AI Insights

Building Trust in AI: Structured, Evidence-Backed Summaries for Seamless SOC Shift Transfers

By Gal Peretz
October 4, 2024
6 Minute Read
A key area for building trust in AI in the SOC? Ensuring that AI-generated summaries have the right structure and evidence to ensure seamless SOC shift transfers.

Contents

Gal Peretz, Head of AI & Data at Torq

Gal Peretz is the former Head of AI & Data at Torq. Gal accelerates Torq’s AI & Data initiatives, applying his vast expertise in deep learning and natural language processing to advance AI-powered security automation. He also co-hosts the LangTalks podcast, where he discusses the latest in AI and LLM technologies. 

Staying ahead of evolving cyber threats means more than just keeping up — it means outsmarting the adversary with intelligent, proactive solutions that supercharge your team. This blog kicks off our latest series focused on building trust in AI in Security Operations Centers (SOCs).

As we navigate this new era of AI, Torq recognizes that integrating intelligent systems into existing security workflows is both new and essential. And it can’t be just deploying advanced technology, it’s about building solutions that seamlessly collaborate with your team and earn their trust. Our mission is to create AI systems that enhance efficiency while embedding naturally into daily operations like SOC shift handoffs, ensuring that technology and human expertise work hand in hand.

The Challenge of Relying on Naive Summarizations in SOC Shift Handovers

Consider a scenario where an outgoing SOC team provides an AI-generated summary during a shift handover. The summary reads:

“A phishing alert was reported by an employee regarding an email from [email protected] with the subject ‘Your package is ready, needs to be released from customs.’ The email passed DMARC and SPF checks but contained several red flags indicating a phishing attempt.” [figure 1]

At first glance, this summary appears concise and informative, but the trained eye will notice it lacks more critical structure and detail. It doesn’t specify what exactly happened beyond a general phishing alert, when the events took place, or how the conclusion of a phishing attempt was reached. Moreover, it fails to cite any original evidence or analyses that support its findings. 

This absence of structured information and verifiable evidence leaves the incoming team with unanswered questions like: 

  • Which systems were affected?
  • What specific red flags were identified? 
  • Were there malicious attachments or links that need immediate attention?

Without this crucial information, the incoming team may misinterpret the severity of the threat or overlook essential steps needed for mitigation. The lack of evidence-backed details also opens the door for AI hallucinations — incorrect or fabricated information generated by AI — which can mislead the team into focusing on the wrong areas. 

Instead of facilitating a smooth transition, the unstructured and unsupported summary creates confusion, delays response times, and potentially allows the threat to persist or escalate.

Example of how a naive AI-generated case summary doesn't have enough information for reliable SOC shift transfers
Figure 1: Naive Case Summary Doesn’t Cut It for Reliable SOC Shift Transfers

The Torq Standard: Structured, Evidence-Backed Summaries

Now, imagine the same scenario we just discussed, this time the outgoing SOC team provides an AI-generated, structured, and evidence-backed summary. The summary is organized into clear sections — What happened, When it happened, and How it happened — each supported by direct citations to original forensic evidence.

“What happened: A phishing alert was reported by an employee regarding an email purportedly from [email protected] with the subject “Your package is ready, needs to be released from customs” [1]. The email contained malicious attachments (invoice.doc and QRCode.png) and included a suspicious link (hXXps://wood82c2[.]jayden1077[.]workers[.]io/c64ed9ed-b68b-4f61-b26e-20d32f0f13ab) [1]. The ‘Reply-To’ address differed from the ‘From’ address, indicating a potential phishing attempt [2].

When it happened: The phishing email was reported on August 5, 2024 [1]. Subsequent analyses and confirmations occurred between August 24 and September 2, 2024 [3][4][5][6].

How it happened: The email passed DMARC and SPF checks, but the discrepancy in the ‘Reply-To’ field raised suspicion [2]. Email body analysis flagged several phishing indicators: a non-legitimate link, a demand for information via a link, a false sense of urgency, and a lack of sender details [3][4]. Sandbox analysis of the attachments confirmed them as malicious, detecting unauthorized network activity and potential application crashes [5][6].” [Figure 2]

Citations:

  1. Phishing Alert Email received by an employee, dated August 5, 2024.
  2. Email Header Analysis Report, conducted on August 24, 2024.
  3. Email Body Content Analysis Summary, dated August 25, 2024.
  4. Suspicious Email Indicators Checklist, referenced on August 26, 2024.
  5. Attachment Scan Results from Antivirus Software, dated August 30, 2024.
  6. Sandbox Analysis Report of Email Attachments, completed on September 2, 2024.

With this structured summary and direct citations, the incoming team can quickly grasp the situation’s full context. They have immediate access to the supporting evidence, allowing them to validate the AI’s conclusions and understand the threat’s specifics without delay. This reduces the risk of misinterpretation and ensures that critical details aren’t overlooked.

The inclusion of citations linking back to original forensic evidence not only mitigates the risk of AI hallucinations but also builds trust in AI-generated insights. Team members can verify each point, ensuring that their actions are based on accurate and reliable information. This structured, evidence-based approach transforms the shift handover into a seamless transition, empowering the incoming team to act swiftly and effectively against the cybersecurity threat.

By adopting this method, Torq has developed AI-based security automation solutions that reflect the analytical thought processes of SOC professionals. The structured summaries not only enhance clarity but also empower team members to validate AI findings, thereby building trust in AI and facilitating more effective collaboration between humans and AI systems.

Example of how a a structured, evidence-based AI-generated case summary can help with building trust in AI in your SOC operations
Figure 2: Structured Summary with Forensic Evidence-Based Citations

Strengthening Your SOC with Trustworthy AI

Innovation and trust go hand in hand, especially in the critical field of cybersecurity. The challenges we’ve discussed highlight the necessity for AI solutions that do more than automate — they need to enhance trust, collaboration, and efficiency within your team. 

This is where Torq’s AI capabilities become your trusted partner in navigating the complexities of security operations. By providing structured, evidence-backed summaries, AI Case Summaries ensure that every piece of information is transparent and verifiable. It empowers your SOC by enabling team members to work faster, make informed decisions with confidence, and seamlessly transition between shifts. By reducing uncertainty and mitigating the risks of AI errors, it streamlines operations and strengthens your entire security posture. 

Together, we’re fostering a collaborative environment where AI and human expertise unite to safeguard your organization more effectively than ever before.

Share

Related Articles

Insights MSSP

4 MSSP Trends: Differentiate Your Business with CTEM, AI SOC, and More

By Torq
October 1, 2024
7 Minute Read
Explore 4 key MSSP trends to help differentiate your business — from continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) to AI-powered SOCs.

Contents

MSSPs have huge potential for growth as more and more companies turn to experts to outsource their cybersecurity. Tailwinds such as escalating cyber threats, the need to protect more customer data than ever before, and growing compliance requirements are driving the managed security services market’s growth at a compound annual growth rate of 15.4% from 2023 to 2030. 

But competition is fierce in a market crowded with thousands of MSSPs — and the landscape is constantly evolving in response to seismic shifts like the rise of AI. 

How do you stand out from the MSSP crowd while adapting to major changes? Below we break down four key trends forward-thinking MSSPs are capitalizing on to differentiate their business and win.

