Streamline Your SOC Workflow: Best Practices

Streamline Your SOC Workflow: Best Practices

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Security Dilemma
3. The Importance of Prioritization
4. The Assignment Function
   • Assigning Hosts and Accounts
   • Resolving Assignments
   • Workflow Implications
5. Context and Annotations
   • Using Tags
   • Adding Notes
   • Grouping Hosts
6. Integrating with SOAR Platforms
   • Ready-made Integrations
   • Automating Ticketing Processes
   • Host and Account Isolation
7. Leveraging the API
   • Overview of the API
   • Use Cases for API Integration
8. Conclusion

Introduction

Welcome to today's webinar where we will discuss best practices for establishing a streamlined workflow and overcoming challenges in your security operations center (SOC). My name is Julian Krauss, a Consulting Analyst at Vectra AI. As part of the Vectra MDR service, my colleagues and I work closely with customers to optimize their usage of the platform and identify areas for improvement. In this webinar, I will share some insights and recommendations Based on our experiences. Let's get started!

The Security Dilemma

Managing a SOC can be incredibly challenging, especially in adequately staffing the team and staying on top of the constant threats and alerts. The security dilemma arises when organizations struggle to balance the need for high visibility and coverage with the overwhelming number of alerts and false positives. While minimizing false positives is important, not missing any true positives is equally critical. Unfortunately, reducing false positives often increases false negatives, making it crucial to prioritize and streamline workflows to optimize your team's efficiency and effectiveness.

The Importance of Prioritization

Effective prioritization is essential for guiding your Attention and focusing on the most critical alerts. Accurate prioritization requires automatic analysis and identification of the most Relevant events. Vectra uses a combination of behavioral detections and correlation to assign priority based on a host or account's overall activity along the attack life cycle. This prioritization system enables You to allocate resources to high-priority entities and allocate your team's time efficiently. Prioritization automation, notification, and workflows play a vital role in managing the SOC workload and optimizing visibility.

The Assignment Function

To facilitate efficient investigations and tracking, Vectra provides an assignment function that allows hosts and accounts to be assigned to specific users within the Vector Detect platform. This feature is particularly useful when you do not have an external ticketing system. Assigning entities ensures that all detections within an entity are automatically assigned to the same user, streamlining investigation processes and reducing confusion.

Assignments can be made directly from the hosts overview or the individual entity page. Once assigned, analysts can begin their investigations and provide outcomes, which are recorded for reporting purposes. Adopting the assignment workflow enhances visibility, improves collaboration, and enables the generation of operational metrics reports to assess team effectiveness.

Context and Annotations

To minimize the need for manual pivoting between tools and maintain concentration during investigations, Vectra offers contextual information and annotation capabilities within its platform. The contextual information includes data from Active Directory, EDR, VMware, and cloud providers, allowing you to quickly access details such as host operating systems, active directory group membership, and more. Additionally, analysts can add their own annotations to provide context and document their investigative steps and conclusions. These annotations enhance knowledge transfer among analysts and improve future incident response with references to prior incidents.

Integrating with SOAR Platforms

Vectra integrates seamlessly with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms to consolidate information and automate workflows. Ready-made integrations with IBM Curator, Splunk Phantom, Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR, and other major platforms allow Vectra to feed important information and trigger actions based on detections. This integration enables tickets to be automatically created, enriched with Vectra details, and assigned to the relevant teams for further investigation. Integration with SOAR also supports host and account isolation to stop malicious activities quickly and efficiently.

Leveraging the API

In addition to ready-made integrations, Vectra provides a robust API that allows you to programmatically Interact with the platform. The RESTful API enables advanced searches, management of tags and notes, triaging detections, and creating and managing filter rules and groups. With API integration, you can automate tasks within Vectra, extract data for further analysis, and even integrate with custom tooling or workflows. The API offers flexibility and extensibility, ensuring Vectra can adapt and integrate smoothly with your existing security infrastructure.

Conclusion

In today's webinar, we explored best practices to enhance your SOC workflow and improve your visibility and efficiency in threat detection and response. Prioritization, assignment functions, and contextual information play crucial roles in streamlining operations and reducing the time and effort spent on false positives. Integrations with SOAR platforms and the use of Vectra's API provide opportunities for automation and customization, further enhancing your security operations. Implementing these best practices will enable your team to stay ahead of threats and proactively protect your organization's assets. Thank you for attending this webinar, and feel free to reach out with any further questions.

Highlights:

• Effective prioritization is essential for managing a SOC workload and optimizing visibility.
• Vectra's assignment function streamlines investigations and provides valuable operational metrics.
• Contextual information and annotations help analysts maintain focus and document their investigative steps.
• Integrating with SOAR platforms and leveraging Vectra's API enable automation and customization.
• Implementing best practices enhances threat detection and response capabilities.

FAQ:

Q: How can I integrate Vectra with Outlook 365? A: While Vectra does not have a specific integration for Outlook 365, the Vectra platform offers detections focused on Exchange and mailbox-related activities. These detections can help uncover threats such as mailbox takeovers.

Q: Does Vectra support integration with Microsoft Sentinel? A: Vectra does not currently have a ready-made integration with Microsoft Sentinel. However, you can leverage Vectra's API to integrate with Microsoft Sentinel or any other custom tooling. The API provides flexibility and enables data extraction and integration into your security workflow.