Security teams are becoming overwhelmed with the increasing volume and complexity of security incidents and the struggle to hire enough skilled staff to process them. As IBM Security’s latest study showed, cyberattacks such as ransomware are clever, damaging and on the rise. The traditional incident response (IR) runbook must be completely reimagined.

Changing the Game With Dynamic Playbooks

For years, runbooks were manual and static — often PDFs or spreadsheets that would become outdated as fast as they were produced. Resilient changed that five years ago. Our Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platform made runbooks current, customizable and collaborative, to say nothing of how much easier it made the whole IR process.

Last week, we changed the game again with our latest innovation, Dynamic Playbooks. Dynamic Playbooks create powerful and agile workflows that automatically generate response plans based on incident circumstances and adapt them in real time as new information about an incident is uncovered. This produces smart, fast and effective responses.

With Dynamic Playbooks, security teams can better leverage their organization’s existing infrastructure. They retrieve incident data from integrated security tools. Then the sophisticated logic engine updates the plan in real time, deciding to raise the incident’s priority, reassign ownership, add or remove specific tasks, or perform additional triage.

A Winning Strategy

Here’s an example of how a Dynamic Playbook accelerates the response to a malware attack: During an attack, the perpetrators add artifacts, including IP addresses and malware hashes, to an incident. Dynamic Playbooks automatically enrich these artifacts with threat intelligence from an integrated feed and determine that the incident’s IP address is a malware command-and-control (C&C) server. Consequently, Dynamic Playbooks automatically increases the incident severity, escalating the response process.

Additionally, if an executive’s device is infected, Dynamic Playbooks can automatically escalate the incident to a Tier 2 analyst and notify the legal team. If an integrated endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution reveals that the malware hash is found on several other computers in the organization, the Playbooks can direct IT staff to reimage the impacted machines.

This all occurs before the analyst even opens the incident. It helps ensure that the right analyst is working on the right tasks with the right tools, enabling security teams to more effectively manage today’s increasingly complex attacks.