If a data breach occurs, your business needs an incident response plan to act quickly and prevent as much damage as possible. As the rate of cyberattacks increases worldwide, automated incident response programs have made the defensive process more efficient. These programs use advanced artificial intelligence technology, allowing companies to respond to threats quickly.

Why Implement an Automated Incident Response Process?

At first glance, leaving an essential part of your cybersecurity strategy in the hands of automated systems might not seem like a good idea. However, as new threats emerge and become more frequent, cybersecurity management becomes increasingly fast-paced.

This can lead to security professionals and employees feeling burned out and fatigued, which can become a significant cybersecurity vulnerability. Professionals must respond to alerts many times a day — most of them false alarms. Having to spend time confirming these false alerts can allow real threats to slip by unnoticed.

Automated incident response programs can help relieve the burden of false alerts and mundane tasks from cybersecurity professionals, allowing them to focus on more pressing matters. The monitoring process can become more streamlined, responding to more signals and separating the false alarms from the true ones.

Automated incident response also has the potential to save time and money. Recovering from a cyberattack can cannibalize a lot of resources — in 2020, a Maryland school district found this out the hard way when a successful cyberattack cost them a year and $9.7 million to recover — and they didn’t even pay the ransom. Automated incident response may or may not have prevented the attack, but it could certainly make the response more efficient and reduce the damages.

Although there are many benefits to an incident response process, implementing them into your company’s cybersecurity strategy might be challenging if you don’t know what to concentrate on. Here are a few tips to make implementation as smooth as possible.

Identify Aspects for Automation

When planning to automate your incident response plan, the first step is identifying aspects that would benefit from automation. Many routine cybersecurity and incident response tasks can be more efficient through automation.

Routine Tasks

Updating tickets, gathering metrics, generating reports, and sending emails are some tasks that can be simpler or even eliminated using automation. While these tasks are essential, they are also mundane and repetitive, taking up a large portion of time for security professionals if they build up.

Programs that utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence technology can handle these tasks for your cybersecurity team. This can significantly reduce their workload, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks.

Investigating and Resolving Alerts

Higher profile tasks such as investigating incidents and resolving alerts can also benefit from automation. Determining if signals are legitimate or false is one of the tasks that can be the most time-consuming for security professionals because they must thoroughly investigate each one.

Investigating alerts that turn out to be false can be a significant waste of time. An automated incident response process can help reduce the number of false alerts your cybersecurity team has to respond to and investigate.

Other tasks that involve analysis are also perfect for machine learning and artificial intelligence programs. These excel at data gathering and analysis, making them ideal for analyzing data packets attempting to enter computer systems.

Rather than human users scanning them manually, automated programs can scan multiple sections of data and compile their findings into one cohesive report for professionals to review. An excellent way to determine other areas of improvement is to consult your cybersecurity professionals on what other aspects of your strategy they feel could benefit from automation.

Find the Right Automated Incident Response Tool

There are a large number of automation tools available for cybersecurity incident response. Many of these are open source, meaning you can usually find and download them from the internet for free or a subscription fee. Here are three examples of open-source automated incident response tools. (Please note the author has not received any compensation for recommending these tools.)

TheHive

TheHive is a comprehensive security incident response platform designed to streamline incident response plans for SOCs, CSRTs, CERTs and other professional cybersecurity services. Integrating MISP — Malware Information Sharing Platform — this program allows information security professionals to respond swiftly to any security incidents.

The main feature of TheHive allows multiple SOC and CERT analysts to collaborate to carry out various investigations simultaneously. Professionals can access real-time information on alerts and possible threats, which are available to all team members.

Live streaming and messaging services are built in so all members of an investigation can coordinate much easier. Jobs can be assigned to the AI using simple template engines, allowing for faster automation of tasks and analysis.

Security Onion

Security Onion is another open-source incident response platform that specializes in network traffic analysis. When computers access the internet, they continuously receive data from internet services. It’s in this data that hackers hide viruses and malware programs. Much of a cybersecurity specialist’s job is analyzing this data traffic.

Security Onion uses Kibana — a data visualization tool that makes analyzing data traffic much more effortless. The program does the analysis and breaks down the data into logs that are easy to understand.

Alerts can also automate to make responding to them much more accessible. These are specific to the type of cyber attack initiated against the company, allowing security professionals to plan an appropriate response quickly.

Cynet AutoXDR

Cynet AutoXDR is one of the most comprehensive open-source incident response automation tools, though it’s not free like some alternatives. AutoXDR comes in tiers — more expensive ones provide more features — but all but the lowest offer automated detection and response.

AutoXDR is a complete security suite, so it comes with malware protection, anti-ransomware tools and compliance management features in addition to its incident response tools. Some teams may only need some of these extra features, but those without existing solutions for these processes can benefit from this broader scope.

Now that Cynet has partnered with software distributor TD Synnex, AutoXDR is more widely available than ever. While it may fall outside of some teams’ needs or IT budgets, it’s worth consideration for those looking for a comprehensive incident response suite.

Create a Framework and Build Templates

Once you’ve identified the areas where automation can improve your incident response plan, you and your cybersecurity specialists need to create a framework built around automation. Choosing the proper systems, additional training and the new plan’s capabilities are all essential.

Data analysis and malware protection are ever-changing fields, so the template for the new cybersecurity system needs to be adaptable. Adding new procedures and updating needs to be seamless to be prepared for new threats. IT specialists must test the templates regularly to ensure your cybersecurity remains relevant.

Improve Your Cybersecurity with Automated Tools

Having an incident response process is essential to stopping malware attacks and preventing as much damage as possible to your business. Automated incident response tools are the latest weapon in the continuous fight against cybercrime. Making incident response quicker and more efficient will stack the odds in your favor and keep hackers out of your computer system.