Revolutionizing Cybersecurity: How GenAI Enhances SOC Capabilities

Cybersecurity challenges are becoming more complex, persistent, and pervasive than ever before, raising the stakes for security teams around the world.

In response, organizations are looking for ways to enhance their existing security controls and mechanisms. One of the most impactful has been the shift toward integrating Generative AI (GenAI) into security operations center (SOC) functions and products, which increases these centers already critical roles as nerve centers for detecting, investigating, and responding to security incidents.

By leveraging the power of GenAI, SOC teams and technologies can enhance their capabilities, amplify their ability to identify, understand, and mitigate cyberthreats, and be better positioned to protect their organizations around the clock.

Whether your organization is just beginning to consider integrating GenAI into its SOC operations or if it wants to enhance its impact, this article lays out five key benefits and how leading platforms can accelerate your evolution.

One of the most critical challenges in cybersecurity is understanding the adversary. Unfortunately, the signs of an impending attack are often found when it is too late. 

Instead, by using historical patterns and threat intelligence data, AI can be trained to learn adversary profiles based on known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Using this training, AI can generate comprehensive profiles of cyber adversaries that can be turned into use cases loaded into SOC systems to highlight indicators of compromise or flag attack patterns faster.

These profiles can also be used to enable SOCs to develop strategies for combating digital adversaries using advanced analytics. For example, AI can prioritize responses based on the severity and probabilitiy of an attack, ensuring that the most critical threats are addressed first.

In fact, this is an area where Cipiher's Extended Managed Detection & Response (xMDR) platform shines: xMDR is designed to utilize GenAI to generate and refine detailed adversary profiles, empowering security analysts to always stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

In addition to enhancing security analysts' ability to monitor and analyze potential cyberthreats, GenAI can also create and continuously update predictive models that identify potential threat pathways. These results can then be used by SOCs to anticipate and prevent attacks before they occur. 

Also, once a potential threat is identified, AI can be used to validate malicious behaviors based on previous attack scenarios, providing a more accurate and timely response than analysts can do on their own.

This proactive approach is particularly crucial in today's highly connected environment, where new threats against sensitive data emerge rapidly. 

AI can also play a pivotal role in the immediate wake of a confirmed attack, assisting with incident investigation and forensic response. 

By analyzing thousands of lines of logs, network activity, and the blast radius of attacks, AI can quickly identify the root cause, path, and scope of a security incident.

This capability not only speeds up the investigation process but also enhances the accuracy of the response, helping to prevent future attacks and limiting the impacts of an event.

One of the biggest hurdles faced by SOC analysts is alert fatigue, in which real attacks get hidden in the noise of flase positives and other routine events. One 2022 report found that 79 percent of respondents had more than 500 security alerts open on a daily basis, a level that causes burn-out, friction, and missed threats.

Unlike its human counterparts, GenAI doesn't get tired, allowing this technology to significantly reduce the burden on security analysts' shoulders and helping to overcome the talent gap. Using models, AI can streamline alert triage and investigation, alert management, and trend analysis.

Every Business and workflow is unique. While this agility allows organizations to define themselves in the marketplace, this need to remain fluid can make it difficult for SOCs to enable business without slowing it down. 

This is another area where AI-enabled security tools like Cipher's xMDR platform are a real game-changer.

Cipher's xMDR platform provides the visibility and flexibility your SOC needs, tailored to its unique tech stack and business functions. In other words, AI can be "tuned" to allow certain actions that are essential for business operations without triggering unnecessary security alerts. At the same time, xMDR can help to enhance the performance of your organization's existing security tools, consolidating and processing data while removing blind spots.

GenAI is already proving its ability to revolutionize SOC operations. From understanding digital adversaries and detailed alert analysis to enabling business operations with tailored security controls, orgnaizations that can successfully leverage GenAI can see their SOCs operating more effectively and efficiently—critical benefits in a world with increasingly frequent and sophisticated attacks.

Want to fast-track your organization's integration of GenAI into your cybersecurity strategy? Now's the time to schedule a personalized session with a Cipher expert.