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Automation affects security incident response not only in terms of technology, but in terms of career progression as well. Older, labor-intensive SOCs, for example, depended upon a full pipeline of operators.

"It's not sustainable because there are simply not enough people in the industry to fill all of these roles. And because of that, it creates a negative effect where you're always worried about, well, if I hire these people and I train them, are they going to leave? And then it becomes a retention problem. So one way to address that - and also one way to get your response times down is to automate a lot of the rote steps that these lower-level analysts are doing."

But the human operators remain indispensable.

"It is critical that humans are always overlooking the automation. We can't ever assume that automation is going to take care of everything. There are still certain conditions where automation can either break or not quite do the job. So it's very important for higher-level security operations center workers to check the work of the automated incident response and verify that, in fact, A., it did what it's supposed to do and, B., why did it do that? Why did command .EXE spawn from a browser? And so you're right. It does buy you time in order to stop an adversary. Because the adversary is going to say, well, my command .EXE was killed. What else can I do? And they might try some other steps that might not be covered under the automation. So it's very important to be able to have experienced incident responders look over the roll-up data."

—Justin Harvey, global incident response leader at Accenture, on the CyberWire Daily Podcast, 11.6.19.

When all is said and done, the defenders are up against human adversaries.

Notes to our readers.

This Monday, November 11th, is Veterans Day, the US Federal holiday that both marks the end of the First World War and honors all veterans. We won't be publishing on the holiday, but we'll be back as usual on Tuesday, November 12th. And on the 11th, spare a thought for all veterans, everywhere.

And Sunday, November 10th, marks the two-hundred-forty-forth birthday of the United States Marine Corps, dating to their founding at Tun Tavern, Philadelphia. So happy birthday to America's Corps of Marines, crossing water uninvited since 1775.