What Are the Key SOAR Security Orchestration Use Cases? – Part III

In Part I, we introduced SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) and highlighted how it differs from SIEM (Security Information and Event Management).

In Part II, we explored how SOAR integrates with Threat Intelligence to enhance response times and improve decision-making. Now, in Part III, we’ll delve into practical SOAR use cases demonstrating how it’s revolutionizing security operations across different scenarios.

Breaking Down SOAR: The Three Core Components

1. Security Orchestration Security Orchestration focuses on seamless integration and communication between multiple security tools. It establishes repeatable, enforceable, measurable, and effective incident response workflows. This integration is key to remediating vulnerabilities and provides a structured framework for collaboration, reporting, and incident management.
2. Security Incident Response Incident Response technologies help organizations plan, track, and manage responses to confirmed security incidents. These tools support all stages of incident management, from triage and containment to remediation, ensuring that every alert is handled swiftly and appropriately.
3. Security Operations Automation Automation is at the heart of SOAR. By utilizing playbooks (linear task sequences) and runbooks (decision-based conditional actions), SOAR automates routine processes, policies, and reporting tasks. This automation significantly reduces manual workloads, enabling teams to focus on higher-priority threats and more complex tasks.

How Does SOAR Work?

A SOAR platform is designed to automatically respond to security alerts by seamlessly orchestrating the various tools in an organization’s security ecosystem. Once a security event is detected, the system triggers specific playbooks and runbooks, which outline the steps to address the threat.

The objective of SOAR is to automate routine responses to alerts, freeing up security analysts to focus on higher-priority and complex tasks, such as advanced threat analysis. This approach improves efficiency, consistency, and effectiveness within security operations and incident response.

SOAR Use Cases:

1. Vulnerability Management: Automating Threat Detection and Remediation

When a potential threat is detected, a SOAR platform automatically gathers and analyzes data from the SIEM and other tools. It correlates this data to assess the severity and criticality of the vulnerability and automatically generates incidents for investigation. In addition, the platform queries other systems to get diagnostic details and possible remediation steps for the vulnerability. It even creates a historical repository of threats and responses, allowing for better future decision-making.

2. Forensic Investigation: Speeding Up Data Collection

Forensic investigations often involve the manual collection of incident data, which is both time-consuming and prone to human error. SOAR alleviates this challenge by automatically collecting contextual information from disparate tools across the security environment. This provides the security team with all the necessary data for a thorough and efficient investigation.

3. Insider Threat Detection: Catching Malicious Activity Early

Insider threats can be particularly tricky, as they often mimic normal user behavior. SOAR integrates multiple security tools to quickly identify suspicious activities that might indicate insider threats. Once detected, SOAR can automatically trigger a playbook to begin the process of investigation, triage, and response.

If necessary, alerts are sent for human intervention, ensuring that critical incidents don’t go unnoticed.

4. Failed Access Attempts: Automating Account Protection

Failed login attempts are common, but SOAR can help protect your systems by automating the response. For example, once the number of failed access attempts exceeds a certain threshold, SOAR can:

• Confirm the identity of the user via email or mobile verification
• Reset the password and notify the user of the change
• If the user disputes the failed login attempts, SOAR can lock the account, gather information such as IP address and location, and escalate the issue if needed.
5. SSL Certificate Management: Ensuring Secure Communication

SSL certificates are critical for securing communications but managing them can be tedious. SOAR automates this process by regularly checking endpoints for SSL certificate expirations and other issues.

If any problems are detected, the platform automatically initiates communication with the user and their manager to start the update process. It will also follow up regularly to ensure certificates are renewed before expiration, preventing downtime or security vulnerabilities.

6. Endpoint Diagnostics: Streamlining Endpoint Management

Managing endpoints and addressing security alerts related to them can be a daunting task. The volume of alerts from endpoint logs can quickly overwhelm a security team. However, SOAR can automate the analysis of SIEM data, query relevant tools for additional context, and even terminate malicious activities on infected devices.

By automating actions like removing infected files, updating signatures, and initiating incident response, SOAR reduces the burden on security teams and helps to prevent the spread of malware across the network.

7. Malware Analysis: Accelerating Threat Response

When malware is detected, a SOAR platform can ingest data from multiple sources, such as SIEMs, email systems, and threat intelligence feeds. The platform then extracts suspicious files for analysis, sending them to be dedicated malware analysis tools for detonation.

If the file is confirmed to be malicious, SOAR updates watchlists, quarantines affected endpoints and opens tickets for further investigation. This automated, multi-step response helps contain threats faster and more efficiently.

The Growing Adoption of SOAR

According to Gartner’s SOAR Market Guide, 30% of organizations with a security team larger than five people will adopt SOAR tools by the end of 2022—a massive jump from less than 5% today.

Why this surge? The need for SOAR is becoming clear: Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of alerts and false positives generated by modern security systems. As the threat landscape becomes more complex, SOCs need automation to stay ahead.

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