As machine learning (ML) and automated intelligent “bots” becomes more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, cybercriminals are also using it for their daily hacking activities — and that means the cybersecurity strategies that organizations currently employ for IT security simply aren’t cutting it. In this blog, we’ll walk through the particulars of AI-based SOAR (security, orchestration, automation and response) technology and why it’s a critical part of the new era of proactive CyberSafety.
There’s an irony about artificial intelligence (AI) in the cybersecurity community: The potential AI has to stop cyberattacks is just as great as the potential it has to increase their scale and severity. The sophistication that makes AI an incredible tool for our industry – helping to spot patterns in behavior, speedy detection and response – can, when flipped, be the same mechanism savvy hackers use to convince a person that a phishing email is real, or power a ransomware attack that shuts down businesses or essential services.
We’re approaching a not-so-distant future where machines can be taught to attack networks – and this comes at the same time that security operating centers (SOCs) at many organizations are operating at a deficit – and that’s if they even have enough staff or budget for an SOC to begin with. There’s also a pressure to adopt name-brand, big-budget cybersecurity technologies – regardless of if they’re effective or not.
It’s no wonder many chief information security officers (CISOs) and senior-level IT security executives are often worried and feel drained when it comes to keeping cyberattacks at bay. It’s a losing battle – hacks are getting more savvy, skilled data security staff is hard to come by, and budgets keep shrinking. They concentrate on lessening the cyberattacks because it seems impossible to stop them completely.
Employing AI-based SOAR technology for information security
There is a way to stop the threats, but it requires thinking differently about how you fight cyberattacks – and the tools you use. Anticipatory response technologies, like security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) offer a way to fight fire with fire.
CyberSafety is the paradigm shift that’s needed within our industry for organizations to confidently make the leap from simply reacting to cyberthreats (what we typically refer to as CyberSecurity) to preventing them from occurring in the first place. AI-based SOAR technologies can augment that shift, offering IT security teams a way to:
- Reduce risk management resources, as the AI continuously improves its knowledge through consuming data and understanding cybersecurity threats. Once it senses a threat, the SOAR technology can detect and eliminate threats to data security in microseconds – a vast improvement from reactively chasing down threats in minutes, hours, or even days after a breach happens. This means less dependence on human intervention.
- Detect and respond to threats both ingress and egress faster at an organization’s IoT network edge.
- Anticipate future attacks by using deep learning to identify traffic that deviates from an organization’s usual network security patterns and perform behavior risk analytics on users and entities in real time.
- Insert proactive security code – once it learns what to look for – to block a hack or cyberattack, alerting the network security technology to an attempted breach and stopping it.
Breaking down the acronym – the benefits of SOAR technology
SOAR platforms consist of these four elements:
- Security: For a SOAR platform, “security” refers to any strategy that prevents unauthorized access to an organization’s IT assets. This includes computers, devices, networks and data.
- Orchestration: When you have a solution that can collect data from all corners of your network – every alert, device, and cloud or installed software – and can streamline it to create a single pane to look through, it establishes the groundwork for risk awareness. If you become more aware of your risks, you not only anticipate them, but you can also start to control them. It’s like having a unified dashboard for your network security.
- Automation: Efficiency is the name of the game with SOAR technologies – particularly making the issue of IT security staffing shortages less severe. Through instantaneous machine learning and data science, a SOAR platform can automatically write a new security mitigation rule when it learns something that doesn’t match the known patterns of an organization’s network.
- Response: Once it has that rule, it has the ability to prevent an attack within microseconds by inserting that rule into an exact area of code. This doesn’t require human intervention, which reduces alert fatigue and allows the SOC to focus on the threats that require a closer look.
At CloudCover, we’ve shifted the meaning slightly of the “R” in the SOAR acronym. While the usual definition – the one we cite above – focuses on risk response, CyberSafety is equally concerned about risk control. It’s important for the platform to learn the risk’s behavior so it can predict – and stop – future threats.
Speed of SOAR technology aids in preventing DDoS attacks in the cloud and IoT
Using SOAR technology can be particularly important for preventing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – one of the most serious threats to internet availability. These attacks show no signs of slowing down, as the data-rich cloud and IoT have created the optimal environment for hackers.
The microsecond response and orchestration capabilities of SOAR platforms make it possible for organizations to implement AI-driven cloud security. These solutions enable the exchange of relevant security controls, again creating that holistic view of cyber threat intelligence that’s needed for automated decision making. SOAR technology can also help stop IoT attacks by creating an unbreachable perimeter around an entire network – including individual IoT network devices.
Network security: from SOC to N-SOC
SOAR technology enables organizations to create a variation of the SOC – the N-SOC, the no-security operation center. With the SOAR platform acting as the ongoing operational component for enterprise network security, it can create a more instantaneous way to stop, contain, and prevent cyberattacks – giving SOCs a bit of room to breathe.
CloudCover has reimagined reactive CyberSecurity as proactive CyberSafety and has long been a champion of AI-based SOAR technology as the linchpin of this new era – as evidenced by our CyberSafety CC/B1 Platform™. To learn more about how your organization can take part in this network security evolution, we invite you to download and read our full white paper, “AI-Detect, Auto-Control, Microsecond Response: The New Era of CyberSafety.”
