Adversaries are becoming more sophisticated and faster with their attacks. According to the CrowdStrike 2023 Threat Hunting Report, the average eCrime breakout time is just 79 minutes. This is partly due to adversaries taking advantage of tools that leverage automation like password-cracking tools, exploit kits for web browser vulnerabilities, and marketplaces that sell stolen data. Automation is making their jobs easier and more efficient and is yielding more profitable results, putting security teams at a disadvantage. Attackers use automation — and your team should too.

Inefficient and Manual Processes Are Slowing Down Your Team

Unfortunately, security analysts face more than just threats. Their day-to-day operations are plagued with numerous challenges. It’s not uncommon for security analysts to investigate and respond to a threat with inconsistent processes that include overly manual investigations that force them to correlate data across multiple, disjointed security tools. This leads to lost time, expensive mistakes and overall analyst burnout.

To level up the playing field against attackers, your security team must adopt security tools that harness the power of automation and seamlessly integrate with your ecosystem to enable them to work smarter and faster. By standardizing processes and automating repetitive tasks, your team will increase its productivity, efficiency and accuracy. Not only will they gain back valuable time to focus on higher-value operations, they will be able to respond to threats faster.

The Power of Automation Relies on Well-defined Security Processes

Getting started with security automation can be a daunting task because sometimes processes are not designed for automation. If the business logic is not defined correctly, automated processes can yield erroneous results that only become obvious when they are operational. To start your automation journey, you need to assess how it can streamline your current security operations — based on your organizational goals — by establishing priorities and identifying the repetitive and mundane tasks that hold back your team.

Once these are identified, you are ready to gradually implement automation. Start defining the process by documenting the steps the team must take, determining the information needed and where it resides, and identifying who in your organization has access to it. There are numerous security use cases that are prime candidates for automation given their recurrence and number of repetitive tasks involved, such as phishing, alert enrichments, endpoint incident response, threat hunting and more.

Selecting the right tool for the job will also give your team an advantage. Attacks are evolving fast, making use cases and security tools obsolete quicker, and you want to invest in security and IT tools that can integrate with a flexible security architecture. It can be a challenge for security teams to ensure that configurations of automation tools work with the many different point tools in use — and therefore, native automation capabilities are preferred. To successfully deploy automated workflows and orchestrate investigations and incident response, you need to evaluate tools for their ability to integrate with your current tools and also for their API ecosystem to ensure deep and standardized integrations as you expand into new use cases. 

Accelerate Investigation and Response with Native SOAR Capabilities

If you do a search for the ‘average number of security tools used by a SOC,” you’ll find data that shows companies can use 40, 50 and even as many as 60-70 security tools. Consolidating and integrating tools is a business imperative, reducing the complexity and simplifying the management of tasks and workflows. Consolidating tools not only helps reduce your budget, it allows your security analysts to conduct their day-to-day operations from a single console to reduce swivel-chair syndrome.

The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform offers native security orchestration automation and response (SOAR) capabilities through CrowdStrike Falcon® Fusion, which empowers your security team to build automated workflows to speed up threat investigation and response. Fully integrated with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform and its product modules, Falcon Fusion orchestrates workflows across the platform and with third-party tools such as ticketing systems that enhance collaboration and bridge the gap between security and IT. Your team will have access to high-quality security data, automated workflows, integrations and response actions, all from the unified Falcon platform.

Increase SOC Productivity and Reduce Analyst Burnout with Falcon Fusion

The ability to systematize your incident response plan into automated workflows gives your security analysts the power to increase consistency and accuracy as they resolve threats. The Falcon Fusion no-code interface results in workflow builds in just minutes – teams simply select the trigger, define conditions and configure the actions. It also enables you to orchestrate complex use cases with conditional branching and logic, and to schedule them to run continuously. For common security use cases, Falcon Fusion provides pre-built playbooks to give your security a head start automating your security operations processes, all from the same console that your team already uses. 

With over 61,000 unique workflow definitions, Falcon Fusion gives you limitless opportunities to automate your processes to make them more efficient. By integrating with Falcon Real Time Response, your analysts will be able to import customized scripts, created by them or from the library, to expand the actions that they can perform with their workflows for immediate remediation. And, due to its native integration across Falcon platform modules, Falcon Fusion extends the automation power of each module like CrowdStrike Falcon® Intelligence Recon for digital threat monitoring, CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight for automated vulnerability remediation and more.

Security automation is essential to defend your attack surface and give your security team a fighting chance against adversaries. By automating workflows such as investigating incidents faster, scaling vulnerability patching and containing hosts to stop lateral movement, Falcon Fusion will up-level your team to punch above their weight and reduce your mean time to respond (MTTR) to better protect your organization and keep adversaries at bay. 

Additional Resources

• Want to learn more about Falcon Fusion? Visit the Falcon Fusion product page.
• Download the Falcon Fusion data sheet to learn about our integrated SOAR capabilities.
• Start a Free trial of the Falcon platform and start building workflows with Falcon Fusion.
• Sign up to attend our Next-Gen SIEM Showcase.