Automate Remediation and Response with Security Orchestration

Leverage automation and SOAR capabilities to accelerate response times, reduce human error, and scale security operations.

Last week, we continued our series on 10 Best Cloud Practices for the Modern Enterprise. This week, we will discuss leveraging automation and SOAR capabilities to accelerate response times, reduce human error, and scale security operations.

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)

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The speed and scale of modern cyberattacks, particularly in the cloud, have rendered manual response processes obsolete. Security teams are inundated with alerts, and the time it takes for a human analyst to detect, triage, investigate, and act on a threat creates a critical window of opportunity for attackers. To keep pace, organizations must embrace automation. Automated vulnerability remediation is the use of technology and predefined workflows to detect, prioritize, assign, and resolve security vulnerabilities without relying solely on manual intervention.⁶² This approach is essential for reducing human error, dramatically accelerating response times, ensuring consistent and repeatable actions, and freeing up highly skilled security analysts from repetitive tasks to focus on higher-value activities like threat hunting and strategic analysis.⁶²

This best practice extends beyond simple automated patching. It involves a mature approach to Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), where security tools and processes are integrated to execute complex, multi-step response workflows automatically. This orchestration is what enables a truly rapid and effective response to threats, transforming the security operations center (SOC) from a reactive, ticket-driven team to a proactive, highly efficient defense force.

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I have been invited to explore a new External Attack Surface Management tool called TRaVIS (Threat Reconnaissance and Vulnerability Intelligence System) and it was designed to take a different approach path from your traditional vulnerability management tool— focused proactively uncovering the gaps that real-world attackers would exploit.

We will dive more into this in another blog post.

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Key Concepts

The Spectrum of Security Automation

Automation in vulnerability management is not a binary on/off switch but a spectrum of maturity. Organizations typically progress through several stages:

1. Automated Discovery and Scanning: The foundational level where tools are used to continuously scan the environment and identify vulnerabilities, as discussed in Section 1.⁶

2. Automated Ticketing and Assignment: Integrating vulnerability scanners with IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms like ServiceNow or Jira to automatically create remediation tickets and assign them to the correct asset owners. This eliminates manual data entry and ensures accountability.⁶³

3. Automated Patch Management: Using tools to deploy OS and application patches based on predefined schedules and deployment rings (e.g., test, staging, production). This is a common and effective way to handle routine vulnerability remediation.⁹

4. Full Security Orchestration (SOAR): The most mature level. This involves using a central platform to coordinate actions across multiple, disparate security and IT systems in response to a security event. A SOAR platform can ingest an alert and trigger a "playbook" that executes a series of logical steps, such as enriching the alert, containing the threat, and notifying stakeholders.⁶⁷

Common Use Cases for Orchestrated Response

SOAR platforms enable a wide range of automated response scenarios that go far beyond simple patching. Common use cases include ⁶²:

• Alert Enrichment: When an alert is generated, a playbook can automatically query threat intelligence sources, asset databases, and user directories to add critical context, helping analysts make faster, more informed decisions.

• Threat Containment: For a high-severity alert, a playbook can take immediate containment actions, such as isolating a compromised endpoint from the network using an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool, blocking a malicious IP address at the firewall, or disabling a compromised user account in the identity provider.

• Bi-directional Sync with Ticketing Systems: A playbook can not only create a ticket in ServiceNow but also monitor the ticket's status. When the IT team closes the ticket, the playbook can trigger a validation scan to confirm the vulnerability is resolved and then automatically close the corresponding security incident.⁶⁴

• Stakeholder Notification: Playbooks can automate communication by sending customized notifications to relevant parties via email, SMS, or collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack, ensuring that everyone from the SOC analyst to the CISO is kept informed.⁶⁷

Microsoft Implementation

Microsoft's security suite provides a powerful and deeply integrated set of tools for achieving end-to-end security automation and orchestration.

Azure Update Manager

For the core task of automated patching, Azure Update Manager is the centralized service for managing and deploying OS updates for Windows and Linux virtual machines in Azure, on-premises, and in other cloud environments (via Azure Arc).²² It allows organizations to create scheduled deployment configurations, define maintenance windows, and group machines for phased rollouts, enabling a structured and automated approach to routine patch management.

Azure Logic Apps: The Orchestration Engine

Azure Logic Apps is the foundational platform that powers Microsoft's automation capabilities. It is a powerful, low-code/no-code service for building automated workflows that can connect and orchestrate tasks across more than 1,400 services through prebuilt connectors.⁷⁰ These services include the entire Microsoft ecosystem as well as third-party tools like ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and more. For security operations, Logic Apps can be used to build custom remediation playbooks. For example, a Logic App could be triggered by a Defender for Cloud recommendation (e.g., "Key Vaults should have purge protection enabled") and automatically execute the API calls necessary to remediate the misconfiguration.⁷²

Microsoft Sentinel Playbooks: SOAR in Action

Microsoft Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud-native Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and SOAR platform.⁶⁷ The SOAR capabilities in Sentinel are delivered through

playbooks, which are essentially Azure Logic App workflows that are specifically designed to be triggered by Sentinel alerts or incidents.⁶⁴ This provides a seamless way to automate responses to detected threats.

When a Sentinel analytics rule detects a threat and creates an incident, an automation rule can be configured to automatically run a playbook.⁶⁴ For example:

1. Sentinel detects a brute-force login attempt against a VM, followed by the execution of suspicious PowerShell commands. An incident is created.

2. An automation rule triggers a playbook named "Isolate-VM-and-Block-User."

3. The playbook executes the following orchestrated actions:

• It uses the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint connector to issue an "isolate machine" command to the compromised VM.

• It uses the Microsoft Entra ID connector to disable the compromised user account.

• It uses the Azure Firewall connector to add the attacker's source IP address to a blocklist.

• It uses the Microsoft Teams connector to post a high-priority message to the SOC channel with details of the incident and the automated actions taken.

This entire orchestrated response can be executed in seconds, long before a human analyst even begins their investigation. This is the power of a fully integrated SOAR platform. By leveraging the vast connector library of Azure Logic Apps, Sentinel playbooks can orchestrate responses across the entire IT and security stack, making them the nerve center for automated vulnerability response and threat containment.⁶⁹

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Some security tools you can consider for improving your business security posture:

Crowdstrike endpoint protection https://crowdstrike2001.partnerlinks.io/Cpf-coaching

INE Security Awareness and Training https://get.ine.com/snyc9gtnuhbb

Tenable vulnerabilities management https://shop.tenable.com/pmscn6dtufjc-vqqg32

Cyvatar.AI Managed endpoint protection solution for SMBs https://cyvataraif5706.referralrock.com/l/CHRISTOPHE77/

Omnistruct helping you with your privacy, GRC and security programs https://omnistruct.com/partners/influencers-meet-omnistruct/

Guidde help you turn your tribal and undocumented processes into easy documented videos and instructions https://affiliate.guidde.com/cpf-coaching

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