7 Best Incident Response Tools
When a breach happens, every second matters.
Yet even as the number of cyber attacks keeps climbing, most organisations are not equipped to respond to security incidents with enough speed and precision required to shut down attack chains before damage is done.
On average, it takes organisations 212 days to detect a data breach, as per a new report by IBM and Blumira. It takes companies an additional 75 days to contain it.
One reason why there’s such a significant lag between when breaches happen and when they are discovered is that many incident response teams are heavily understaffed. Alert overload, aka “alert fatigue,” has been affecting the security community for years, and the continuing cybersecurity skills shortage means that there are not nearly enough people to address every alert that comes in. This slows down threat detection and response.
About 1 in 2 security professionals feel overwhelmed by alerts their security tools produce. A similar number are not certain of their ability to prioritise them. As a result, at least some alerts go unnoticed while others are investigated too late. Over a third of IT professionals admit to ignoring alerts if the queue is already full.
To help incident responders detect and respond to attacks faster, it’s critical that organisations invest in effective incident response tools.
7 Best Incident Response Tools
Incident response tools can help incident responders reduce the time it takes to detect an intrusion, minimise errors, and speed up remediation efforts. Here are seven incident management tools that fit the bill.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms are security monitoring tools that collect data from endpoints in real time. When EDRs come across suspicious activity, they issue alerts. This helps incident response teams find, investigate, and remediate potential security threats like malware faster.
EDRs can even carry out specific incident response activities through predefined rules, like isolating a particular endpoint in the event of an attack.
User and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA)
User and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) tools use algorithms, machine learning, and statistics analyses to determine what normal behaviour for users, IP addresses, and other entities (endpoints, servers, and routers) on corporate networks looks like.
When UEBA spots behaviour different from the baseline, it issues a notification.
Since UEBA focuses on network activities of devices and users, it is particularly effective at spotting insider threats.
Intrusion detection systems (IDS)
Intrusion detection systems (IDS) monitor networks/systems for signatures of known malicious attacks or unusual activities. They then generate alerts when these activities are found.
Two common intrusion detection systems are:
Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). NIDS is placed at strategic points within a network. It monitors traffic on a corporate network itself, matching traffic to a library of known attacks. When abnormal behaviour/potential attack is identified, NIDS issues an alert.
Host-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS). HIDS is placed on a specific endpoint and monitors traffic to and from that machine specifically.
Besides issuing an alert when it notices a suspicious security event, some IDS can automatically respond to intrusions.
Security information and event management (SIEM)
Security information and event management (SIEM) is a category of security tools that aggregate and analyse data from across an organisation’s technology infrastructure, such as endpoints, host systems, applications, network, and security devices (antivirus, firewalls, etc.)
Anytime a SIEM observes unusual activity within an IT environment, it generates an alert in real-time.
For incident response teams, SIEMs make it easier to quickly identify and address abnormal events, like 10 failed attempts or an employee trying to escalate their privileges to access sensitive files.
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms collect security data from various sources, automate repetitive tasks, and automatically respond to some threats.
SOARs are made up of three components:
Orchestration connects disparate internal and external tools through application programming interfaces (APIs) and custom or built-in integrations. This helps ensure that no threats slip past and improves context.
Automation analyses data and alerts from orchestration to automate low-level manual processes. Automated actions are predetermined using playbooks (pre-built or custom). Through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), SOAR can also issue recommendations, automate future responses, and bring more complex threats to human attention. This simplifies the incident response process.
Response gives incident response teams a centralised view into asset management, monitoring and reporting.
Extended detection and response (XDR)
Extended detection and response (XDR) platforms collect and correlate data from tools across an organisation’s IT environment, including endpoints, network, cloud, etc.
By integrating a number of security products, XDR improves the incident response team’s ability to detect, investigate, and respond to attacks.
With XDR, analysts can see the entire kill chain in a centralised management console, including where the threat started. Because XDR validates and prioritises alerts, it also reduces the number of false positives security operations teams receive. Additionally, XDR allows security teams to automate some routine tasks.
XDR is still a relatively new term with an evolving definition. At the moment, there isn’t a standard XDR offering.
SenseOn: Self-driving cyber defence
SenseOn is a self-driving cyber defence platform that natively combines the capabilities of EDR, IDS, network detection and response (NDR), SIEM, and SOAR.
Gathering data from multiple sources in a consistent format, SenseOn analyses security events from across the entire IT infrastructure to see if there are any similarities between them, thus emulating how a human analyst thinks.
This means that SenseOn surfaces only genuinely malicious activity for analyst review rather than flagging every suspicious event for SOC teams' attention.
Every alert issued by SenseOn:
Breaks down the sequence of suspicious events.
Is prioritised based on how urgent it is.
Is mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Incident responders can therefore have a better idea of what next steps they should take to remediate the potential intrusion flagged. The more context security teams have, the easier it is to drive down the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).
SenseOn’s response capabilities also mean that time-critical cyber threats like ransomware can be dealt with without human input.
Automating Cybersecurity Incident Response
The best way to speed up security incident detection and response is to reduce the number of alerts security teams receive. For that to happen, organisations need to find a way to consolidate their tools and automate repetitive tasks.
SenseOn is uniquely placed to do that.
Our platform:
Consolidates single-point solutions like EDR, SIEM, SOAR, etc., into a single platform, eliminating the need for disparate tools.
Uses AI to gather and correlate data from various sources within an organisation’s IT estate (endpoints, network, and cloud). No alert is ever looked at in isolation, greatly reducing the number of false positives.
Dynamically updates its threat intelligence library with publicly and privately available data.
Automatically matches security alerts to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Prioritises alerts based on how critical they are.
Allows analysts to triage and mitigate endpoints remotely.
Isolates endpoints when ransomware is detected without human input.
Supports different operating systems, from Windows to Linux and macOS.
Thanks to the above, SenseOn can reduce security teams’ workload by 99.4% while lowering deployment time (15x) and cost (10x).
Try the SenseOn demo here.