planning to deploy AI capabilities, including agentic AI, should take steps now to document and audit current processes, as it will be important to ensure that AI and automation is used to scale effective processes, rather than to compensate for ineffective ones. Security teams should also establish a method to quantify operational gains from an AI deployment. 

As with any new technology, AI in the SOC will require new skills and training for security teams, such as learning how to effectively collaborate with agentic AI. Any agentic AI solution deployed should be able to raise a flag when it is missing information or requires human validation. For example, if the AI’s threat analysis leads it to recommend quarantining a laptop but the user’s title is “CEO”, the system should have the intelligence and boundaries to flag that the decision is “above its pay grade” and then escalate the decision for human review and approval.

To combat the risk of AI hallucinations and build trust in AI, the system must be able to transparently explain why it made the decisions it made and how it came to the conclusions it did. This requires the AI to bolster its insights and recommendations with citations to original, forensic evidence.

AI or Die: Get the Manifesto

While agentic AI is still a relatively nascent technology, its potential to revolutionize security operations is undeniable. But the crowded AI SOC market makes careful selection essential. 

Get the AI or Die Manifesto to learn red flags that separate AI-washed vaporware from truly impactful AI for the SOC, as well as strategic considerations for effective adoption.

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