Book Image

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response for Security Analysts

By : Benjamin Kovacevic
5 (1)
Book Image

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response for Security Analysts

5 (1)
By: Benjamin Kovacevic

Overview of this book

What your journey will look like With the help of this expert-led book, you’ll become well versed with SOAR, acquire new skills, and make your organization's security posture more robust. You’ll start with a refresher on the importance of understanding cyber security, diving into why traditional tools are no longer helpful and how SOAR can help. Next, you’ll learn how SOAR works and what its benefits are, including optimized threat intelligence, incident response, and utilizing threat hunting in investigations. You’ll also get to grips with advanced automated scenarios and explore useful tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk SOAR, and Google Chronicle SOAR. The final portion of this book will guide you through best practices and case studies that you can implement in real-world scenarios. By the end of this book, you will be able to successfully automate security tasks, overcome challenges, and stay ahead of threats.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: Intro to SOAR and Its Elements
5
Part 2: SOAR Tools and Automation Hands-On Examples

Best practices for working with dynamic content and expressions

In the examples discussed in previous chapters, we used dynamic content over static content wherever we could. This is because with dynamic content, we receive the latest data to make appropriate decisions.

We learned that all actions in the playbooks that speak with external services, such as Microsoft Sentinel, Azure AD, MDE, and VirusTotal, use API calls. All APIs will return responses in JSON format, as we saw in our MDE example in Chapter 8 when we searched for MdatpDeviceId. While most of the actions map API responses to dynamic content, not all response fields from the API are available as dynamic content, and we saw that with MdatpDeviceId.

In this case, when dynamic content is not available for the specific field we need, we can utilize expressions instead of dynamic content to get the data inside the playbook – but how do we utilize expressions?

Let’s open the Isolate-MDE-Machine playbook...