Reimagining the SOC Analyst Role Using AI — What is Actually Realistic?
1 min read
Summary
The growing prevalence of AI within industries is increasing its use within cybersecurity, particularly for threat detection, task automation and improving incident response processes.
AI plays a key role as a valuable sidecar assistant to SOC analysts, particularly during alert triage, providing rapid, contextual suggestions and accelerating decision making, while reducing cognitive load, albeit dependent on the quality of the engineering behind the solution.
AI also excels at filtering out low-hanging fruit alerts, wasting precious time of analysts, and delivering continuous reporting and insight into attack surfaces, such as automating real-time detection assessments and scheduling regular reports on gaps and noisy detections.
However, AI falls short in replacing humans in the SOC due to the lack of intuition and the margin for error which remains high, even with larger sample sizes, and could have catastrophic consequences in a high-stakes environment.
A hybrid SOC, enhanced by AI, but with a human element, may be the optimum solution, with AI performing first line triage and escalation, with analysts only involved for alerts that meet certain confidence and severity ratings.