At ThreatQuotient, we write a lot about security automation. Most recently, we’ve discussed how our data-driven approach to automation helps enable extended detection and response (XDR) in all phases of security operations including detection, investigation and response.  

Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take a closer look at three specific use cases where the ThreatQ Platform and ThreatQ TDR Orchestrator work together to automate repetitive processes and accelerate workflows. From threat intelligence management to spear phishing triage to vulnerability management, security teams can collaborate more efficiently and effectively to address their more pressing needs. Following is a snapshot of what our ThreatQ experts will discuss in detail.

1. Threat intelligence management: The practice of aggregating, normalizing, de-duplicating, analyzing and enriching threat data to provide context for decision-making processes is central to the overall security practice. Creating and managing this single source of truth seems like low-hanging fruit that any intelligence platform should be able to handle, but this is not always the case. The work of the Intelligence Analyst can only begin once we have a clean data set.In this blog series, we’ll take a look at the opportunities along the enrichment process where we can introduce automation and transform this tedious and time-consuming activity into a fast, reliable task that runs in the background. Specifically, we will show how to use the ThreatQ Platform to define a process that says whenever data meets this criterion, do this with it, and automate that task. We can then share that information out to other areas of the security organization, including the SOC, the threat hunting team and the vulnerability management team, among others. Threat intelligence management is the foundational use case for security automation and the starting point for XDR.
2. Spear phishing triage: Security teams have grappled with spear phishing attacks for years. Yet despite their best efforts to reduce the threat posed by human error through cybersecurity training coupled with email security products, research finds that 80% of organizations fell victim to a phishing attack in 2021.We will explore how ThreatQ and its product suite can serve as an XDR platform to help security teams understand attacks, prioritize threats, accelerate response, and learn and improve security processes over time. Based on attack patterns and trends identified through the powerful ThreatQ DataLinq Engine, ThreatQ TDR Orchestrator can initiate data-driven workflows to accelerate response either through simple automation or more complex orchestration using criteria that is important to the organization. Automating the repetitive process of analyzing spear phishing emails and allowing security teams to easily build repeatable remediation steps, greatly reduces time and effort when triaging an incident. Analysts are freed-up to focus on more strategic tasks such as investigating more complex events and proactively defending against potentially more damaging attacks.
3. Vulnerability management: At any given time, only a small fraction of existing vulnerabilities is actively exploited or exploitable. And for any given organization, only a fraction of those vulnerabilities is utilized by threat actors and campaigns that may target that organization. It logically follows that higher quality threat data and tighter integration of that threat data into the vulnerability management lifecycle will improve outcomes.While the ThreatQ platform has had a broad set of integrations with vulnerability management tools for years, the addition of ThreatQ TDR Orchestrator makes those integrations even more powerful. In this upcoming blog, we’ll discuss how ThreatQ TDR Orchestrator further automates threat intelligence workflows so that vulnerability management teams can focus more time on developing a deeper and more responsive understanding of their threat landscape and risk profile. In turn, this allows them to more easily evolve their vulnerability management workflow to adapt to their dynamic environment and act more quickly – either patching or initiating compensating controls.

Security automation has now advanced to the point where it can be optimized for an organization’s unique environment to address important use cases such as threat intelligence management,  spear phishing triage,t and vulnerability management. ThreatQuotient meets the needs of organizations that are looking for a best-of-breed implementation of XDR where they can leverage their existing security investments and use a data-driven approach to take the right actions faster in each of these areas. The ThreatQ Platform and TDR Orchestrator enable security teams to leverage the right data to understand and prioritize threats, and trigger the right processes integrated with the tools of their choice to accelerate threat detection and response. 

We hope you enjoy the upcoming blog series that explores these use cases in more technical detail.