MSSP Trend #1: Budgets are Shifting to More Proactive Security Solutions

In 2024, over 70% of businesses increased spending on proactive security solutions, outstripping spending in preventative and reactive measures.[1] It’s pretty easy to see why: a proactive approach helps organizations get ahead of threats before vulnerabilities can be exploited — rather than constantly dealing with the fallout from attacks that have already happened.  

Proactively identifying and remediating exposures can lower the overall security workload over time while decreasing the likelihood of downtime, data breaches, lost productivity, and lost revenue from attacks. To win business amidst this spending shift, MSSPs need to evolve their approach, services, and messaging towards a proactive stance.

Why this is great for MSSPs: Not only are clients increasingly looking for proactive security solutions, adopting a proactive posture also makes a better business case for MSSPs. 

It’s difficult to attach clear ROI to a reactive, defensive stance because lack of failure is hard to quantify. Flipping the script to an offense-oriented, proactive posture enables  more tangible measurement of harm mitigation and risk reduction. This helps MSSPs make a stronger business case to clients, and in turn, helps their clients demonstrate effective results to their own leadership when justifying budget allocation for security investments. 

MSSP Trend #2: CTEM Brings Opportunity to MSSPs Through Prioritized Threat Remediation

A proactive approach to security must be implemented programmatically in order to succeed. Gartner, Inc. introduced the concept of Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) as a new methodology for security teams to reduce future exposure amidst a dynamically shifting threat landscape. 

Not every vulnerability is created equal — a key component of CTEM is to prioritize vulnerabilities based on urgency, exploitability, and potential impact on the business.

According to Gartner, Inc., by 2026, organizations that prioritize their security investments based on a continuous exposure management program will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.

Why this helps MSSPs differentiate: A prioritized approach to threat remediation recommendations enables clients to focus their resources where they will have the most impact: critical vulnerabilities. This efficiently maximizes risk reduction — and helps MSSPs redefine their role as strategic partners, rather than just service providers.

Strategic recommendations also help MSSPs improve collaboration with clients’ internal teams when remediation actions are needed. Rather than lobbing an unmanageable barrage of issues that need fixing over the fence to a client’s overwhelmed IT teams, providing high-priority recommendations alongside justification for why the remediation matters to the business will enable client teams to more effectively address their most urgent vulnerabilities.

MSSP Trend #3: SOAR is Out — and Hyperautomation is Maximizing MSSP Margins

A proactive, programmatic security strategy requires a robust tech stack that streamlines processes and empowers human experts. For MSSPs, Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) was supposed to be the silver bullet to help them automate operations at scale. However, SOAR’s monolithic architecture and reliance on proprietary connectors failed to deliver even the most basic functionality required to effectively automate security operations — and it’s left MSSPs locked-in to a rigid vendor stack, unable to scale, and bleeding margins.

Enter Hyperautomation. Cloud-native, built for multi-tenancy, and with limitless security integrations and automations, the Torq Hyperautomation platform is changing the game for MSSPs. Hyperautomation:

  • Offloads repetitive tasks by instantly automating any security process using thousands of pre-built integration steps and AI-generated workflows.
  • Frees up MSSP teams to focus on high-value work by proactively identifying threats, prioritizing investigations, and only elevating cases to the appropriate analyst when human-in-the-loop intervention is needed.
  • Onboards new clients in minutes and reduces onboarding costs by securely sharing workflows across environments.
  • Seamlessly integrates with every tool in your clients’ existing security stack.

Why this matters to MSSPs: The supercharged efficiency gains from Hyperautomation means your MSSP can do more, faster — without increasing headcount. This translates to reduce customer acquisition costs, boosted margins, faster-time-to-value, and improved SLAs. Sounds like a win-win-win-win.

The latest MSSP trend? Ditching SOAR for Hyperautomation. Get the Managed Services Manifesto to learn why SOAR is dead.

MSSP Trend #4: AI-Powered SOCs are Rapidly Becoming the Future of Security Operations

MSSP SOCs are under siege from a tsunami of threats growing in severity and complexity, exacerbated by an ongoing talent shortage. Security analysts can only address half of the alerts they’re assigned each day, and nearly half say average detection and response time has increased within the past two years,[2] impacting MSSPs’ ability to meet SLAs. This can lead to penalties, customer churn, and reputational damage. 

AI has radically changed the security world — and it’s key to helping MSSP SOCs beat burnout and stay ahead of evolving threats. Leveraging AI in security operations is not about replacing analyst jobs, but rather augmenting and upleveling existing staff so they can make informed decisions faster without being bogged down by low-level alerts. 

With Torq, MSSPs harness the power of AI through:

  • Socrates, the AI SOC Analyst: Socrates can autonomously execute SOC-defined runbooks written in natural language, auto-remediating 95% of cases within minutes. For critical cases, your human analysts can collaborate with Socrates using natural language to summarize case details, request additional information, and trigger complex remediation workflows — upleveling the capabilities of your team and speeding up response times across the board.
  • AI Workflow Builder: Create custom security automation in seconds by describing your needs in simple, natural language, then previewing and customizing the results — no code required. 
  • AI Case Summaries: Rather than manually slogging through pages of logs and incident details, Torq automatically presents your team with a concise, insightful summary of each case, surfacing critical insights and recommendations so your team can make the right decisions quickly.

Why this helps MSSPs: By automating workflows, speeding up processes, enriching and summarizing cases, and augmenting human expertise, Torq helps MSSP SOC teams achieve machine speed response and start building an autonomous SOC. This results in a faster MTTR to better serve customers — improving their satisfaction and retention. 

Not only that, an AI-powered SOC helps eliminate alert fatigue and analyst burnout so your team has the bandwidth to focus on the bigger picture: strategically securing your clients’ organizations. 

“We are impressed by how [Torq’s] AI augmentation capabilities empower [SOC] staff members to be much more proactive about fortifying the security perimeter.”

IDC HyperSOC™ Spotlight Report

Unlock Growth and Differentiation: The Power of Proactive, AI-Enhanced Security

Proactiveness, prioritization, Hyperautomation, and AI are the future of security operations — and the keys to MSSP evolution and success. Adopting these now will help you stand out, better serve customers, hold on to your best talent, and boost your margins. 

Explore how Torq is helping MSSPs get ahead of the curve and win.

Sources:

  1. Security Magazine, More than 70% of companies increased spending on proactive security, June 2024
  2. Morning Consult and IBM, Global Security Operations Center Study Results, March 2023

Share

Related Articles

Hyperautomation

8 Benefits of Using Hyperautomation

By Dallas Young
September 30, 2024
4 Minute Read
Hyperautomation benefits in cybersecurity

Contents

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) was never built for hybrid cloud adoption at enterprise scale. Legacy SOAR’s complexity, critical operational holes, and technical limitations make it the fatal flaw sinking your organization’s ship. Hyperautomation addresses these challenges with scalable, AI-driven orchestration that enhances security posture while reducing operational overhead.

If your SOC is still relying on legacy SOAR, here are eight Hyperautomation benefits that show why it’s time to switch — today.

What is Hyperautomation?

First things first, what is Hyperautomation? Security Hyperautomation combines AI-driven automation, orchestration, and advanced analytics, enabling your security teams to manage complex workflows across multiple platforms autonomously.

Unlike traditional automation methods, Hyperautomation integrates seamlessly with existing security stacks and business processes, enhancing your team’s ability to respond effectively to evolving threats.

