The Role of SOC Playbooks in Modern Cybersecurity Strategies

Security Operations Center (SOC) playbooks stands out as a pivotal strategy for fortifying an organization’s defenses. These playbooks streamline the process of identifying and responding to threats and serve as a guide for consistent and effective incident management. Here, we explore the benefits of implementing these playbooks in your organization, SOC playbook examples, and how to create playbooks when you choose Swimlane as your SOC vendor. 

What is a SOC Playbook?

A SOC playbook is a comprehensive set of guidelines and procedures designed for security analysts within a SOC team to effectively respond to various cybersecurity incidents and threats. 

These playbooks provide step-by-step instructions for identifying, assessing, and remediating security issues, ensuring that your team’s response is swift, efficient, and streamlined. By codifying best practices and standardized procedures alongside the use of AI-enhanced security automation, SOC playbooks enable organizations to manage and mitigate risks more efficiently, improving their overall cybersecurity posture.

Why Do You Need a SOC Playbook?

The main reason SOC playbooks are needed is to streamline processes and ensure consistency across all members in security operations (SecOps). SOC playbooks provide a clear, structured approach for responding to security incidents, enabling teams to act cohesively based on established SOC best practices. 

Having detailed playbooks ready, provides team members with thorough guides to follow, making the onboarding process smoother and ensuring all actions are aligned with the organization’s processes. For example, in the event of a phishing attack, the playbook would outline the specific steps to be taken, from initial link detection to containment and resolution, guaranteeing a rapid response across the entire team.

What is the difference between a Runbook and a Playbook in SOC? 

A runbook focuses on the how, such as collecting specific logs, isolating a host and searching for a query, while a playbook in the SOC focuses on what we are doing and why. 

Even more, a runbook is essentially a procedural guide for routine operations and provides instructions on how to perform specific tasks or resolve common issues. Similar to a playbook, it’s particularly useful for standardizing responses to known situations and ensuring consistency. On the other hand, a playbook focuses on incident response strategies, outlining measures to be taken in responding to security threats or breaches. So, where a runbook includes operational procedures, a playbook is more strategic, guiding the SOC team through the decision-making process during security incidents and providing swift, coordinated responses.

How SOC Playbooks Aid Modern Strategies 

Staying ahead of evolving threats, embracing new technologies, and enhancing strategies are crucial components of a modern SOC’s efficiency. And implementing SOC playbooks are pivotal in achieving this agility and preparedness; here’s how you do it:

1. Streamline security operations: 

By detailing the specific actions to take in response to different types of security incidents, SOC playbooks help streamline events within SecOps.  By having a set of predefined actions and protocols to follow, SOCs can drastically reduce the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), metrics crucial to optimize for. 

2. Standardize response procedures: 

SOC playbooks result in a standardized approach to incident management. This reduces the likelihood of human errors during stressful situations such as ransomware attacks or data breaches. 

3. Audit

Alongside reducing security metrics like MTTD and MTTR, the structured approach provided by SOC playbooks allows for more accurate tracking and reporting of security incidents, leading to better-informed decision-making by SOC analysts and continuous improvement of security strategies.

4. Scalability and effectiveness

One of the critical challenges of expanding modern operations is maintaining consistent, high-quality responses to security alerts and threats across an ever-increasing volume of incidents. SOC playbooks are instrumental in scaling SecOps as organizations grow as specific processes can be easily adopted and replicated. This improves the overall effectiveness of the SOC and significantly reduces the training time and human resources needed to bring new analysts up to speed, thus supporting the organization’s ability to quickly scale its defenses.

5. Support for automation:  

Lastly, playbooks are vital tools in enhancing SOC automation. They allow security teams to automate incident response processes that are time-consuming so no alert is overlooked, resulting in faster resolution. Moreover, playbooks help quickly identify higher-priority alerts and direct them to human analysts. This means analysts aren’t overwhelmed by low-priority alerts, and their time can be better spent concentrating on more complex tasks that need strategic human involvement.

