Who do you want running your security operations: robots or cyborgs?
For our less intelligent readers, robots are entirely machines, while cyborgs are humans who have been enhanced with technology. In cybersecurity, the “robot” path means trying to replace human analysts with automation wherever possible. And with new technology making this more realistic, people in the security industry can't help but wonder whether budget-conscious companies will look at this route as an attractive way to save cost.
At D3, we're on Team Cyborg. We see automation as a way to make human practitioners more effective, not replace them entirely. Let's be clear: Security analysts don't need our help to be good at their jobs. Automation just needs to remove the obstacles that hog their time and prevent them from working at the level of their capabilities.
Even if the bot path sounds attractive, we believe that most companies will end up on a cyborg team. Security leaders know how difficult it is to hire and train qualified people, so it's rare for companies to look to reduce the size of their security team. There is always more to do, if only there is the time and resources needed.
That's why we prioritize people-focused automation. Simply put, it's technology that makes your team better at security operations. Most importantly, D3 achieves this alongside any security tools you prefer. After all, is a vendor really improving your team if you have to ditch your carefully curated group and replace it with his or her cohesive group?
In this article, we'll talk specifically about how D3 makes security practitioners more effective, diving into three specific areas where our customers are seeing the biggest improvements.
Spending more time on high-quality alerts makes your team better
Alert volume is one of the biggest issues facing security teams, so why aren't more automation vendors trying to solve it? The short answer: Because it's really hard. However, we have never shied away from a challenge, so we have reduced the number of alerts that security teams have to handle as a core element of our offering.
We do this through automation not only at the incident level, but also at the event level, across our event pipeline. Incoming alerts enter our system as events, which are deduplicated, normalized and sorted by the event pipeline. This means organizations can confidently dismiss most alerts before they require human attention, based on fully customizable criteria.
Even if you're not ready for automatic dismissals, your team will be working on automatically collected, highly accurate incident logs, not sifting through endless alerts about low accuracy. This gives your team more time to spend on real threats, armed with rich contextual data. This is time they used to spend chasing false positives and performing monotonous reputation checks on artifacts.
No matter how good your team is, they will perform better with more time spent on important investigations.
Less administrative work makes your team better
You can call us crazy, but we believe security teams perform best when they can focus on security work. Unfortunately, security operations come with a lot of important administrative tasks. Investigators need to track their actions and share notes with collaborators, reports need to be written after important incidents occur, and executives need to see how the Security Operations Center (SOC) is working.
D3 prioritizes automating these important aspects, keeping your team focused on doing what they do best. D3 provides a seamless connection between the game rules and the incident workspace, so that all relevant information collected about the incident is automatically collected, written as a summary by an integrated large language model (LLM), and displayed to investigators. This is extremely valuable because D3 draws information from all integrated tools, giving automated summaries the ability to connect dots not found in a detector alert.
D3 can also automatically compile reports and distribute them to stakeholders. These executive reports are laid out in a professional-looking template and include a high-level summary, investigation timeline, harmful elements, and more. If users want to make modifications to the report, they can also download it as a Word file before distributing it. MSSPs can also customize the template of these reports with their own branding, making it an attractive service to offer to clients.
In addition to collecting and distributing information, there is the issue of making the security operations center function properly at the technical level. With automation, a lot of that comes down to building, testing, and maintaining integrations. Integrations are both one of security automation's biggest assets, and one of its biggest headaches, if not handled properly. Getting dozens of tools to work together seamlessly without errors is no small task, which is why we don't want to burden your security team with this task. D3 takes all integration management off your list, with a dedicated team studying hundreds of tools to develop and maintain the best possible integrations with our platform. All you have to do is drop integrations into your playbook.
This frees up time your team might have to spend struggling with integrations to translate data to fit required formats, identify error patterns, monitor vendor APIs for updates, and perform all the other time-wasting tasks that come with managing integrations.
Faster, more effective actions make your team better
The fundamental promise of automation has always been to enable rapid action against threats from a single interface, rather than manually moving from one tool to another to coordinate incident response operations. When you think of security automation, these are probably the capabilities that come to mind.
In addition to event-level automation and high-quality integrations, which we've already covered, playbooks are an important way for security automation tools to take faster action. However, there are two ways some automation tools can undo the gains their playbook is intended to deliver.
One is to make it difficult to create, test, edit, and publish game rules. As with our integrations, D3 wants to reduce the burden of managing game rules. That's why we have a no-code, easy-to-use game rules editor, with hundreds of pre-built utility commands for important actions like retrieving users, items, and events. Users can test their game rules directly from the editor, to easily find bugs before publishing.
The second potential pitfall is when the game rules are too limited to deliver maximum benefits to users, slowing them down or requiring them to do extra work. D3 overcomes this with advanced game rules capabilities that support flexibility, efficiency and reliability. For example, D3 run rules can run tasks in parallel to reduce processing time, run repetitive tasks to double-check new information at a specified time interval, and schedule proactive tasks such as scanning for threats.
D3 also has nested rulebooks, which are rulebooks that can be saved as single gameplay rule blocks for reuse, rather than users having to rebuild common sequences from scratch each time. For example, a sequence to enrich an incident with email sender-specific data could be saved as a nested playbook and then included in any playbook that handles suspicious emails. This isn't just a time saver. Nested playbooks and comprehensive utility commands simplify game playbook design, reducing potential points of failure.
Having strong playbooks means your team can do more within their automation system, automating complex sequences and weighing in on key decision points, rather than having to figure out workarounds to the limitations of the automation tool.
Bring people-focused automation to your SOC with D3
There is a place for “robots” in security operations. As you can see, there are a lot of things that D3 completely automates. But it is always in the service of empowering the human user.
People-focused automation enables better decision-making, because it puts all the information where you need it. It makes your organization more secure, by removing the noise and freeing up time to conduct deep investigations into real threats. It keeps your security experts focused on security, by removing administrative tasks from their tasks. And it makes your team faster, because automation turns their decisions into coordinated actions across the environment.
Get a demo with our security automation experts to learn more about how D3 can help your team be better at keeping your organization secure.
The post D3 Security Automation That Makes Your Team Better appeared first on D3 Security.
***This is a Security Bloggers Network syndication blog from D3 Security authored by Walker Banerd. Read the original post at: https://d3security.com/blog/people-focused-security-automation/
