Many organizations still carry out labor-intensive and time-consuming incident response processes, which often creates serious barriers in recognizing high-value targets, gathering endpoint forensics, and conducting investigations. Performing such monotonous tasks for every threat can overburden security teams. Automating incident response with cybersecurity playbooks aids security teams in executing response workflows across on-premise and cloud environments at machine speed, delivering faster response based on better threat context.
Using incident response playbooks, security teams can handle threats before they become attacks, understand them, and appropriately respond to them. These cybersecurity playbooks play a critical role in helping the security teams determine the “who, what, and where” of cyberattacks, corroborating forensic reports of targeted systems, taking quarantine and containment measures, and monitoring incident response KPIs. Security teams need to determine the internal departments, groups, and users that are affected. Understanding the “who” helps them prioritize high-value targets whereas the internal and external factors provide hints to malicious domains or IPs in security alerts. All these attributes are integrated into an incident response playbook with the ability to import and employ third-party intelligence to automate analysis. These aspects prove useful in identifying the victims as well as understanding the magnitude of a threat. Furthermore, the cybersecurity playbooks assist in eliminating false positives and preventing infections from spreading and data from exfiltration.