Automate Security Incident Response with Okta

Read this white paper to find out how to properly address threats with multi-factor authentication, how to use identity as the foundation for your breach prevention strategy, and how Okta integrates with the rest of your security infrastructure apps like Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, and Splunk.

Security threats require immediate response. Automation and improved security orchestration make that possible.

Security attacks can happen in an instant. For example, 30% of people who receive a phishing email open it, according to Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). On average, it takes them just 1 minute 40 seconds to open it, and 3 minutes 45 seconds to blithely click on its malicious link or attachments.

In less than 5 minutes, your network, apps, data, and users have gone from safe to compromised.

Because this common and devastating kind of hack can happen so quickly, companies must be prepared to take immediate action the moment a suspicious actor is identified. In fact, to stop a breach in progress before intruders get a chance to wreak havoc, security response needs to begin faster than humans can react. This means incidence response operating at maximum efficiency, and even fully automated where possible.

The faster a security team can take meaningful action against a threat, the safer a company will be.

How Do You Address the Threat?

The first step is to make credentials as secure as possible. A main way to protect credentials is to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA). With MFA, a company can create more secure authentication policies without overburdening users. MFA is a critical part of protecting credentials and is a first line of defense against threat actors.

An additional security layer behind credentials is for companies to have visibility into user activities to detect suspicious behavior. When someone logging into a system is identified as suspicious or malicious, the system should rapidly alert security analysts to take immediate action. Better still, where possible and appropriate, a policy-based automatic response can instantly force a step-up authentication or even suspend the suspected user. In either case, the attacker is stopped before any harm is done to the enterprise.

With attacks happening so frequently and quickly, it’