5 Common SOC Playbooks

1. Incident response: This playbook outlines the steps to be taken to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from a security incident. 
2. Vulnerability management: These playbooks detail the process for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities in an organization’s systems and networks. It includes regular scanning, patch management, and risk assessment to reduce the attack surface and prevent exploitation.
3. Phishing triage: As the name suggests, this playbook provides guidance on how to respond to phishing attacks. It includes steps for detecting phishing emails, analyzing them, responding to potential compromises, and educating users to prevent future phishing incidents. 
4. Threat hunting: This playbook outlines proactive strategies for searching through networks and systems to detect and isolate potential threats that may have evaded automated detection tools. 
5. SIEM Triage: Triaging alerts is significant to identifying real threats and protecting your organization. This playbook is used to manage alerts generated by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools. It provides guidelines for prioritizing and investigating alerts, determining the severity of potential threats, and deciding the appropriate response actions to ensure efficient and effective incident management.

Playbook Actions in the SOC:

There are several actions SOC playbooks can perform:

• Blocking IP or domain on a firewall: This action involves proactively identifying and blocking malicious IP addresses or domains directly on your organization’s firewall to prevent them from accessing your network.
• Query your SIEM: By executing specific queries, you can identify suspicious activities or anomalies among the vast amount of SIEM alerts that warrant further investigation.
• Look up a user in an active directory: This action is a critical step for verifying user identities, understanding their access levels, and investigating whether an account has been compromised or is involved in any suspicious activities.
• Threat intel lookup on domains, IPs, and URLs: This involves using threat intelligence platforms to research and gather information about specific indicators of compromise. The information this provides can help in understanding the nature of the threat and the potential impact it could have.
• Parse email headers: This entails analyzing an email’s header information to trace its origin and path across the Internet. This action is crucial for identifying spoofed emails or tracing the source of phishing attacks, thereby helping in understanding attack vectors and preventing future breaches.
• Send team-wide messages: This involves automating communication with team members or specific channels within collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. By sending messages or alerts, you can quickly disseminate information about detected threats or required actions, thereby enhancing the speed of response to incidents.
• Get common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) details using automation: This action refers to utilizing a security automation tool like Swimlane’s HeroAI. By obtaining details from automation tools, teams can better understand vulnerabilities, assess their severity, and prioritize remediation efforts based on the potential impact on your systems.
• Create a ticket for operations teams: For issues that require intervention or follow-up, this action involves prioritizing the issue to management platforms like Jira or ServiceNow. This ensures that tasks are formally logged, assigned, and tracked until resolution, facilitating accountability and efficient handling of security incidents.
• Run a scan on hosts: Lastly, this action involves conducting a security scan on a specific host or system to detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or the presence of malicious software.

How to Create a SOC Playbook

Creating a SOC playbook involves compiling detailed procedures and response plans, such as the various events above. Typically, it starts by identifying the relevant threats and then outlining specific protocols for detecting, analyzing, and responding to these threats. Each response plan should include SOC roles and responsibilities, communication procedures, and step-by-step actions tailored to different types of cybersecurity attacks and incidents. Playbooks should be updated regularly to reflect emerging threats and incorporate lessons learned from past incidents; this is where an automation platform like Swimlane Turbine can help simplify SOC playbook building.

SOC teams without automation face several key challenges: time-consuming, manual playbook building; inefficient workflows prone to errors in incident response; limited scalability and adaptability; lack of centralized visibility into playbook interactions; and analyst burnout. These issues weaken your SOC team’s ability to effectively manage and mitigate security threats, increasing the risk of more frequent or severe incidents.

Enhance your SOC Playbook Building with Swimlane Turbine

With Turbine Canvas, you can cut SOC playbook-building time in half using a low-code platform that offers no-code features as well as the ability to execute Python scripts for advanced automation. Canvas allows SOC teams to easily create automated SOC playbooks, and it’s as easy as drawing a flow chart. You’re able to gain unprecedented visibility into how all your playbooks connect, with the ability to edit and customize them in one spot and leverage multiple triggers per playbook for unparalleled control and flexibility. On average, Swimlane customers who leverage Turbine’s no-code capabilities have reported 50% time savings. They are now able to build complete end-to-end use cases in 25 minutes vs. 56 minutes.

Explore Swimlane Turbine today to see first-hand how your team can enhance SOC playbooks, optimize processes, and work more efficiently.