8 Hyperautomation Benefits That Deliver

1. Ease of Use and Simplicity

One of the top benefits of Hyperautomation is accessibility. With Torq, anyone on your security team, not just developers, can create powerful workflows in minutes with never-seen-before efficiency. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, the solution is powerful enough to handle the most complex threat responses yet easy enough to deploy. Unlike legacy SOAR solutions, multiple teams can eliminate repetitive security tasks with automations that can be created in minutes.

2. Enterprise-Grade Security Architecture

Torq’s Hyperautomation platform is built for scale. Built on cloud-native, zero-trust principles, Hyperautomation ensures extensive security at scale. For example, Torq delivers immutable activity logs, granular role-based access controls, and strict adherence to compliance, addressing critical operational gaps common in legacy SOAR solutions.

3. Measurable ROI and Cost Savings

With dashboards like Torq Insights, security leaders can track real-time gains in productivity, cost savings, and incident resolution times. Many teams see a 10X+ efficiency boost within weeks, as Hyperautomation eliminates repetitive tasks and accelerates key metrics like MTTR and case closure rates.

4. Intelligent Case Management 

Another key benefit of Hyperautomation is that it autonomously orchestrates the analysis and remediation of security cases. Rather than manually managing a security case’s progress, Hyperautomation workflows can be triggered by case-specific actions. 

When a case severity changes or a new observable is added, Hyperautomation moves the case forward by intelligently adjusting the priority, assigning the appropriate field of ownership, or even beginning the remediation process. This accelerates the detection, analysis, and response of security issues, freeing up significant analyst time to focus on strategic activities. 

5. Lower Services Overhead

Unlike traditional SOAR solutions, Hyperautomation platforms don’t need costly professional services to write complex Python scripts that bend rigid pre-built connectors or inflexible use case playbooks. 

Torq’s advanced agentic AI capabilities provide guided coding expertise across scripting languages such as SSH, PowerShell, SQL, Python, BASH, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure CLI, and more. This eliminates the need for any level of coding experience or unexpected expenses from third-party consultants. Achieve your automation goals quickly and efficiently without hidden charges.

6. Secure Connectivity

Hyperautomation eliminates the need for risky firewall modifications or VPN setups. With Torq’s zero-trust containerized agents, outbound-only connections securely integrate your on-premise infrastructure, maintaining security posture across any variation of cloud, hybrid, or on-premise environments.

7. Integrate Anything. Automate Everything.

Automate virtually any task or use case across any solution in your security stack with Hyperautomation’s agentic AI-driven workflow-building experience. Simply describe a workflow, use case, or outcome using natural language to guide Torq’s AI agents as it implements workflows to secure your organization faster than ever before. Or leverage Torq’s library of thousands of pre-built integrations, steps, templates, and AI prompts to inspire your next Hyperautomated security use case.

8. Extensibility Across the Organization

With Hyperautomation, you can empower your organization beyond security by connecting to collaboration, communication, and infrastructure applications — and more. Torq’s near-limitless connectivity enables security teams to interact with non-security employees, streamlining just-in-time access, information gathering, and incident response. 

SOAR Is Dead — and Hyperautomation Is the Answer

SOAR promised automation but delivered frustration. It’s slow, complex, and fundamentally not built for modern cybersecurity needs. Security Hyperautomation is the next evolution and the benefits are clear: faster to deploy, easier to scale, and purpose-built for the cloud-native, AI-driven SOC.

Don’t let legacy tools hold your team back. Start realizing the full value of AI-powered automation.

The Kill Your SOAR Guide has all the details on how to migrate from legacy SOAR to Torq.

Get the Guide
Share

Related Articles

Insights News

Accelerating Torq’s Vision: Announcing Our Series C Funding Round

By Ofer Smadari, CEO
September 24, 2024
4 Minute Read
The latest Torq funding round closed with $70M in Series C funding — fueling our mission of revolutionizing SecOps through the Generative AI-based Torq Hyperautomation Platform and Torq HyperSOC solution.

I’m excited to share some significant news that marks a pivotal milestone in Torq’s journey. We’ve successfully closed our Series C funding round, securing a $70M investment to propel our mission of revolutionizing SecOps through the Generative AI-based Torq Hyperautomation Platform and cutting-edge Torq HyperSOC solution.

A Journey Fueled by Innovation

When we launched Torq three years ago, our vision was clear: To transform SOC automation and operation teams with solutions that not only defend against sophisticated threats, but also streamline and hyperautomate SecOps at the largest global enterprises. During the past three years, our dedicated team has worked tirelessly to build the Torq Hyperautomation Platform which seamlessly integrates with any existing infrastructure and security tool, providing the unparalleled ability to instantly and precisely remediate security events, and orchestrate complex security processes at scale. 

This funding round is more than just a financial boost. It reflects the confidence of our investors and the strength of our technology. We’re thrilled to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cybersecurity, particularly with a focus on Hyperautomation.

Doubling Down on Generative AI

A key highlight of this funding round is our commitment to double down on Generative AI. We recognize that Generative AI has transformative potential in enhancing cybersecurity. By integrating these advanced technologies into our platform, we aim to provide even more sophisticated threat detection, response automation, and predictive capabilities.

Generative AI will empower our systems to analyze vast amounts of data and generate actionable insights in real-time. This will not only improve the accuracy and efficiency of SecOps, but also enable our customers to stay ahead of adversaries with cutting-edge defensive measures.

What Series C Means for Us and Our Customers

Series C will accelerate our growth in several key areas:

  1. Innovation and R&D: We’ll invest heavily in R&D to enhance our platform’s capabilities, ensuring we stay ahead of emerging threats and provide our customers with state-of-the-art solutions.
  2. Expansion of Our Talent Pool: To drive our vision forward, we need the best minds in the industry. This funding will allow us to expand our team and bring in experts who are as passionate about cybersecurity and Hyperautomation as we are.
  3. Market Penetration and Customer Growth: With this capital, we’ll accelerate our go-to-market strategy and scale our operations to reach more businesses and organizations globally. Our commitment to innovation has already attracted a rapidly growing customer base, and we are excited to extend our reach even further. New and existing customers will benefit from enhanced features, faster deployment, and robust security measures designed to meet their evolving needs.
  4. Customer Success and Support: We’re dedicated to providing exceptional products and ensuring our customers have the support they need to maximize their investment in our technology. This funding will help us enhance our customer success programs and provide top-tier support to our growing client base.

Value for Our Growing Customer Base

Our expanding customer base is clear validation of our approach and the value we deliver. For our existing customers, this funding means we can continue to enhance and refine our platform, offering sophisticated tools and capabilities to keep their operations secure. For new customers, it represents an opportunity to leverage our state-of-the-art technology from a company committed to pushing the boundaries of cybersecurity and automation.

A Thank You to Our Partners and Team

This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of our investors, partners, and incredible employees. Your collective belief in our vision and dedication to our mission have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today.

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, our commitment to innovation and excellence remains steadfast. We’re excited about the possibilities ahead and are more determined than ever to lead the way in cybersecurity and Hyperautomation. Together, we will continue to build a safer, more resilient digital world.

Thank you for your continued support and trust in us. Here’s to the next chapter of our journey!

Share

Related Articles

AI Hyperautomation Insights Product

The Evolution of Automation and AI for Security Operations

By Bob Boyle
September 23, 2024
8 Minute Read
AI for security operations automating a SOC at machine speed

Contents

In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving, and security teams are overwhelmed by an ever-expanding flood of alerts, tech sprawl, and an ongoing talent shortage, modernizing the SOC is no longer optional — it’s imperative. AI for security operations offers the speed, intelligence, and resilience that today’s SOCs need to survive.

