SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) is a category of security software designed to coordinate, automate, and manage incident response tasks across multiple security systems. Think of it as a central control panel that ties together SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), firewalls, endpoint protection tools, threat intelligence feeds, and more—so a security team can quickly detect, investigate, and respond to threats without hopping between dozens of separate dashboards.
> The SOAR platform provides an interface (often drag-and-drop or low-code) to define automated workflows known as playbooks or runbooks.
> SOAR orchestrates actions across different security layers: blocking malicious IP addresses in the firewall, updating tickets in IT service management systems, and pulling logs from SIEM or endpoint solutions—all from a single workflow.
Example workflow: Upon detection of a suspicious file by the endpoint security tool, the following automated actions are initiated:
> Queries your threat intelligence feeds to see if the file’s hash is known to be malicious.
> Runs a script to quarantine the endpoint if the file is confirmed malicious.
> Opens an incident ticket in your case management system, attaching all relevant logs and evidence.
> Notifies the security team via email or Slack.
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A) Centralized vulnerability scanning and patching is typically handled by a vulnerability management or patch management system. While a SOAR platform might ingest alerts or results from these systems, it does not primarily manage or execute the full patching process itself.
C) Real-time threat intelligence gathering and analysis are capabilities more commonly associated with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems or Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs). A SOAR solution can integrate with these feeds but does not inherently provide real-time threat intelligence on its own.
D) Proactive user behavior monitoring and anomaly detection using machine learning fall under UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics). SOAR can act on alerts from UEBA systems, but the actual behavior analysis and ML-based anomaly detection are typically done by specialized analytics platforms.