Not that long ago, SOC teams spent most of their time on tasks like monitoring entry points for signs of attacks and correlating data from multiple sources. Now, automated tools handle these routine steps, freeing up humans to focus on bigger security challenges.
However, automation alone isn’t enough for staying ahead of threats that change daily. While automated systems are great at responding to known threats, they can’t always keep up with new and evolving adversary tactics. Even though tools that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) learn and adapt, they still can't match the insight and decision-making skills of experienced professionals.
This is why human expertise is essential for a well-rounded cybersecurity defense. Let’s explore how the human element plays a critical role in your security operations.
CISOs and SOC managers love hearing about AI and automation. Vendors know this, so they flood the market with tools that promise to completely automate threat detection and response.
While automating security has many valuable benefits, overreliance on automation creates a new set of problems. One of the biggest is that AI tools and automation give a false sense of security — despite many vendors’ claims, you need more than technology to improve your security posture and cyber resilience.
What buyers often overlook in automated platforms is that they:
One area where human expertise is still crucial is setting up, maintaining, and fine-tuning security platforms to make sure they’re delivering the expected outcomes. Humans are also needed to select the data sources that have actual security value, manage threat intelligence, and customize the tools to fit your organization’s technology environment, business model, and goals.
In short, integrating human and machine intelligence gives you the best of both worlds — you’re using technology as the enabler for human-driven action.
If you’re looking for outcomes like decreasing your team’s workload and reducing your risk holistically, you’re not going to achieve them through automation alone. To start with, automated platforms are typically complex, and you need people to deploy and manage them. Without any human intervention, you’re also putting all your trust into a portal to figure out how to action the alerts.
Before you can get the best value from your security stack, you need to:
None of these things can be accomplished without skilled humans. And without these steps, your automated platforms are more likely to put extra burden on your team rather than alleviate it. Solutions that claim to be ready out of the box offer a one-size-fits-all approach — and this doesn’t work in cybersecurity because every organization is different.
Another major shortcoming of technology-only models is that automated responses are based on playbooks for defending against known threats and tactics. And AI systems, while highly capable of learning, are inferior to humans who are making informed decisions based on years of experience with how the adversaries think and act. Machines also lack context and don’t typically take into consideration factors like industry-specific threats, your user base, and your network architecture.
Lastly, no matter how good your security it, threats will slip through. That’s where human-led threat hunting comes in. For instance, threat hunters may use a hypothesis-driven approach, developing theories based on known attack patterns, tactics, and techniques (like those in frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK) to systematically search systems for signs of malicious activity.
Threat hunters can also use indicators of behavior (IoB) to catch malicious activities that automated tools might miss. These IoBs are subtle patterns of activity that suggest an attacker might be present, even when security platforms don’t detect anything unusual.
A hybrid approach to security combines best-of-breed technologies and automation with deep human expertise to give you the best possible response action. Automated tools can handle routine tasks while freeing people to focus on in-depth investigations and advanced incident response.
Automated platforms can offer high-fidelity, actionable security alerts, reducing false positives. A platform with fully automated capabilities can also neutralize a threat in seconds. Human intelligence augments this technology to make fast, data-informed decisions, build confidence in your data and detections, and ultimately boost your cyber resilience.
If you don’t have the internal resources to run your own SOC, outsourcing threat detection and response to an outside partner is an effective alternative. Managed detection and response (MDR) offers you access to 24/7, experienced security professionals who crowdsource threat intelligence from their entire customer base across various industries. These experts leverage advanced analytics and automated tools to not only respond to security events effectively but also continuously improve your security posture.
Digital Hands combines the best-in-breed technology with a team of highly skilled experts with extensive security knowledge. Our MDR solutions include:
We have a track record of detecting cyber threats in mere seconds, responding in less than 4 minutes and resolving in less than 14. Fusing machine intelligence and human intelligence, Digital Hands MDR solutions ensure you’re prepared to face the evolving threats in a way that’s most effective for your organization.