According to Gartner and IDC, automation and AI for security operations are the keys to unlocking new levels of efficiency, accuracy, and resilience in the fight against cyber threats. Learn how SecOps automation has evolved way (way) past SOAR and how SOC teams are putting agentic AI into action to elevate their teams and achieve machine-speed response times.

From Legacy SOAR to Hyperautomation + AI

  1. Legacy SOAR came — and went. The security operations automation journey began with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) as the primary automation and orchestration option for SecOps teams. However, as the cybersecurity landscape grew more complex and the volume of threats increased, SOAR’s limitations became glaringly evident. Gartner even went as far as to say “SOAR is Obsolete” in their latest ITSM Hype Cycle (2024), placing SOAR at the bottom of their “Trough of Disillusionment”. 
  1. Hyperautomation unleashed limitless potential. Unlike SOAR, Hyperautomation offered unlimited security integrations, simple-to-build automations, and cloud-native scalability. The incorporation of case management into a Hyperautomation engine helped mitigate alert fatigue by enabling automated remediation of false positives and other low-risk threats while more intelligently prioritizing comprehensive security cases in a meaningful way. 
  1. AI for security operations sped up the SOC. The next evolution of security automation involved leveraging generative AI to augment human expertise, enabling SOC teams to achieve machine-speed detection and response.
  1. Agentic AI takes the wheel: Agentic AI is the next logical evolution of AI for security operations, delivering autonomous decision-making capabilities that can reason, plan, and execute goals without constant human supervision. It’s the brain behind the autonomous SOC, freeing up analysts to do the strategic work. IDC’s report highlights that agentic AI can solve problems, adapt to its environment, and make complex decisions without human intervention. This shift moves SOCs from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop supervision.

The modern SOC has arrived. As Gartner recently highlighted, to overcome the existential challenges that continue to plague SOC teams, security operations must continue to adapt. This brings us to the future of SecOps, where the gold standard for the modern SOC is a purpose-built combination of Hyperautomation and agentic AI to achieve the autonomous SOC.

Benefits of Adopting Automation and AI for Security Operations 

AI for security operations is critical not just for efficiency but for survival. It’s about alleviating the pressure on SOC teams, helping to avoid burnout and reducing the four million+ talent shortage gap that exists in the cybersecurity industry today. 

Gartner predicts that “by 2028, AI in threat detection and incident response will rise from 5% to 70%, primarily augmenting — not replacing — human analysts.”

As Gartner highlights, while the growth of AI continues to expand, its primary aim should be to augment the existing staff operating the SOC, not replace them entirely. This is good to keep in mind, as many organizations are hesitant to fully entrust AI with their security operations. However, with the rise of AI used in targeted attack campaigns, most organizations do recognize that it is near impossible for humans alone to keep pace with today’s quantity and complexity of threats.

When implementing AI for security operations, the most successful benchmarks to strive for are: 

  • Eliminating alert fatigue
  • Improving SOC analyst morale
  • Getting time back to focus on critical threats
  • Mitigating threats more quickly and efficiently
  • Increasing the accuracy of results

The benefits of automation and AI for security operations are not in removing human decision-making altogether but rather in upskilling the most junior SOC analysts while preventing the most experienced analysts from burning out in their role. 

To fully realize the potential of AI for security operations, organizations need a solution that combines context awareness and autonomous action. That solution is Socrates.

Introducing Socrates: Your AI SOC Analyst

Torq Socrates is our AI SOC Analyst capable of deep research, planning, and autonomous execution of end-to-end security case management. Socrates acts as an OmniAgent, coordinating multiple specialized AI Agents for contextual alert triage, incident investigation, and auto-remediation of Tier-1 tasks. 

For critical threats, Socrates augments your team’s expertise — enabling them to take action faster thanks to natural-language, human-AI collaboration.

There are two primary ways SOC teams are using Socrates to handle security cases today:

  1. Assigning cases to Socrates for end-to-end autonomous remediation
  2. Faster human-on-the-loop remediation with AI augmentation

1. Autonomous Remediation

First, SOC teams can assign specific cases to Socrates for auto-remediation without requiring any human intervention. 

In traditional analyst remediation, when a case is assigned, the analyst typically consults a runbook to guide them through the response required to contain the specific event (or events) that appear within the case. 

From start to finish, the triage, investigation, and remediation of a single case can take a human analyst 30 minutes or more, depending on the experience level of the analyst. In larger enterprises, there may even be multiple analysts with varying responsibilities involved in the lifecycle of a case — one for the initial triage, one for the Tier-2 investigation, and another for the incident response.

Socrates follows the same runbook planning and execution process but instead leverages a team of AI agents to craft, plan, and execute highly customized incident response strategies — at machine speed. Socrates’ leverages agentic AI to analyze SOC-defined runbooks written in natural language, learn from past outcomes, identify attack patterns, and continuously refine response plans to adapt to new threat vectors —  resulting in complete auto-remediation of 95% of cases in mere minutes.    

For cases that increase in severity based on Socrates’ agentic investigation or as new case data is added, raising the threat to a critical level, SOC teams can build off-ramps into each runbook that tell Socrates when to escalate cases to a human analyst for intervention.

2. Faster Human-on-the-Loop Remediation

Which brings us to the second use case: leveraging Socrates to help SOC teams investigate and take action on the cases that do require human decision making — faster. 

Analysts who are assigned critical cases for human-guided remediation can take advantage of Torq’s Multi-Agent System (MAS) by using natural language to chat with Socrates and ask for: 

  • AI-generated case summaries: Faster access to real-time and historical case observables, attachments, associated indicators of compromise (IOCs), or current case status enables streamlined decision-making by eliminating irrelevant noise.
  • Deep research investigations: Enrich cases by uncovering hidden attack patterns across diverse data sources and third-party threat intelligence to help precisely assess the threat impact and improve strategic threat prioritization.
  • Agentic AI-augmented remediation: Take action across the security stack using AI agents to trigger complex remediation workflows through Torq’s Hyperautomation platform, significantly reducing the amount of time from case assignment to case resolution.  

With Socrates, even a brand new analyst who hasn’t been trained on how to leverage the full functionality of every security solution in their stack can easily ask Socrates to deploy AI agents that can quickly quarantine devices, isolate hosts, or kick off a password reset — without the risk of human error. 

In its simplest form, Socrates was built to do what Torq has set out to do from the very beginning: Hyperautomate SecOps. By coordinating a team of AI agents, Socrates can automate the most repetitive tasks and reduce Tier-1 triage and investigation by 90% — helping humans respond to threats faster.

Embracing Hyperautomation and AI for Security Operations 

In an era where cyber threats are constantly evolving, the modernization of the SOC is no longer optional — it’s imperative. The inclusion of AI for security operations — like Torq Socrates — marks a pivotal shift in how SOC teams can combat alert fatigue, tech sprawl, and talent shortage. 

By integrating Hyperautomation and AI, Torq HyperSOC exemplifies how AI for security operations drives faster detection, smarter decisions, and machine-speed remediation, achieving:

  • Up to 90% reduction in investigation times
  • 3-5x increase in SOC alert capacity without additional headcount
  • Autonomous remediation of over 95% of security threats

AI for security operations lets teams regain significant amounts of time, allowing human analysts to focus on more strategic tasks while maintaining control over critical operations. The future of the SOC lies in this harmonious blend of human expertise and intelligent automation, setting a new standard for operational efficiency in security operations.

