The latest News and Information on Security Orchestration, Automation and Response.
Software vendors have loads of high-value data they need to protect — from customers’ personally identifiable information to the company’s intellectual property — so a data breach can be catastrophic. There’s a lot on the line if these types of organizations fall victim to a cyberattack, including fines from regulators or damage to their brand and reputation.
Cyberattacks have intensified over the last few years as threat actors are always improvising their game plan to carry out new and sophisticated methods. Concepts like Ransomware as a Service have made it easy for small threat groups to leverage weaponized services with devastating results for organizations. This highlights how traditional security systems and approaches are no longer able to keep up with the ever-evolving threat landscape.
According to the 2022 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million. Data breaches in the US are even more costly, averaging over $9 million. However, it isn’t just the big players caught in the line of fire. IBM’s report also found that 83% of companies will experience a data breach soon, meaning financial institutions of all sizes — from local credit unions to Fortune 500s — are at risk.
Many automation tools, such as SOAR, suffer from an ironic Catch-22: you know that automation will save your team huge amounts of time, but it’s difficult to implement and requires skills you don’t necessarily have in-house. Essentially, you can’t afford the tools that will save you money. Ay, there’s the rub! You may have seen tools promising “no-code” capabilities with intuitive GUIs that help non-programmers build abstract functions.
Cloud adoption and digital transformation have enlarged attack surfaces that can be exploited by malicious actors to harm your organization. Traditional SIEMs and EDRs fall short as they are not cloud-native and also difficult to scale. Further, there are inherent fixed costs that need to be considered when adopting any modern threat detection apparatus.
This past June I presented a.conf22 session called “A Beginner’s Guide to SOAR: Automating the Basics” to address perceptions about SOAR adoption among security practitioners. This was my first in-person presentation to a live audience in several years because of the pandemic and I was encouraged to find that the session was among the highest attended at the event with well over 200 attendees in the room.
