Cybersecurity businesses that automate abuse handling processes can improve incident response rates and management times. In this blog post, we take a look at how you can use automation in your service provider’s security abuse handling process.

Automation Works In Flow

Typical abuse desk teams collate information in batches, capturing data for all compromised users before mitigating and remediating issues a few days later. Individual users are then contacted and informed of the breach. This process is often ineffective, as it can take as long as a week to get through. If customers are not informed fast enough, massive damage can take place over that period.

An abuse desk should capture, parse, and analyze abuse as it occurs. It’s also important to differentiate priority reports from lower priority categories. Specialist products, like AbuseHQ, continuously integrate and process threat reports while automatically notifying customers that they have been compromised in real-time. This speeds up the handling process considerably, allowing abuse teams and their customers to take measures to deal with the threat.

See also: The Importance Of Correctly Interpreting Network Abuse Reports

Data Sequencing Breaks Down Lots Of Data

Automation enables abuse managers to process large amounts of data to identify patterns and new threats and to predict an attacker’s behavior. The more data the better, as service providers can gather threat data from a range of sources. Data sequencing breaks down massive amounts of data into smaller packets to determine whether they belong to the same message.

Automation and data sequencing makes it possible to correlate and connect common abuse issues, which reduces the time it takes to process network security reports. Without aggregating data, a service provider won’t be able to determine that, for example, only a few customers are actually responsible for a range of connected issues coming from a specific source.

Manual processing is inefficient, resource-intensive, and insufficient to deal with today’s threat-levels. Some services, like AbuseHQ, collect and analyze data related to network attacks and automatically extract, compile, and organize event data into cases so that abuse managers can manage network abuse better.

See also: Why SIEM And Ticketing Systems Are Not The Correct Tools For Abuse Handling

Automatic Remediation Of Abuse

Being able to collate, process, and organize data automatically makes life considerably easier for abuse managers. Once a threat has been exposed, attackers will attempt to evade further detection and act quickly to spread their activity on the network. System automation can be programmed to remove the threat automatically or notify abuse managers to take action.

Automation enhances network protection by providing abuse desk managers with faster analysis and reporting. This way, threat incident management processes, and critical decision making can take place in real-time. And because an attack is likely automated and coordinated from multiple systems, abuse teams need to combat automation with automation to act quickly and effectively.

With spam, malware, and other categories of abuse on the rise, internet service providers and hosting companies need to embrace automation as an essential part of their security abuse handling process.

AbuseHQ makes automation possible through real-time analysis and prioritization of threats. It pulls all your inbound network abuse, security reports, metrics, and actions into one place to make incident management and threat mitigation processing that much easier.