Want to learn more about the SOC’s evolution from automation to autonomy? IDC’s Spotlight Report explores why agentic AI for security operations is the next leap in the autonomous SOC. 

Get the Report
Share

Related Articles

Use Cases

The Future of Automated Threat Intelligence: 6 Enrichment Use Cases

By Torq
September 20, 2024
7 Minute Read

Contents

Cyber threats move fast — your threat intelligence should move faster. But most SOC teams spend more time drowning in false positives and manually correlating threat data than actually responding to real threats.

Automated threat intelligence changes this. With AI-driven automated intelligence, security teams can instantly collect, analyze, and act without sifting through endless alerts and indicators of compromise (IOCs). This shift from playing catch-up to a proactive, automated defense is critical to outpace attackers.

What is Automated Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence is the evidence-based collection of information and the observation of the capabilities, techniques, motives, goals, and targets of an existing threat. Simply put, it’s everything that you know about an attacker — actual or potential — based on their motives and how badly they can damage your business assets.

Threat intelligence is not a checklist. It’s a cycle of well-defined processes and operations that involves collecting raw data, cleaning and normalizing it into actionable observables, comparing it to current data to remove duplicates, and then storing it in a structured, human-readable format. That’s a lot of work.

And here’s the reality: SOCs are flooded with data — OSINT feeds, commercial intelligence, SIEM alerts, and internal security logs. Sorting through this manually is incredibly inefficient. Meanwhile, threat actors are evolving, moving faster, and becoming more evasive.

This is where security automation comes in. Instead of relying on analysts to manually collect, correlate, and respond to intelligence data, automated threat intelligence streamlines and enriches alerts, automatically prioritizes threats, and triggers incident response.

The Importance of Automated Threat Intelligence in the SOC

Threat intelligence is the backbone of a SOC, setting apart reactive teams from proactive ones. Here’s why it matters:

  • Automated threat intelligence adds important context to threats so teams know what they see.
  • It identifies attackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), giving insight into how threat actors operate.
  • Intelligence can enable faster and smarter decision-making, reducing response time and preventing data loss.
  • By increasing efficiency, automated intelligence makes it easier to demonstrate ROI and value.

What is Threat Intelligence Enrichment?

Threat intelligence enrichment is the process of adding context to raw security threat data in order to better understand the threat. 

Imagine this scenario: You detect a wave of port scans against your servers. You know the IP addresses of the hosts from which the port scans originated, but you don’t know much more than this.

With threat intelligence enrichment, you could immediately gain insights like: 

  • Where the scanning servers are located
  • The operating systems and infrastructure they’re using
  • Whether the IPs are linked to known botnets, advanced attackers, or recent global threats
  • If these specific scans have been flagged in association with malware campaigns targeting similar organizations

With this enriched intelligence, your SOC can respond with precision and accuracy, blocking known malicious IPs, strengthening defenses against relevant attack vectors, and prioritizing investigations based on risk level. 

Of course, you can manage your threat intelligence data manually by correlating and comparing it. That approach, however, is not practical at scale. So, that begs the next question: How can we automate threat intelligence enrichment?

6 Ways to Automate Threat Intelligence Enrichment

1. Enrich Alerts Across Multiple Sources

Security teams need to correlate data from OSINT, intelligence feeds, internal logs, and SIEMs — but they’re stuck manually sifting through inconsistent, raw data. This delays investigations and allows threats to slip through.

Torq Hyperautomation™ automatically collects and correlates threat intelligence across all sources, filtering out false positives and providing actionable insights. Torq ingests, correlates, and enriches raw threat intel in real time, prioritizing alerts that actually matter.

Key Benefits For Alert Enrichment
Reduces the risk of false positives and false negatives in threat detectionAutomates the process of collecting and analyzing dataPrioritizes alerts, provides contextual information, and recommends response actionsQuickly and efficiently make informed decisions, reducing the response time to potential threats

2. Automate EDR, XDR, and SIEM Alerts

Manually managing alerts from EDRs, XDRs, and SIEMs can be challenging when dealing with large amounts of data. A Hyperautomation platform integrates across EDR, XDR, and SIEM platforms, automating alert handling and prioritization. It triages, enriches, and remediates alerts in real time, slashing MTTR and freeing up analysts to focus on real threats.

With Torq Hyperautomation, when an EDR alert flags a malicious file, Torq automatically quarantines, blocks the source, and launches an impact assessment. Torq is the connective tissue between these technologies, eliminating silos and enhancing data sharing.

Key Benefits For Alert Automation
Automates the process of collecting and correlating data from multiple technology sourcesRapidly identifies and responds to potential security threatsFrees up analysts to focus on critical tasks and work on strategic initiativesReduces response times, minimizing the impact of potential security incidents

3. Streamline Team-Based Threat Hunting

Threat hunting is the proactive search for threats that may have evaded detection by traditional security technologies. This process requires highly skilled analysts to investigate, but it is also a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. A Hyperautomation platform can centralize all the data, streamline the data correlation, and facilitate collaborative and automated threat hunts, reducing investigation times.

Torq’s AI-powered threat hunting assists SOC analysts by proactively analyzing high-velocity and high-volume data sets from multiple sources. It’s able to identify patterns, analogies, and IOCs that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Key Benefits For Threat Hunting
Automates the process of sharing information and delegating tasksProvides workflows to facilitate collaboration between multiple teams in threat huntingImproves the efficiency and effectiveness of threat hunting capabilitiesIdentifies and responds to potential threats more quickly and accurately

4. Align Processes

Disconnected security processes create inefficiencies, gaps, and compliance risks. Hyperautomation aligns security processes across teams and tools, ensuring every security event follows a standardized, automated workflow. 

For example, if a SIEM alert flags a compromised user account, Torq Hyperautomation automatically pulls identity and access logs, verifies behavioral anomalies, and notifies the security team with recommended actions.

Key Benefits For Process and Procedure Alignment
Standardizes security processes and proceduresEnsures all security workflows are repeatable and consistently applied across the organizationEnhances visibility into potential threats allowing organizations to proactively address concernIdentifies and responds to potential threats more quickly and effectively

5. Trigger Workflows Across Disparate Infrastructures

Security teams cannot manually manage the sheer volume and velocity of security data generated by different security technologies. They need a better way to identify and respond to threats. Hyperautomation can integrate EDR, SIEM, email security, cloud security, MDM, and endpoint security, plus more, allowing organizations to trigger cross-platform security actions.

When an incident is triggered in a workflow, Torq Hyperautomation can launch containment workflows and notify stakeholders.

Key Benefits For Workflow Triggering
Extracts maximum value from existing investments by integrating disparate security technologiesAutomates security workflows across the entire security tools stack


Collects and analyzes large volumes of data at scale to reduce noise


Responds to potential threats more quickly and accurately, reducing the MTTR


6. Minimize Manual Response Dependencies

Security incidents need instant response, but human remediation is too slow. The longer it takes to contain an attack, the more damage is done. Hyperautomation can speed up the entire response process, reducing manual effort and slashing MTTR. 

If an endpoint security tool flags a malicious file, Torq Hyperautomation instantly isolates the device, blocks the attack vector, and launches an automated investigation.

