Why SOAR is Not a Replacement for a TIP

Introduction

Two critical components in cybersecurity’s technological arsenal are SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) and TIP (Threat Intelligence Platforms). Both play important and distinct roles in enhancing an organization’s security posture.

• SOAR focuses on automating responses and orchestrating security processes, streamlining operations, and reducing incident response times.
• TIP centers on the aggregation and analysis of threat intelligence, providing the necessary context to anticipate and understand potential threats.

Together they create opportunities for truly informed, automated responses or defense. Separate, one or more of those goals is not possible.

Core Functions of SOAR and TIP

SOAR platforms are designed to improve the efficiency of security operations. By automating responses and facilitating orchestrated workflows, these systems help organizations rapidly address security incidents. Key functions include automating predefined response actions to discover security events or act on behalf of security teams in maintaining their defenses. These automations reduce manual tasks and speeds up reaction times, reducing mean time to respond (MTTR), and orchestrating processes to integrate various security tools to ensure cohesive operational workflows.

In contrast, TIPs primarily focus on the intelligence aspect of cybersecurity. They aggregate data from multiple sources to offer a comprehensive view of the threat landscape, aiding in the strategic planning of defense mechanisms. Essential functions of TIP include aggregating intelligence by collecting data from various sources to provide a centralized view of potential threats and contextual analysis to analyze and contextualize intelligence to help predict and mitigate future attacks. Advanced TIPs can also work with historical and near-real time intelligence equally, even incorporating SOAR discoveries into their intelligence aggregate.

Impact of SOAR without a TIP

Having a SOAR without a complementing TIP can significantly limit the effectiveness of an organization’s cybersecurity efforts. Here’s why integrating both is essential:

1. Data Enrichment and Contextualization: SOAR systems excel in automating responses and orchestrating various security processes. Doing those actions well depends on the quality and context of the data they receive. TIPs provide crucial intelligence to those actions by gathering and analyzing data from diverse sources, which include global threat data, to identify potential risks before they impact the organization. This allows SOAR actions to standard the interpretation to the intelligence gathered by TIPs to then make informed decisions and prioritize threats accurately​.
   
2. Enhanced Decision Making: SOAR platforms automate and streamline many of the tasks associated with incident responses, such as triaging alerts and initiating responses. However, without the in-depth threat analysis provided by TIPs, SOAR may only be reacting to surface-level data or miss discovery of security events. TIPs deliver the insights necessary for understanding complex threat behaviors, enabling SOAR systems to adapt their automated responses to counteract sophisticated cyber threats ​more effectively.
   
3. Reduction in False Positives & Prioritization: One of the critical challenges in cybersecurity is the high volume of alerts, many of which may be false positives. TIPs help reduce this noise by analyzing and filtering out irrelevant or harmless data before it reaches the SOAR system. This allows the SOAR system to focus on genuine threats, improving the efficiency and accuracy of security operations​.
   
4. Strategic Security Operations: Integrating SOAR and TIP facilitates a more strategic approach to cybersecurity. TIPs provide the strategic threat intelligence needed to understand the broader threat landscape, while SOAR focuses on tactical and operational responses. This synergy ensures that security operations are reactive and proactive, adapting to new threats as they evolve​.

While SOAR provides the mechanism for rapid response and automation, TIP is crucial for ensuring that these responses are intelligent and informed. They create a robust defense mechanism against cyber threats, enhancing an organization’s overall security posture.

Impact of a TIP without SOAR

The inverse operation of a TIP without a SOAR has alternative impacts to an organization’s effectiveness.

1. Rapid and Informed Response: TIPs provide the information that should inform responses which cyber analysts can use independently from SOAR. Doing so requires undue manual time when a SOAR can automate the TIPs insights directly against the live stream of activity, with the goal being to prevent security events entirely or at least respond fast enough to mitigate their impacts.
   
