In today’s IT world where technology and security requirements are evolving rapidly, IT teams are drowned with workload and are exhausted beyond one’s imagination. 

According to a University of Maryland study, cyberattacks are happening every 39 seconds today, and, organizations are recording thousands, millions of alerts each month. In the absence of security automation, analysts are expected to launch an investigation on all these alerts manually. This investigation includes 

• correlating potential threats against the organization’s threat intelligence, 

• determining legitimacy, 

• deciding on a course of action, and then 

• responding to the alert — all manually; and in the hope to get everything right in real-time with usually unstructured details.

The pandemic has only transpired the threat landsacpe to become much denser. Today, since security analysts have to monitor an attack surface including mobile devices, cloud infrastructure, and IoT devices, alerts are coming at them from everywhere and with full force. Unfortunately, just like the rest of the mankind, even they have only the same 24 hours to identify and deal with potential threats from this large pool of generated alerts. 

Why things need to change 

Thanks to digital transformation, hacker sophistication is on the rise. And as a result, security teams are facing a shortage of time, resources, and in fact even expertise, that’s required to respond to the evolved security incidents.

According to a recent report, 70% of companies do not have appropriate cyber security talent, with a shortage of around 140000 skilled workers in Europe. In addition, this condition has escalated even more in the last year.

The combined result of all these factors: 

• constantly changing threat landscape; 

• digital transformation; 

• crippling skills shortage; and 

• the plain realization that humans are not error-proof; 

Is simple - invitation to potential attackers.
It is this very challenge - that any and every organisation faces globally - that births the need for security automation. 

What is security automation?

If your organisation or security team has ever faced challenges including a breach, lagging response times, overwhelming false positives, or just the lack of efficient and cost-effective operations, security automation is your answer.

Security Automation refers to the use of automatic systems that detect and prevent cyber threats while also committing to the overall threat intelligence of an organization. 

Often, the breaches that are high in number and sophisticated in nature, go undetected by the naked eyes of security analysts. In such cases, a security automation software claims supremacy by sifting through thousands of data alerts and unconvering such undetected threats within mere minutes or even lesser! 

One of the biggest perks of a deploying security automation is, to efficiently manage response times. Security automation solutions automate mundane and recurring tasks such as collecting threat intelligence, enriching indicators of compromise (IOCs) for context, and containing low-level threats. This allows businesses and security analysts to save time and concentrate on more important problem-solving network defending activities. 

Businesses of all sizes, regardless of the industry or application, face a myriad of operational challenges: Hiring and retaining security talent; thousands of alerts and incidents to investigate; and, constantly switching between multiple security tools as part of investigation and response processes. Such challenges usually result in a perpetual pileup of backlogs, increased operational costs, and high alert fatigue. This is again where security automation steps in to automate all those security tasks that would otherwise need manual efforts. By doing so, it not only helps you minimize the response time and combat alert fatigue, but also helps you save millions in dollars by mitigating human error.

Organisations around the globe are recognizing that the threat landscape has evolved, and in order to ensure that threat detection, prevention, and response priorities are unaffected, security automation has to be the ultimate solution and savior. 

5 Ways to beat threats with Automation 

According to a Research and Markets study, the market for cyber security automation is anticipated to grow for the foreseeable future and is projected to exceed $38 billion by 2026.

Relying on manual inspections for threat management of both expected, and especially, unexpected malicious activities, is out-dated and most likely to end security teams in a fix. To avoid possible security adversities like phishing, firewall breaches, malware, among others, deploying automation software is the best possible way to move ahead. 

Here are 5 ways to beat cyber threats with security automation- 

Vulnerability management

Unlike the manual process, with automated systems vulnerability scanning, all IT systems are constantly scanned and monitored. This is done to identify known vulnerabilities, security misconfigurations, outdated software packages, weak passwords, etc, as and when they appear. If any possible threats are detected, they are actively alerted and reported to the security teams for further investigation and remediation.

Traffic Logs Management

Automated traffic log management involves proactive detection of “normal” network traffic patterns such as network load sequence, time-based, and location-based alerts, stored network log movements, etc. Using machine learning intelligence, security automation tools compare current traffic logs with older logs to catch and “match” suspicious network activities. 

Endpoint Threat Management

Automated endpoint threat management provides protection against both known and unknown threats. For the process, data is collected from numerous sources like servers, clouds, laptops, mobiles, etc and collected in a common threat repository. During the process, automation tools ensure only relevant data is analyzed for “actual” threats and filters out all false positives. It provides full visibility into the endpoint enviromnet with complete context and real-time forensics. This makes it possible for security teams to not only detect threats but also react automatically with remediation or a complete formatting to a pre-encrypted state in case of ransomwares.

Automating penetration testing 

Conventional pen-testing involves excessive task repetition which increases the bandwidth of its successful completeion. Automated network penetration testing mimics a hacker’s attack and delivers a pen-test within minutes. It uses an agent or a virtual machine to attack pen tester’s laptop or target proxy pluggins into your network. Then it explores its environment to establish and filter through whatever’s found. Finally, it produces detailed reports along with effective remediations.

Automation-assisted patching

Automated patch management enables your team to get ahead of their backlog of work. Patching can be a complicated process on both the technical and human fronts. With automation-assisted patching, you can keep your IT systems secure from threats through timely identification, testing, and application of code alterations.

Only people looking for trouble reject automated backups

Centralized servers and non-automated backups are the ultimate gateways to mishaps. Don't be the next victim of an unfortunate cyber attack and deploy security automation to avoid any possible breakages. Having an automated backup server with an intelligent monitoring infrastructure like Binaryflux can help you swap in and out instantly and react to potential threats rapidly.

Binaryflux’s Security automation solution - Automation and Response, seeks to alleviate the burden on IT teams by offering an automated solution to threat responses. It is a solution that allows organizations to automatically collect threat data from multiple sources like and respond to low-level security anomalies without the need for human assistance.

It provides you an effective and efficient top-to-bottom threat management system by defining, prioritizing, standardizing, and automating incident response activities. It utilizes an advanced neural brain to understand and learn about your company’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to strengthen threat management cycles. 

Moreover, our advanced UEBA integration ensures you stay one step ahead of your attackers by not only detecting and preventing their plans but also predicting what these mischievous attackers might be after.