Key Benefits For Minimizing Manual Response Dependencies
Automates the coordination of incident response activities across different teams and technologiesResponds to threats with minimal manual human dependencies, helping improve and scale incident response capabilities
Assists with centralizing the coordination and multi-team collaboration to minimize the risk of errors and miscommunications
Provides workflows to help organizations respond to security incidents more efficiently, quickly, and accurately

The Role of AI in Threat Intelligence

AI plays a pivotal role in threat intelligence automation. It rapidly analyzes massive volumes of data to detect patterns, anomalies, and indicators of compromise that human analysts might miss. 

This dramatically improves detection accuracy, speeds up response, and helps organizations stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated attackers. In short, AI in threat intelligence turns reactive security into proactive, predictive defense.

Ready to automate your threat intelligence operations with AI-driven Hyperautomation? See how Torq can help.

Get the Demo
Share

Related Articles

Product

What’s New With Torq: September 2024

By Torq
September 6, 2024
4 Minute Read

Contents

The Team at Torq is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in security automation, and we’re excited to share several new capabilities designed to make security analysts’ lives easier and more efficient:

Introducing AI Case Summaries

Torq AI Case Summaries leverages the power of artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate your security operations. Imagine this: instead of manually reviewing pages of logs and incident details, your team is presented with a concise, insightful summary of each case automatically generated by Torq.

Here’s how it works:

  • AI-Powered Summarization: Torq AI Case Summary analyzes all the relevant data points associated with a security alert, including logs, threat intelligence feeds, and historical incident data.
  • Instant Insights: Our advanced AI algorithms identify the most critical information and present it in a clear, easy-to-understand summary, highlighting the potential impact and recommended actions.
  • Faster Response Times: Armed with these AI-driven insights, your team can quickly understand the nature of the threat, prioritize incidents effectively, and take decisive action to mitigate risks.

Torq AI Case Summary enables your security team to operate at peak performance. By automating the tedious task of case summarization, AI Case Summary frees up analysts to focus on what matters most: investigating complex threats, hunting for vulnerabilities, and proactively strengthening your security posture.

Learn More

Simplify Form Building with Torq Interact

Need a department head to approve a suspicious travel request? Or perhaps you need a marketing manager to verify the legitimacy of a social media file? Torq Interact empowers security teams to automate approvals and data collection tasks with teams outside the security organization, ensuring a swift and coordinated response to security events.

As customers use Torq Interact to streamline both security team processes and end-user engagement, we continue to find new ways to improve the Interact experience. As of today, four new fields have been added to Torq Interact: 

  1. Date & Time Parameter: End users can easily select specific dates and times within interactions. For example, they can pinpoint the exact date of a thwarted phishing attempt.
  2. Enhanced File Parameter: Users can now upload multiple files simultaneously rather than one at a time. This simplifies the user experience, especially when dealing with unpredictable files. 
  3. Download File Parameter: Now, Torq users can leverage Interact to send files directly to end users for download, either directly or through workflow context. Analysts might be looking for a secure way to send a potentially malicious file to another team member so they can execute it in a sandbox for further investigation. 
  4. Secondary Button: This enables Interact users to add flexibility to their workflows with a secondary button that allows users to submit forms without filling in all required fields, perfect for adapting to various interaction scenarios.
  5. Conditional Elements: The conditional element introduces an advanced logic conditional element to enhance the end-user experience by dynamically presenting questions or information based on live responses, increasing the accuracy of every interaction.

Learn More

Enhanced Data Records with Torq Tables

Security teams are drowning in data. Every tool in your stack generates logs, alerts, and reports. But making sense of it all? That’s where things get messy. Spreadsheets buckle under the weight of hundreds, thousands, millions of rows. Custom dashboards require coding expertise and constant maintenance. You need a way to wrangle your data, not be ruled by it.

Torq Tables is a powerful, flexible way to interact with all your security data, directly within the Torq platform.

Torq Tables Enable You To:

  • Centralize your data: Pull in data from any source – NIST, SIEM, EDR, cloud platforms, and more – into a single, unified view—no jumping between tools and screens.
  • Investigate with speed and precision: Filter, sort, and analyze a significant amount of data in real-time. Uncover hidden threats and patterns that would otherwise remain buried.
  • Automate with ease: Trigger workflows directly from data in tables, responding to threats and anomalies at machine speed.

Torq Tables is now available for all Torq users. Log in to your Torq instance to get started, or schedule a demo.

Learn More

Monitor and Manage Workspaces with Organization Management

Organization Management introduces a new single pane of glass view, simplifying the process for Torq users to monitor usage across multiple workspaces and perform org-level administrative tasks. Additionally, we’ve introduced a new Organization Manager role to grant appropriate stakeholders org-level access while adhering to a least-privilege access approach. 

Learn More

We’re excited to see what security teams will accomplish with these new capabilities. Keep an eye out for future updates as we push the boundaries of security automation!

Share

Related Articles

Hyperautomation Use Cases

A Blueprint for Hyperautomating Your Next-Gen Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

By Aner Izraeli
August 26, 2024
5 Minute Read
SDLC automation architecture and blueprint at Torq

Contents

Aner Izraeli is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Torq. He leads Torq’s cybersecurity strategy with a focus on innovation and resilience. Aner’s career spans over two decades in the cybersecurity field, where he has consistently demonstrated expertise in SIEM/SOC, incident response, and network security. 

At Torq, we’re all about pushing boundaries and driving innovation. But we can’t afford to treat security as an afterthought in our relentless pursuit of speed and creativity. As a lean and agile team, we’re constantly challenged to stay ahead of emerging threats without slowing down our momentum.

In this blog, I break down how we Hyperautomated our software development lifecycle (SDLC) to improve security coverage, reduce friction, and keep our R&D teams shipping fast.

The SDLC Challenge: Balancing Speed and Security

Our software engineering teams manage various components and microservices, each with unique functionalities requiring meticulous threat modeling and vulnerability assessments. Modern software engineering integrates open-source and proprietary libraries, introducing potential security vulnerabilities in individual and shared components across teams.

The primary challenge is ensuring these vulnerabilities are continuously identified and mitigated before they compromise the production environment. Simultaneously, it’s crucial to maintain an environment where teams can continue to innovate and deliver high-quality software without being hindered by security concerns. 

In short, how do we ensure that potential application security vulnerabilities are identified and resolved before they threaten our production environment while empowering our teams to innovate and deliver high-quality software? That’s where SDLC automation and security Hyperautomation come in.

Building Our SDLC Automation Architecture

Our solution started with integrating an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, which provided complete control over our supply chain and SDLC. This visibility extends across open-source packages, Dockerfile dependencies, and container images — everything from the far-right side of the SDLC. But visibility alone can be overwhelming. 

We needed to take it further by leveraging Torq’s Hyperautomation capabilities. Hyperautomation enabled us to combine no-code workflows, AI-driven orchestration, and system-wide integrations into a single, scalable SDLC framework.

Here’s how our SDLC automation stack works in the context of our Application Security events pipeline:

SDLC automation architecture and blueprint at Torq

Inside Our Hyperautomated SDLC Pipeline

My vision was simple but ambitious: create a seamless, automated SDLC pipeline that transforms how we manage vulnerabilities. Here’s how we did it:

I used Torq’s workflows to categorize and aggregate issues, while centralized case management simplifies investigations for R&D teams. Automation facilitates generating Jira tickets, pull requests, and Slack notifications, keeping teams aligned with daily SLA reminders. This ensures our teams can focus on what matters most — innovation without compromise. 

