From the deepest corners of the dark web, cybercriminals and other threat actors ply their trades. Their activities produce a constant stream of critical threat intelligence that can be utilized to stop them. That threat intelligence – from leaked source code to stolen credentials – creates alerts that security experts can use to their advantage.

DarkOwl, an industry-leading darknet intelligence provider, says one of the best ways to leverage leak alerts is through SOAR integration. By bringing SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) into the equation, security experts can reduce the time-to-mitigation from hours to seconds. It is all rooted in SOAR playbooks.

SOAR Playbooks: The Basics

SOAR providers like DarkOwl offer tools for creating an automated sequence of actions for responding to specific security incidents. The combined actions create what is known as a playbook.

Playbooks offer two distinct advantages. First, they remove much of the ambiguity that comes from attempting to address threats without a defined strategy. Second, they add automation to the equation. Playbooks can be executed automatically, reducing response times dramatically.

Leak Verification and Enrichment

The biggest challenge in responding to dark web leak alerts is understanding the seriousness of the threat. There is no shortage of potential threats that actually never amount to anything. So security teams cannot afford to chase low-priority threats at the expense of their high-priority counterparts.

Here’s how a SOAR playbook can help:

• Leak Verification – When a new alert matches a known group of high-priority keywords, basic filtering is triggered. The SOAR platform immediately filters out low-confidence data, retaining only those data points that include verifiable information.

• Data Enrichment – Next, the SOAR platform enriches threat data and assigns a risk score to the alert. The higher the risk score, the more serious the threat is.

Note that enrichment is necessary to understand the context of a given threat. Context tells security analysts how a threat might evolve, who might be behind it, and what they could expect in terms of mitigation procedures.

While human intervention is necessary for making final decisions, all the steps leading up to a security analyst’s actions can be automated through a SOAR playbook. All automations are triggered through the SOAR platform so that when it comes time to make a decision, analysts are fully equipped to do so.

The Platform Matters

Automated playbooks are a key component in Soar integration. But as DarkOwl explains, an organization’s SOAR platform is critical to success. Put another way, seamlessly executing playbooks is heavily dependent on a robust SOAR platform and an ecosystem of connections. Those connections are made through integrations.

SOAR providers create integrations that facilitate a thorough selection of automations. For example, dark web integration is a core component in automating dark web leak triage. It is often the native or custom connector to a dark web data source.

Security tool integration is also fundamental. A SOAR platform must be able to seamlessly integrate with core security tools like firewalls, ticketing systems, and active directories.

Immediate Response Wins the Day

A decade ago, discovering dark web leaks was a job left to late-night analysts with plenty of time on their hands. Things are different today. Modern dark web leaks may reveal information that could potentially signal a quickly approaching threat. And imminent threats require immediate responses.

By implementing SOAR playbooks, security teams can turn passive monitoring into active dark web threat intelligence that automatically stops threats before they can do serious damage. SOAR providers make it happen with robust platforms, integrations, and the tools necessary to create customized playbooks for nearly any environment.