Automated Incident Response

What Is Automated Incident Response?

Incident response automation is what it sounds like—applying automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to the incident response process. At its most basic, this could be as simple as replacing manual reporting and notifications. More advanced incident response automation takes this further, autonomously detecting, assessing, and responding to security incidents and threats.

Automated incident response essentially leverages automation to remove many of the traditional pain points from an organization’s incident response process, significantly improving efficiency.

Benefits of Automated Incident Response

The benefits of incident response automation include the following:

  • Significantly faster response and remediation
  • Reduced workload on the security team and incident responders
  • Lower mean time to resolution (MTR)
  • Greater visibility into IT infrastructure
  • Improved context during disruptive events
  • Reduced risk of human error
  • Better, more effective response strategies
  • Lower costs
  • Better collaboration and communication between departments

How Automated Incident Response Works

Incident response automation is driven by cyber threat intelligence and data from within your own organization. It ingests, orchestrates, and analyzes enormous volumes of that data for insights that allow it to manage and mitigate emergencies far more quickly than any human. The tools from which an automated incident response platform might draw data include:

An incident response automation solution then leverages this data to achieve three things:

  1. Differentiate false positives from genuine threats
  2. Prioritize alerts based on risk, severity, and impact
  3. Identify the potential origin point of any malicious software or threat actor

Automated Incident Management Use Cases

There are many different use cases for automated incident management, including, but not limited to:

Detecting and blocking abnormal network traffic by examining real-time logs

Troubleshooting connectivity and compatibility issues

Monitoring processes, equipment, and systems to proactively detect issues

Intelligently assessing and prioritizing incidents to cut down on notification fatigue

Automatically resolving simpler, non-critical incidents

A root cause analysis process

Leveraging reporting and analytics to provide deeper insights about an organization

How to Automate the Incident Response Process

To successfully introduce automation into your incident response process, you’ll need to start by considering a few basic details:

  • What does your current incident response toolkit look like? How well does this toolkit integrate with new additions?
  • How does your organization handle permissions, and how might this apply to incorporating automation?
  • Are there any regulatory concerns or barriers that could cause problems? What are the compliance implications of doing so?
  • What type of incident or crisis does your organization face most frequently?
  • What does your attack surface look like? What about your overall ecosystem?
  • What data and intelligence can you feed into your automation platform to ensure accuracy?
  • What specific data do you need your platform to support?

With these questions in mind, you can start assessing the different incident response automation vendors to see if one would be a suitable fit.

Get immediate help from BlackBerry Cybersecurity Services—whether you're under cyberattack, need to contain a breach or want to develop an incident response plan. Report an incident or call us now at +1-888-808-3119.