Below is an illustration of what that automated SDLC flow looks like:

Visual flowchart showing Torq’s SDLC automation process

The SDLC Automation Implementation In Action

When the ASPM flags a new issue, Torq automatically creates a centralized case grouped by severity and category for that specific repository — eliminating duplicate tickets and reducing noise.

Diagram showing Torq case aggregating security issues by severity and category within a repository to streamline R&D workflows.

The case includes a detailed table with affected packages, suggested upgrades, a risk verdict, and direct links to GitHub and ASPM findings.

If action is needed, R&D can trigger a predefined workflow with one click, auto-generating a Jira ticket, a pull request, and a Slack notification, all while staying aligned with SLA requirements.

Table view of ASPM issues in Torq with quick actions to create Jira tickets, PRs, and Slack alerts for SLA-compliant remediation.
Torq interface showing direct PR links and automated change management for SDLC updates by R&D teams.

With enriched data and automated context in hand, our dev teams can patch vulnerabilities quickly. Each remediation follows Torq’s change management and SDLC policies, flowing through peer review and automated deployment like any standard feature or update.

SDLC automation workflow showing peer review and automated deployment of security fixes through Torq’s change management process.

SLA Compliance Made Simple

Automated workflow in Torq tracking SLA deadlines

In line with Torq’s policy, every issue is assigned a severity-based SLA. To ensure timely resolution, a daily automated workflow reviews open cases and notifies each R&D team of their remaining time to address these issues. SDLC automation keeps teams on track, ensuring vulnerabilities are managed effectively without disrupting ongoing development.

That’s the power of SDLC Hyperautomation: fast and repeatable.

When To Implement SDLC Hyperautomation 

Achieving fully automated vulnerability management may sound like an ambitious goal, but it’s essential for the velocity of modern security operations. Within Torq, we strive for a seamless process from detection to merge. Successful SDLC Hyperautomation can become possible when:

  • The vulnerability management program is mature and well-established
  • There are consistent, repeatable actions required for product or software updates
  • The SDLC includes a robust testing process, acting as a safety net to catch any oversights during automation

The Business Impact of SDLC Automation

The result of our efforts was a fully automated vulnerability management process that has revolutionized our approach to AppSec. We’ve slashed remediation times, improved SLA adherence, and empowered our R&D teams to deliver secure, high-quality software faster than ever. Here was the quantitative impact:R&D teams to deliver secure, high-quality software faster than ever. Here was the quantitative impact:

Ready to Hyperautomate your AppSec approach? Torq can help you build SDLC automation workflows that scale, simplify security, and eliminate busy work.

Get a Demo
Share

Related Articles

AI Hyperautomation Insights

Incident Response Automation and Why It’s Critical for Your SOC

By Torq
August 20, 2024
7 Minute Read
Automated incident response powered by agentic AI

Contents

Speed is everything in security. Delayed responses to security incidents can result in the loss of business data, erosion of trust, and significant financial losses. Traditional manual incident response can’t keep pace with today’s threats.

This is where incident response automation comes in. Powered by AI-driven security automation, it allows SOC teams to detect, prioritize, and neutralize threats faster than ever — often before users even know an issue exists.

In this blog, we’ll break down what incident response automation is, why it’s essential, and real-life use cases for modern SOCs.

What Is Incident Response Automation?

Manual incident response relies heavily on human intervention and human reaction time. Analysts must identify the threat, triage, determine its impact, decide on a course of action, execute that action, and document everything — often while juggling dozens of other critical duties. It’s slow. It’s error-prone. And it leaves your organization vulnerable.

Powered by AI, incident response automation enables instant detection and response by automatically identifying and neutralizing threats — often before users even become aware of an issue. It delivers scalability by handling multiple incidents simultaneously across sprawling, complex environments without overwhelming the SOC. It empowers analysts by offloading repetitive, routine tasks, allowing human experts to focus their time and energy on strategic, high-value initiatives. And it drives operational maturity by feeding AI-driven insights back into detection and response processes, improving incident prevention.

Incident Response Automation Defined

Incident response automation utilizes AI-driven workflows and technology to detect, investigate, contain, and remediate security threats without requiring manual human intervention. It replaces slow, error-prone manual processes with real-time, consistent, and scalable actions, dramatically reducing MTTD and MTTR.

Core Components of Automated Incident Response

Tool integration: Seamlessly integrates with existing security tools like SIEMs, EDR, firewalls, and threat intelligence platforms.

Scalability: Automated responses allow SOCs to handle more incidents without increasing headcount or operational costs.

Consistency: Uniform execution of best-practice-driven response actions reduces risk and ensures predictable outcomes.

Flexibility: Retains human oversight, allowing analysts to intervene or supervise as needed.

Alerting and detection: Real-time, automated detection reduces delays, ensuring immediate response.

Incident prioritization: Automated systems categorize incidents by severity, helping teams focus resources efficiently.

Remediation: Predefined automated actions such as quarantining compromised systems, blocking malicious IPs, and applying patches.

Reporting and post-mortems: Automated documentation simplifies root cause analysis and improves future responses.

Why Manual Incident Response Falls Short

Traditional manual incident response often suffers from:

  • Slow response times: Manual investigation wastes precious time during an active attack.
  • Inconsistency: Human error introduces risk at every step.
  • Alert overload: SOCs are overwhelmed by alerts. Manual triage is not sustainable.
  • Resource constraints: Manual processes are resource-intensive and don’t scale efficiently.

Automated incident response solves all of this. It scales with increasing volume, enforces consistency, and frees up your team’s time and energy to focus on strategic security initiatives.

Benefits of Automated Incident Response

Implementing automated incident response delivers clear advantages:

  • Rapid response: Significantly reduced MTTD and MTTR
  • Improved accuracy: Elimination of manual errors through standardized workflows
  • Reduced alert fatigue: Intelligent prioritization and handling of alerts
  • Cost efficiency: Optimized resource allocation and lowers operational costs
  • Enhanced compliance: Documentation and consistent actions facilitate regulatory compliance

Examples of Incident Response Automation

Here’s how incident response automation plays out across different attack scenarios.

Phishing Attacks

When a phishing email bypasses perimeter defenses and lands in an employee’s inbox, time is of the essence. Automated incident response detects indicators like suspicious URLs, anomalous user behavior, or credential harvesting attempts. The automation system instantly isolates the affected inbox, revokes access to compromised credentials, removes the phishing email from all mailboxes, blocks the sender, and notifies impacted users.

Malware Containment

If malware is detected on an endpoint,  automated workflows instantly disconnect the infected endpoint from the network, trigger forensic scans, kill malicious processes, and initiate recovery steps — containing the spread before it can escalate.

IAM Security

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a prime target for attackers. Automated incident response continuously monitors for unusual login patterns, privilege escalation, dormant accounts, and policy violations. Upon detection, automation can instantly disable user accounts, enforce password resets, revoke elevated privileges, or require multi-factor authentication (MFA). 

Cloud Detection and Response

Cloud security automation monitors cloud environments for misconfigurations (like exposed storage buckets or open firewall ports). Upon detection, the system automatically isolates compromised assets, reaches out to the correct owners, executes remediation, and minimizes damage before analysts need to step in.