2. Pro-Active Defenses: The growing volume of intelligence makes it at times even hard for a security team to know what matters to their organization’s unique operations. TIPs empower cyber analysts to refine the TTPs and IoCs of relevance to their organization’s profile. Without SOAR there can be a now another manual step to take those refined insights to the intrusion prevention tools that would stop the next breach. With SOAR the TIP provided insights should be pro-actively and automatically employed, the goal being to get defenses in place before known methods are attempted against the attack surface.
   
3. Acting on Internally Collected Intelligence: Outside of a SOAR the aggregation of all the data around a security incident is a tedious effort for cyber professionals. The system or host logs, network events, analyst assessments, and outputs from multiple tools are each specific steps required to get a comprehensive view. The effort required for posthumous reporting can often be too cumbersome on teams when the “next” event needs addressed. With SOAR that collection and summarization can be automated, which creates a unique opportunity for a companion TIP, that the current security event becomes more intelligence which informs the next. Advanced TIPs seamlessly incorporate this SOAR output so that security decisions are informed by external and internal intelligence equally.
   

TIPs independently add immense value to organization’s intelligence driven insights. With SOAR the impact of intelligence is more rapidly and efficiently realized as insights need to leave the TIP and start influence the organization’s active defense.

Limitations of Replacing TIP with SOAR

Without the depth of analysis provided by TIPs, SOAR systems might respond to threats based only on predefined rules and the limited context of the incident data they process. This can result in an overly generic security posture that may fail to effectively address specific, sophisticated threats. Moreover, without TIP, SOAR may struggle with a higher rate of false positives and negatives due to the lack of contextual understanding, leading to inefficient security resource allocation and potential oversight of critical threats.

The complexity and integration challenges associated with SOAR platforms can exacerbate these issues if they are not seamlessly integrated with other security tools, including TIPs. SOAR platforms require detailed configuration and management to ensure they function as intended, and their effectiveness is significantly diminished if they operate in isolation from the broader security architecture that includes threat intelligence​.

In summary, while SOAR dramatically enhances the efficiency and speed of cybersecurity responses, more is needed for a comprehensive security strategy. Integrating SOAR with a TIP enhances the effectiveness of automated responses and ensures a deep, contextual understanding of the threat landscape that informs these responses. Therefore the benefits of integration should not be achieved by repeating work in more and more SOAR playbooks, but by incorporating an advanced TIP which can be trusted to accurately inform and receive feedback from SOAR.

Conclusion

The interplay between SOAR and TIPs is foundational to a robust cybersecurity strategy, highlighting the indispensable nature of both systems in safeguarding against escalating cyber threats. Advanced TIPs are essential components that provide comprehensive and contextual insights into the threat landscape. This contextual intelligence is crucial for anticipating potential threats and informing the automated responses executed by SOAR systems, ensuring that these responses are precise and tailored to specific threats.

Advanced TIPs enhance cybersecurity strategies by offering real-time alerts about ongoing attacks and new vulnerabilities, detailed incident reports, and breakdowns of data breaches. These platforms aggregate and analyze threat data from diverse sources, transforming this raw information into actionable intelligence through sophisticated processes. This includes identifying indicators of compromise (IoCs), which are critical for detecting and responding to threats swiftly, and Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), which are critical for understanding behaviors and motivations. Moreover, TIPs provide strategic, tactical, and operational intelligence, each serving different levels of the organization’s needs—from shaping long-term security policies to immediate threat response and mitigation strategies.

Integrating SOAR with an advanced TIP enriches SOAR’s capabilities, allowing for more nuanced automation and better-informed security decisions. This synergy ensures that automated systems are not only reactive but are also proactively adapting to new threats based on continuously updated and refined intelligence. Thus, maintaining both SOAR and a modern TIP within an organization’s cybersecurity framework is beneficial and necessary to ensure a dynamic, proactive, and highly responsive security environment that can effectively defend against current and emerging threats​.