StrikeReady: Not Just Another SOAR

A Vital Part of Enterprise Cyber Vigilance: The Security Operations Center (SOC) Team

These often-unsung heroes are our wizards mastering their defense against the dark arts of threat attackers, who are looking for a way to hex your organization.

StrikeReady: A Partnership I Proudly Support

StrikeReady is a partnership that I’ve proudly supported, at every level. This is an unpaid endorsement. I’m offering this review because I love what they are doing and enjoy working with the StrikeReady team.

The Power of SOAR and StrikeReady

The SOC has to be swift of foot, or hand, to ensure all detections and defenses are on high alert. Enter, the trusty hero’s steed, the SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response). SOAR technology helps coordinate, execute and automate tasks between various people and tools all within a single platform. My favorite SOAR platform is much more than a SOAR; it’s a game changer in the world of cybersecurity.   

Key Advantages of StrikeReady:

• Vendor-Agnostic Platform:

  • No vendor lock-in- they will integrate with whatever product you need them to.

  • If they don’t yet have an integration, they’ll build you one because they believe in a concept that I love seeing from technology innovators: “if you need it, then someone else is likely going to need it,” and so they build it.

  • This gives you a “run what you brung” approach and the ability to retool within your security stack without having to start over with a new platform.

• Flexibility and Cost-Effectiveness:

  • This flexibility allows you to choose the best tools for your needs, which can change over time, and be cost-effective by not needing to replace a cascading list of dependencies within the stack.

  • This enables you to correlate data from tools that may not otherwise have integrations or be part of your SIEM ingestion.

• Direct Ingestion of Data from Platforms:

  • StrikeReady provides the ability to directly ingest data from various security platforms.

  • This ensures that the platform has real-time access to the most relevant security data, enabling faster and more accurate threat detection and response.

  • No more reliance on SIEM connections that might not be working or still processing. Removing latency from an equation where it should have never been a variable to begin with.

  • This direct ingestion gives you access to data from platforms you might not otherwise have and provides a holistic view of your security landscape, leading to better information for your SOC.

The Game of Telephone: Security Agent 📞 Management Server 📞 SIEM 📞 SOAR

Security Information and Event Management, or SIEM, is a security solution that helps organizations recognize and address potential security threats and vulnerabilities before they have a chance to disrupt business operations. But the SIEM is a risk to security! Think of the game of telephone we played in school. In this game, a message is whispered from one person to the next, often becoming distorted by the time it reaches the last person. In traditional security operations, data often passes through multiple layers before reaching the SOAR platform, leading to potential delays and inaccuracies. If you’ve never dealt with SIEM connectors being down or backed up, noisy logs, or compute overload leading to slowness or even no logs, then we should talk and discuss lotto numbers.   

Traditional SOC Data Flow:

• Security Tool Agent: One or more agents on a system collect data and create logs to be shipped to the management server.

• Management Server: Processes the data from agents to be ingested by the SIEM.

• SIEM: Aggregates and correlates data from multiple sources, then makes it available to the SOAR platform.

• SOAR Platform: Receives or pulls the data and initiates alerts, triage, or performs automated response actions.

The SIEM has value, but not in the middle of the stack. It should operate more parallel to the process, as an option for pulling historical data or ancillary data to provide enrichment, not as the centralized source of aggregation and filtration. Let’s be honest, the SIEM wants to continue to adapt to the ever-changing world, but it’s got issues.

StrikeReady eliminates that intermediate step by directly ingesting data from various security platforms. This streamlined approach ensures that the data remains accurate and timely, enabling faster and more effective threat detection and response, as well as an easy way for the platform to pull in enrichment information.

The Secret Ingredients?

(It’s not a comprehensive list, but don’t try to replicate and expect the same powerful effect!)

• Threat Intelligence and Monitoring:

  • A full Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP): Aggregating and analyzing data from various sources to provide accurate actionable information for identification and mitigation of threats (yes, the alliteration is intentional).

  • Dark Web Alerting & VIP Monitoring: Monitoring various common, or uncommon, dark web data sources for information related to your organization, its data, and VIP information.

  • Including a solution that continuously scans for leaked credentials for those in your organization.

• Incident Response and Management:

  • Case Management: Built-in and designed for the SOC, it can also be integrated into your existing ticketing or change management system.

  • Alert Enrichment: Adds context to any alerts.

• Operations and Automation:

  • Pre-built SOAR Playbooks: For every integration, you can build your own or ask them to build what you need. While security is prescriptive, most defense and reaction share common traits.

  • False Positive Discovery: Identifies and reduces false positives.

  • Smart Proactive Countermeasure Deployment: Automatically applies appropriate security measures.

  • Automation with Gates: Ensures criteria are met by a condition, with the ability to configure automatic remediation and auto-retire controls if they are only needed for a limited time, ensuring outdated controls are removed.

• So Much AI:

  • AI-Assisted Platform: While everyone is slapping on the AI label, StrikeReady started creating their purpose-built AI years ago. It provides security teams with actionable insights and automated response playbooks, reducing the time and effort required to respond to incidents. This leads to faster resolution times and minimizes the impact of security breaches.

  • Conversational AI: Not only can it handle analysis, but you can also ask it questions from simple to advanced, and it will act as your AI sherpa.

• Threat Detection and Analysis:

  • Sandbox Browser: No need to go outside the platform; check malicious content from within the platform, reducing complexity and risk.

  • Data Correlation and Normalization: Standardizes data from various vendors to assist in threat detection, hunting, and analysis.

This isn’t by any means an all-inclusive list of features and functionality within the StrikeReady platform. There’s way too much for me to attempt to write up in a single instance without my eyes glassing over from screen-inflicted trauma. So, here’s what really stood out for me when I first saw StrikeReady, and what continues to stand out time and again: they are trying to do it all better than anyone else!

StrikeReady provides you with a functional, and secure, AI assistant (CARA) that will help you move from threat briefing to mitigating controls deployed in minutes. With no need for an analyst to have familiarity with the security tooling stack and no knowledge of scripting. You can have checks and balances put in place to ensure proper procedures are followed, but overall, their goal is to improve the day-to-day efforts and empower the SOC team.

They continue to improve and iterate, evaluating every request- whether from me, from customers doing PoCs, and most importantly, the customers they support. Adding new playbooks, new feature requests, they are on a constant mission to improve. StrikeReady is a platform that can provide an improvement to operations and reduce your workload, which means it starts providing an actual return on the investment as soon as you start using it.

In closing, let’s put an end to SOC burnout- book a demo to fortify your defenses with an almost mystical platform that’s sure to cast a spell on you.