Tech startups are under siege from ransomware attacks that occur with little or no warning, encrypting critical source code repositories more often than not. In the past, these incidents would have taken hours to mitigate due to the myriads of people that had to be notified about the incident, followed by everyone working to triage each incident and then meet numerous times to discuss how to deal with each incident. The deployment of SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) as your “automatic first responder” can dramatically decrease the first hour of the incident response (IR) down to just 5 minutes and can seamlessly integrate with EDR/XDR for startups without full-time SOC resources.
SOAR is an enhanced tool, not just a passing trend. It receives alerts about suspect logins from EDR solutions (like checking fi she is if your engineer last opened their email) or alerts from XDR solutions about lateral movements and executes predefined response procedures in reaction to those alerts... for instance, if a phishing attempt was made against your engineer, SOAR can create a detailed record with all pertinent threat intelligence about the phishing attempt, isolate the affected machine, prevent any contact with the "command and control" (C2) server while automatically notifying the "IR" lead (who still hasn't had their morning coffee!) of what has happened. Ultimately, SOAR can expedite IR completion by as much as 85% with many teams proving to save up to 70% of their time (i.e., analyst time) automating the triage of incoming phishing emails.
SOAR provides the best solution for Hybrid Tech environments. Once an API key has been compromised, SOAR will take automated quarantine actions to prevent further damage by correlating events from cloud and on-premises resources, such as an AWS S3 bucket or Github repo, and taking the necessary action to stop the spread of malware without human interaction. Every action taken by SOAR is logged in an immutable record for the sole purpose of providing documentation for DPDP compliance, thereby instilling confidence in auditors and compliance officials. For our startup clients, there has been a 40% decrease in their breach costs because of using SOAR to implement automated lockdown playbooks to mitigate the effects of LockBit and BlackCat-type attacks.
What is the cost of this solution? Startups can find entry-level solutions on the market today like Splunk SOAR and Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR for an affordable monthly subscription (SaaS). The immediate return on investment can be realized as preventing just one outage will produce a return on the initial investment for the first year. When combined with a managed detection and response (MDR) service for 24/7 monitoring, SOAR allows your small security team the ability to focus on product innovation as opposed to incident response. The ability to customize playbooks specific to your solution stack provides the biggest benefit of using SOAR; whether it's automatically rotating secrets in HashiCorp Vault or scanning Kubernetes pods for cryptomining activity.
Besides ransomware, SOAR can also reduce the risk of insider threats by auto suspending developer credentials if these credentials become compromised (e.g., exposed by a Pastebin dump) and automatically initiating a forensics investigation, as well as notifying the compliance officers of the developer's access being revoked. In Pune's high-stakes competitive SaaS landscape, investors require your company to have a clean compliance posture to fund your business, which can be accomplished by pitching potential investors with our solutions automated capabilities versus excuses.
Essential Implementation Steps
By 2026, SOAR will move startups from being passive victims of cyber-attack to becoming active, automated defenders with rapid-response capabilities. Ransomware will never stop attacking you until you do...do you want to completely automate your business?
Ancrew helps Pune startups set up SOAR quickly with custom playbooks, MDR setup, and compliance checks for DPDP. We've helped clients cut response times by 75% and breach costs by 40%, so you can impress investors. Book a free assessment today and get fast, automated security while you build your product. Ready to chat?