How to Automate Incident Response with SentinelOne and Torq

One of Torq Hyperautomation™’s greatest strengths is its ability to integrate with virtually any security tool. We team up with leading platforms like SentinelOne to create seamless automations that simplify SOC workflows, eliminate manual grind, and dramatically improve incident response times.

Here’s how Torq and SentinelOne combine forces to bring autonomous incident response to life:

1. Auto-Enrich SentinelOne Incidents with Intezer

Torq continuously polls SentinelOne for any unresolved threats. It extracts file hashes from those incidents and queries Intezer for threat intelligence enrichment. The results from Intezer are posted directly into the SentinelOne incident notes.

At the same time, Torq launches a Deep Visibility query to determine the extent of the threat across your environment. If Intezer flags a file as malicious or suspicious, Torq automatically prompts your SOC team in Slack to decide whether to launch an Intezer Live Scan. If the team answers yes, Torq remotely installs the Live Scan agent, runs the scan, gathers the results, and updates both the Slack channel and the SentinelOne threat notes.

2. Threat Hunt for SHA1 Signatures Across SentinelOne Endpoints

Torq enables rapid threat hunts that can be triggered directly from Slack. When a SOC analyst sends a Slack command containing a platform and a SHA1 file signature, Torq initiates an immediate threat hunt.

Torq adds the file hash to the SentinelOne blacklist and launches a Deep Visibility query to find all instances of the file across your managed endpoints. It identifies and notifies endpoint owners by integrating with Jamf or Intune. Torq updates the relevant Slack channel and then triggers a full disk scan on any affected endpoints to eliminate threats promptly.

3. Enrich SentinelOne Findings with Advanced Threat Intelligence

Torq enhances SentinelOne incident analysis by layering in threat intelligence from VirusTotal and Recorded Future. Torq regularly polls SentinelOne for newly detected threats. For each threat, Torq extracts relevant file signatures and queries VirusTotal and Recorded Future for enrichment data, including reputation scores, malicious behavior indicators, and associated threat actors. This context is automatically added to the incident notes within SentinelOne.

Torq can also run a Deep Visibility query for additional results associated with the same file hash, ensuring SOC teams have complete situational awareness without lifting a finger.

Incident Response Automation with Torq

Torq transforms the way SOC teams do incident response. Our platform empowers organizations to:

  • Deliver faster, more accurate automated incident responses without requiring major increases in staffing.
  • Automate repetitive tasks while maintaining human oversight when needed.
  • Enable analysts to focus on strategic initiatives that harden security postures, rather than burning out on alert triage.
  • Socrates, Torq’s OmniAgent, coordinates specialized AI agents that autonomously handle enrichment, investigation, containment, and remediation.

Torq Hyperautomation makes it easy to deploy integrated incident response automation across your security environment. Let Torq automate your incident response — and everything that comes with it.

See how to generate a Torq workflow in seconds to automate incident response.

Read More
Share

Related Articles

Insights

No-Code Security Automation vs. SOAR Tools

By Torq
August 13, 2024
4 Minute Read
Learn how no-code security automation software stacks up to SOAR tools and AI-driven Hyperautomation.

SOC teams have been on the hunt for ages for a way to automate manual, repetitive tasks and workflows. SOAR was intended to streamline security workflows — however, legacy SOAR tools have long since been called “obsolete” by Gartner due to their reliance on excessive customization and scripting. 

That’s why legacy SOAR is being abandoned by SecOps teams in favor of no-code security automation solutions, particularly the new gold standard for today’s modern SOC operations — AI-driven Hyperautomation and the autonomous SOC. 

Let’s break down how these security automation software solutions compare.

What are SOAR Tools?

Legacy Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools were designed to help security teams centralize and automate security operations through playbooks. SOARs were developed to solve many of the problems associated with security incident and event management (SIEM) platforms, the old standby tool for security engineers.

However, SOAR tools suffer from limitations such as rigid architecture and a heavy reliance on custom scripting and coding, hindering their ability to integrate with the modern security stack and adapt to evolving security needs.

Learn why SOAR is dead >

What is No-Code Security Automation?

No-code security automation refers to tools that anyone — not just security engineers with coding expertise — can use to build and deploy automated security workflows that define risks, enforce security rules, and remediate threats automatically. 

By using a codeless approach to security (think drag-and-drop visual interfaces and pre-built templates), no-code security automation tools enable security teams to manage risks without depending on specialized, expensive scripting skillsets.

SOAR Tools vs. No-Code Security Automation

SOAR tools and no-code security automation platforms overlap in many of their objectives, including:

  • Automation: Both solutions enable automated risk identification and management.
  • Efficiency: SOAR and no-code security tools are designed to help organizations manage risks more effectively.
  • Going beyond threat detection: Unlike SIEMs, SOARs and no-code security frameworks don’t just detect risks and send alerts, they can also be used to manage risk response.
  • Threat intelligence: Both categories of tools draw on threat intelligence data to help identify and assess the newest types of security risks.

But the similarities stop there. In general, no-code security automation delivers additional features and benefits that SOAR tools lack, including:

  • Accessibility: No-code security automation frameworks are easy enough for anyone to use, regardless of coding experience. In this way, they allow all stakeholders, not just cybersecurity experts, to define and enforce security requirements within the systems they manage.
  • Automated response: In addition to making it easy to configure security rules, no-code security automation frameworks can automate threat response based on those rules. Traditional SOARs provide some automated response features, but they focus more on orchestrating threat response actions by cybersecurity professionals than on actually remediating the threat themselves.
  • Configuration security posture management: Traditional SOAR tools usually focus on identifying active risks within environments, not assessing configurations to find flaws that could enable a breach. No-code security automation tools do both, however, which means they can address domains like cloud security posture management (CSPM) in addition to runtime security.
  • Simple integrations: While it’s possible to deploy a SOAR in various environments and with many types of systems, doing so usually requires extensive configuration and customizations. In contrast, no-code security automation platforms are designed to start working out of the box, across any mainstream environment, with minimal configuration tweaks.

Enter: AI-Powered Hyperautomation  

Building upon the accessibility and flexibility of no-code automation, the modern SOC now demands a more intelligent and scalable approach: AI-driven Hyperautomation. Torq’s autonomous SecOps platform powered by AI-driven Hyperautomation represents a fundamental leap in the evolution of security automation for modern SOC capabilities.

Security Hyperautomation delivers significant advancements over SOAR and basic no-code automation. In addition to limitless integrations and cloud-based scalability, Torq Hyperautomation™ offers powerful case management capabilities that eliminate alert fatigue by automating Tier-1 threat remediation and intelligently prioritizing complex cases. And now, Torq’s agentic AI and Multi-Agent System is revolutionizing SOC efficiency through autonomous triage, investigation, and response. 

Thanks to no-code, low-code, and AI-generated workflow building, Torq empowers your SOC team to build and manage automations without extensive coding knowledge — while also offering full-code capabilities for those on your team who want granular control.

By automating complex workflows in minutes and leveraging intelligent decision-making, the AI-powered SOC can help organizations move beyond reactive security to become more efficient and resilient in the face of talent shortages and ever-evolving threats.

See how Torq Hyperautomation stacks up:

Torq Hyperautomation vs. Legacy SOAR Tools

Torq Hyperautomation vs. No-Code Security Automation Software

Share

Related Articles

See Torq in Action

Get a demo to see how Torq helps you harness AI in the SOC to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats faster.

Is your security team ready to automate more, faster?