Transform Network Security With Automated Incident Response

by Valerie DiMartino Nov 1, 2025

Modern network security is facing more complex and sophisticated threats. Automated incident response is the tool enterprise networks need to ensure business continuity. Automation solutions provide the intelligence and agility to stop attacks, protect data, and keep critical services running.

What Is Automated Incident Response?

Automated incident response is a security approach that uses predefined, software-driven workflows to manage threats from start to finish. It gives you a structured way to quickly detect, contain, and resolve incidents while maintaining complete visibility and control.

How Does Automation Impact Incident Response?

Automation transforms incident response by cutting the time it takes to detect and contain threats, reducing exposure and business risk. It keeps pace with a constantly changing threat landscape, ensuring faster action than manual processes allow. Automation takes on repetitive work for security teams already stretched thin and enables better outcomes with fewer resources. Fast and efficient resolution also lowers the cost of security incidents.

Addressing Common Network Security Threats With Automation

Understanding the most common network security threats is the first step toward building a resilient, automated defense strategy. These threats include:

• Malware and ransomware: When malicious software disrupts your system or encrypts data for ransom, automation can detect threats through endpoint monitoring, isolate infected devices, map the spread, and execute runbooks to contain and remediate the attack.
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks: Attackers might overwhelm the network with excessive traffic to force downtime. An automated incident response uses real-time traffic analysis to detect abnormal surges, automatically blocks malicious sources, and reroutes traffic to maintain service availability.
• Phishing and social engineering: Attackers might use deceptive messages to trick users into revealing credentials, sensitive data or installing malware. Automation could be leveraged to lock compromised user accounts, force credential resets, and immediately alert security teams to the threat.
• Insider threats: Employees, contractors, or trusted partners could misuse their access accidentally or deliberately. Automation monitors privilege use, revokes access when suspicious activity occurs, and triggers audit logs for accountability.
• Unauthorized access and credential theft: Attackers can gain entry into the network with stolen, weak, or brute-forced credentials. Automation can detect brute-force attempts, enforce multifactor authentication, and lock down compromised accounts.
• Vulnerability exploits and unpatched systems: Hackers often attempt to exploit outdated software or unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerability scans and patches can be automated.
• Misconfigurations: Incorrect system or network settings expose data and create security gaps. Automation performs continuous configuration audits, corrects deviations from policy, and remediates risks before attackers can exploit them.

NetBrain’s Automated Incident Response in Action

When under attack from network security threats, you have any number of tools — intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), antivirus software, security information and event management (SIEM) technologies — that waste no time in sending you an alert that something is wrong.

When a potential threat is identified, speed is of the essence. The quicker network security threats can be located, isolated and mitigated, the less chance there is for actual damage or loss to occur. While the alert process is completely automated, which is why almost no time is wasted in detecting issues, the typical security-response workflow is still very much manual and time-consuming. This is where visibility and automation come in.

When every second counts, “just in time” automation triggers a tier-0 diagnosis that cuts attack-mitigation time dramatically.

Gaining Visibility Into the Impact of Network Security Threats

The first step in securing the network is understanding the impact of threats. However, your IDS/IPS or SIEM will only inform you that there’s potentially malicious traffic. Your network diagrams give you a sense of how the network is connected, so you’ll see what the potential impact is. But diagrams are often incomplete or outdated.

You must rely on your memory, which becomes increasingly challenging with complex, multi-vendor, software-defined and hybrid environments. Or, manually issue command line interface (CLI) commands. In addition to poring through reams of text output.

This gives you visibility into the configuration and design at the device level, but not the network level. That’s a lot of time to get a very limited view of the situation. If additional expertise is needed, you’ll have to escalate things to a more senior-level engineer. But finding the right expert to solve the problem can be challenging.

Traditional “data silos” between the network operations center (NOC) and security operations center (SOC) make collaboration and escalation less than seamless — different teams rely on different tools and different systems and different data sets.

Leveraging “Just in Time” Automation to Mitigate Network Security Threats

Let’s say that an attacker attempts to overwhelm a targeted device with internet control message protocol (ICMP) echo-request packets (ping flood). Your intrusion prevention system (IPS) detects the threat and generates a simple network management protocol (SNMP) trap to Splunk. Splunk receives the trap and, using a search-and-alert mechanism, triggers an application programming interface (API) call to NetBrain with input parameters Source (attacker) and Destination (victim).

As soon as Splunk detects network security threats, API calls trigger NetBrain to automatically map the problem area are and diagnose the issue in real time.

NetBrain then does two things automatically:

1. It calculates the path between attacker and victim, builds a Dynamic Map of the attack path and automatically provides the URL of this map back to Splunk.
2. It executes a Runbook — a programmable (and customizable) series of procedures to collect and analyze specific network data — that performs initial troubleshooting steps, captures performance statistics and documents the network status at the time the threat was detected.

We call this a tier-0 diagnosis because all this triage and analysis happens automatically, before any human gets involved. The “just in time” automation capabilities give you real-time insight into and analytics about network security threats while they’re happening.

Automating Attack Mapping and Collaborative Incident Response

NetBrain automatically creates a Dynamic Map of the attack path, and Executable Runbooks automatically collect and analyze all the data for you. All diagnostic results are recorded right inside the Runbook. This shared analytics console allows everybody to see who did what when — eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel during escalation (run the same analyses that the previous engineers did) and getting different teams (NOC and SOC) on the same page to mitigate an attack.

A NetBrain survey found that the lack of collaboration between network and security teams was the leading challenge when troubleshooting network security issues. NOC and SOC teams can automatically document processes (by customizing Runbooks on the fly with whatever next best steps should be taken) and share critical insights that drastically reduce time to resolution.

Strengthen Your Security Posture With NetBrain’s Network Automation

For a long time, organizations have been able to automatically generate alerts when apparent network security threats attack their network. It’s time that the engineers charged with mitigating these attacks have the same level of automation in their arsenal. Empowering your engineers with automated incident response can dramatically reduce response times, eliminate manual bottlenecks, and promote seamless collaboration between your network and security teams.

NetBrain’s automated solutions bridge the gap from alert to action, helping network and security teams stay ahead of evolving threats and compliance demands. Request a free demo today to see how automation can transform your network operations.