What is security automation and how does it help in leveraging security controls?
Security automation is the process of undertaking security actions and operations with the help of computers to automatically and programmatically detect, identify, analyze, investigate and remediate cybersecurity threats with or without human intervention. It works by identifying incoming security threats, triaging and prioritizing alerts and incidents as they occur and then responding to each threat in a timely fashion as per the value of the asset and threat severity levels. Furthermore, it has the potential to identify incoming security threats, triage incidents and prioritize incidents and alerts as they emerge and perform automated incident response procedures.
Security automations perform activities including detecting threats in the IT systems and platforms, triaging potential threats, deciding on the most appropriate measures to contain or mitigate a security threat, and undertaking mitigation approaches and actions. Moreover, it involves the use of technologies that undertake tasks with minimal human assistance in order for integrating security processes or workflows, applications and infrastructure components. Besides, it allows security analysts and IT teams to focus on projects instead of spending their time in routine and repetitive tasks.
Some of the common types of security automation tools include the following:
- Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR): a solution that enables organizations to collect and analyze data about security threats, and automatically respond to security incidents and events without human intervention. SOAR capitalizes on the security capabilities of a SIEM solution by adding automated response capabilities besides to the collection, aggregation and correlation features. The relationship between SOAR and SIEM solutions resembles that of IDS (Incident Detection System) and IPS (Incident Prevention Systems).
- eXtended Detection and Response (XDR): XDR is an advancement of endpoint detection and response (EDR). Unlike the EDR, XDR aggregates and consolidates data different security environments, including endpoints, networks, and cloud systems. XDR identifies evasive and malicious attacks that hide between security control layers and computing silos. It provides capabilities such as machine learning based detection and analysis, correlation of data, centralized management and user interface (UI), orchestration of response, and improvement over time features. Furthermore, it integrates SIEM, SOAR and other security solutions into a single and centralized managed platform.
- Robotic Automation Process (RAP): RAP automates processes that not require intelligent collection and analysis. It simulates mouse and keyboard commands to automate operations on a virtualized platform.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): SIEM Collects, aggregates, analyzes and correlates security data and logs from across the security controls and IT environment of an organization. Furthermore, it helps organizations to detect and provide contextualized information about security incidents and threats. And it eliminates the need for manual data collection and aggregation from multiple sources.
Security automation incorporates the following major processes:
- Emulating investigative and detective steps of security analysts
- Determining responsive approaches and actions
- Provision service tickets, close the ticket or escalate if not handled properly
- Automating threat hunting, incident response procedures
Benefits of security automation include the following:
- Reduce security administrators workload
- Faster threat and incident detection and response
- Faster containment, mitigation and remediation
- Improved performance and productivity
- Standardization and automation of security processes
- Integrate security architectures