It’s a fact: enterprise security operations centers (SOCs) that are most satisfied with their investments in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) operate and maintain less than a dozen playbooks. This is something I’ve uncovered in recent years whilst building SIEM+SOAR and autonomous SOC solutions – and it perhaps runs counterintuitive to many security leaders’ visions for SOAR use and value.
SOAR technology is one of those much-touted security silver bullets that have tarnished over time and been subsumed into broader categories of threat detection and incident response (TDIR) solutions, yet it continues to remain a distinct must-have modern SOC capability.
Why do satisfied SOCs run so few playbooks? After all, a core premise of SOAR was that you can automate any (perhaps all) security responses, and your SOC analysts would spend less time on ambient security noise – giving them more time to focus on higher-priority incidents. Surely “success” would include automating as many responses as possible?
Beyond the fact that “security is hard,” the reality is that threat detection and response is as dynamic as the organization you’re trying to protect. New systems, new policies, new business owners, new tools, and a sea of changing security products and API connector updates mean that playbooks must be dynamic and vigilantly maintained, or they become stale, broken, and ineffective.
Every SOC team has at least one playbook covering their phishing response. It’s one of the most common and frequently encountered threats within the enterprise, yet “phishing” covers an amazingly broad range of threats and possible responses, so a playbook-based response to the threat is programmatically very complex and brittle to environmental changes.
From a SOC perspective of automating and orchestrating a response, you would either build a lengthy single if/then/else-stye playbook or craft individual playbooks for each permutation of the threat. Smart SOC operators quickly learn that the former is more maintainable and scalable than the latter. A consequence of this is that you need analysts with more experience to maintain and operate the playbook. Any analyst can knock-up a playbook for a simple or infrequently encountered threat vector, but it takes business knowledge and vigilance to maintain each playbook’s efficacy beyond the short term.
Surely AI and a sprinkle of LLM magic will save the day though, right?
I can’t count the number of security vendors and startups that have materialized over the last couple of years with AI and LLM SOAR capabilities, features, or solutions – all with pitches that suggest playbooks are dead, dying, replaced, accelerated, automatically maintained, dynamically created, managed, open sourced, etc., so the human SOC analyst does less work going forward. I remain hopeful that 10% of any of that eventually becomes true.
For the immediate future, SOC teams should continue to be wary of any AI stories that emphasize making it easier to create playbooks (or their product-specific equivalent of a playbook). More is NOT better. It’s too easy (and all too common) to fall down the rathole of creating a new playbook for an existing threat because it’s too hard to find and maintain an earlier iteration of that threat’s playbook. Instead, focus on a subset of the most common and time-consuming threats that your SOC already faces daily, and nail them using the smallest number of playbooks you can get away with.
With the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” playing in the background, perhaps you’ll get some modicum of SIEM+SOAR satisfaction by keeping your playbook playlist under a dozen.
— Gunter Ollmann