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When responding to a cybersecurity incident, every second matters. You need to make the right decisions, based on the right data, with the right decision makers, all in the right order. To respond quickly, it’s essential to have a well-defined and efficient incident response plan.
A well-defined incident response (IR) plan requires planning, skills, coordination and automation to ensure a timely and accurate response. NIST outlines IR guidelines that have withstood the test of time. A well-defined IR process should have the following phases:
Preparation
Detection and analysis
Containment, eradication and recovery
Post-incident activity
IBM Security® QRadar® SOAR empowers your organization to define and execute a strong IR process. Infused with intelligence and automation, QRadar SOAR uses a simple hierarchy of phases, tasks and actions required to aid in your team’s quick and decisive response to cybersecurity incidents.
QRadar SOAR’s award-winning Playbook Designer makes it easy to build a standard IR process and prepare your team to respond. QRadar SOAR contains 13 out-of-the-box playbooks that cover general IR use cases, expanding your response capabilities.
Playbook tasks provide responders with prescriptive guidance on how to address next-steps during remediation, and in which order. Decision points facilitate a dynamic process that can include or skip tasks as deemed necessary. Analysts can manually add additional tasks as an incident develops and more information is learned.
Threat intelligence is based on automated threat detection and threat hunting flag alerts that need to be reviewed by an analyst. Sending those alerts to QRadar SOAR creates a case and initiates the incident response plan.
With the power of our Unified Analyst Experience (UAX), QRadar SOAR is able to analyze the root cause and correlate alerts coming in from various threat detection sources, such as SIEM and EDR, into consolidated cases. QRadar SOAR intelligently and automatically assigns a severity score to cases, helping analysts to prioritize their focus.
Analysts can then review cases and determine whether the alerts are valid and require action. As they continue their investigation, analysts can tune the automated playbooks to best respond to threats in the environment. This benefit makes incident response services more efficient.
Time is of the essence during an attack involving advanced threats, insider threats, ransomware, malware, phishing, suspicious activity and other cyberthreats. QRadar SOAR’s automation capabilities are built to save time on triage and reduce the learning curve for new analysts. With over 300 integrations and support for open standards, QRadar SOAR boasts effective incident response tools that automate containment actions to help minimize the blast radius.
Once analysts have looked into an incident and gathered more context and information, the incident type of a QRadar SOAR case can be updated. Relevant actions will be automatically populated to the task list, guiding the analyst through the IR process.
Integrations with third-party security tools help analysts act faster by improving workflows and reducing the amount of swivel-chairing between applications in the IR process. The IBM App Exchange (link resides outside ibm.com) provides information on hundreds of integrations for QRadar SOAR to help your team optimize your security incident response.
Once a security incident has been resolved, QRadar SOAR facilitates a number of post-incident activities to start and track recovery. Integrations with ITSM tools, such as Salesforce Service Cloud or ServiceNow, allow security teams to create tickets for affected systems bi-directionally with QRadar SOAR.
Reporting summarizes the documentation for each response and action taken during the IR process. These reports help with understanding where incident management can be improved. This can include updating manual tasks added to QRadar SOAR playbooks to be more specific to your organization and improve efficiency for future incidents.
In the case of a data breach, reviewing applicable regulations helps to keep organizations compliant with the associated reporting timelines. QRadar SOAR Breach Response Module is built to help maintain compliance throughout the process, and avoid expensive financial penalties.
“With IBM, we now have an accurate 24-hour view of the world in real time. We can see every endpoint, every system. And that’s made our cross-team collaboration much more efficient," says Robert Oh, Chief Operating Officer, DDI.
“For an SOC to be effective, the ability to prioritize our response to the most pressing security risks is nearly as important as detection. The QRadar solution... has made our team far more effective at addressing the threat landscape," says Umair Shakil, Head of Security Operations Center Unit, Askari Bank.
“Our Netox Trust cybersecurity services provide visibility into [customers'] unknowns, and our playbooks help them respond when an attack happens," says Marita Harju, Senior Manager, Cyber Security, Netox Oy.
Take the complexity out of response by providing a unified experience that works with your existing business processes.
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Explore insights and observations obtained from monitoring over 150 billion security events per day in more than 130 countries.
To assess the state of today’s security operations and gain critical insight into key trends, pain points and best practices, IBM surveyed 1,000 global SOC team members.