Building an Effective SOC Playbook

A Security Operations Center (SOC) plays an essential role in cybersecurity. One of the most critical tools in a SOC’s arsenal is the SOC playbook that enables teams to automate security incident response activities. For example, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies automate incident response tasks by deploying and executing playbooks.

Let’s delve into the details of what a SOC playbook is, how to create one, and why it is a must-have in today’s threat landscape.

What is a SOC Playbook?

A SOC playbook is a step-by-step guide designed to help security analysts navigate and manage security incidents effectively. SOC playbooks address specific cybersecurity risks facing an organization, meaning that SOC teams usually have a different playbook for each incident type.

A playbook typically includes the following elements:

Prerequisites: requirements for creating detections and triggering investigations
Workflows: order of activities to perform during an investigation
Checklist: task list, often visualized as a flow chart
Investigation steps: activities for investigating a specific incident type
Containment steps: activities that limit the threat’s reach
Recovery steps: activities that restore the affected asset to its pre-incident state

Essentially, the SOC playbook provides a roadmap for how a security operations center should investigate and respond to various cyber threats.

What is the Difference Between an Incident Response Plan and SOC Playbooks?

Since incident response is critical to managing security, you should think about an incident response plan and SOC playbook as different tiers of information that get more detailed as you dig deeper.

An incident response plan is your set of processes for how to handle security incidents, including:

Goals and objectives
Scope
Roles and responsibilities across incident response team members
Internal and external communications
Incident severity levels
Incident types
Incident definitions, like security incident, event, or data breach
Procedures mapped to the chosen incident response lifecycle framework, like NIST or SANS

SOC playbooks focus on specific current risks the organization faces so incident response teams can consistently respond to them. Some examples of incident response playbooks include:

Ransomware playbook
Data breach playbook
Malware playbook
Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) playbooks
Phishing attack playbook
Password spray playbook
Compromised and malicious applications playbook
Zero-day vulnerability playbook

For example, a SOC playbook for password spray attacks might include the following:

Investigation triggers: alerts based on Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), indicators of compromise (IoCs), firewall logs, or identity and access management (IAM) tools
Investigation process: questions about attack timelines, IP addresses involved, MFA reporting, abnormal IP address or device connections
Mitigations: activities related to blocking attacker IP address, changing compromised credentials, or enabling MFA
Recovery: activities for restoring pre-incident state, like tagging bad IP addresses, checking mailbox forwarding rules and delegations, using MFA as primary authentication, and updating alert configurations

Why Do You Need a SOC Playbook?

With the increasing rate of cyber threats such as phishing, ransomware, and malware, having a SOC playbook enables a structured, consistent approach to incident response, reducing the time taken to manage security incidents. When you use SOC playbooks to automate SOAR responses, you can leverage the platform’s machine learning capabilities to further reduce key metrics like mean time to respond and mean time to recover.

Moreover, having a SOC playbook helps in triage, escalation, remediation, and even in proactive threat hunting activities. It provides a framework for security automation that improves incident response times and cyberattack risk mitigation by integrating various IT and security tools, like ticketing systems.

In essence, a SOC playbook helps streamline the workflow in the SOC, making it a vital component of cybersecurity.

How Do You Create a SOC Playbook?

Creating a SOC playbook involves several steps. Here is a simplified process:

Understand your Environment: Get a clear picture of your IT infrastructure, including the IP addresses, endpoints, firewalls, and other elements.
Identify Threat Vectors: Understand the common cyber threats that your organization is likely to face. This could include phishing emails, ransomware attacks, and more.
Define Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly outline who is responsible for what during an incident response process. This includes the security team, response teams, stakeholders, and others involved.
Outline the Procedures: Provide step-by-step procedures for different incidents. This should include everything from identification, triage, escalation, remediation, and follow-up steps.
Integrate Tools: Mention the tools that will be used during the incident response process such as SIEM, EDR, sandbox, etc.
Test the Playbook: Once the playbook is created, it needs to be tested and refined based on the results.

Remember, creating a SOC playbook is not a one-time task. It needs to be updated regularly as new threats emerge and changes occur in the IT environment.

Enhancing Your SOC Playbook with Tufin

Incorporating tools like Tufin can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your SOC playbook. Tufin’s capabilities for firewall network topology can provide your SOC team with detailed insights into the network status, helping them make informed decisions during incident response.

Moreover, Tufin’s Cortex XSOAR integration can aid the automation of your incident response process. You can also gain valuable insights from Tufin’s intent-based networking podcast episode for enhancing your SOC playbook.

Lastly, Tufin’s automatic provisioning functionality, provides a fully automated (zero-touch) implementation of firewall changes, ensuring that only trusted users and devices are accessing your network resources.

FAQs

What is SOC playbooks?

A SOC playbook is a step-by-step guide that helps security analysts manage and respond to security incidents effectively. It outlines the procedures to follow, tools to use, and people to involve during an incident.

Want to learn more about this? Check out our blog post on SOAR playbooks.

How do you make a playbook in SOC?

Creating a SOC playbook involves understanding your IT environment, identifying threat vectors, defining roles and responsibilities, outlining procedures, integrating tools, and testing the playbook.

For a detailed guide, read our blog post on automated incident response.

What is a playbook in cybersecurity?

In cybersecurity, a playbook is a set of rules that guide the response to various types of cyber threats. It helps in streamlining the incident response process, thereby reducing the time taken to manage security incidents.

What is a Cisco security playbook?

A Cisco playbook enables organizations to build response automations by integrating various Cisco tools and repositories with their SIEM to triage alerts. When SOC teams identify repetitive manual tasks, they can achieve triage and enrichment to improve existing process flows.

For more insights on this, head over to our blog post on optimizing SOCs.

Wrapping Up

Developing a SOC playbook is not just about addressing immediate needs; it’s about shaping the future of security operations. With full visibility, templates, automation, threat intelligence, and strategic integrations, Tufin can assist the modern SOC to become an ever-adaptive force against threat actors and cyber threats. Click here for a demo to learn more!