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 humans to focus on bigger security challenges.
Automation alone, however, 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 tools that integrate artificial intelligence learn and adapt — yet they still can't match the insight and decision-making skills of experienced professionals. Human expertise is essential for a well-rounded cybersecurity defense.
The limits of automation-only threat detection and response
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:
- Lack context — Machines lack the human ability to contextualize an alert and apply additional logic, intuition, and understanding of nuanced deviations or disparate correlations.
- Rely on attack signatures — They can't detect zero-day and emerging attacks and aren't guaranteed to spot deviations from normal behavior.
- Can add to the noise — Without proper configuration and tuning, they can add to alert fatigue.
- Can be bypassed — Skilled attackers often find ways to outsmart automated defenses.
- Can create vulnerabilities — Integrating multiple AI tools can leave gaps, ironically making organizations more vulnerable to breaches.
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 an organization's technology environment, business model, and goals. Integrating human and machine intelligence gives you the best of both worlds — technology as the enabler for human-driven action.
The value of human-led threat investigation and response
If you're looking for outcomes like decreasing your team's workload and reducing risk holistically, you won't achieve them through automation alone. 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:
- Have the right data sources for ingestion
- Ensure the data is accurate and parsed correctly
- Analyze the inputs and tune, configure, and manage the systems
- Customize the technology to your environment based on your use cases
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 that 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. AI systems, while highly capable of learning, are inferior to humans making informed decisions based on years of experience with how adversaries think and act. Machines also lack context and typically don't take into consideration factors like industry-specific threats, your user base, and your network architecture.
And no matter how good your security is, some threats will slip through. That's where human-led threat hunting comes in. Threat hunters may use a hypothesis-driven approach, developing theories based on known attack patterns, tactics, and techniques — like those in MITRE ATT&CK — to systematically search systems for signs of malicious activity. They can also use indicators of behavior (IoB) to catch malicious activities that automated tools might miss. IoBs are subtle patterns of activity that suggest an attacker might be present, even when security platforms don't detect anything unusual.
Hybrid models: fusing human expertise and automation
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 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.
Leveraging machine and human intelligence with Digital Hands
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) gives 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 best-in-breed technology with a team of highly skilled experts with extensive security knowledge. Our MDR solutions include:
- Hands-on security approach to swiftly prevent and resolve issues with little to no client involvement
- Real-time visibility into your security for full transparency
- A composable security model that works with your existing tools and practices — no rip and replace
We have a track record of detecting cyber threats in seconds, responding in less than four minutes, and resolving in less than fourteen. Fusing machine intelligence and human intelligence, Digital Hands MDR solutions ensure you're prepared to face evolving threats in a way that's most effective for your organization.
Talk to a Cyber Expert to learn more.