How SOC Runbooks Help Analysts Investigate Security Alerts
Summary
Runbooks attach investigation rationale, benign explanations and evidence-gathering questions to detection rules, helping analysts and AI agents investigate alerts consistently and refine guidance as teams learn.
Key points
- Detections identify potentially suspicious activity but do not necessarily explain how to investigate it or distinguish it from legitimate behavior.
- Runbooks link detection rules with their rationale, plausible benign scenarios and questions that guide evidence collection.
- Unlike automation playbooks, runbooks guide investigation and reasoning before a verdict rather than executing response actions.
- Runbooks can help teams standardize investigations across analysts while still accounting for organization-specific context.
- Sekoia’s Elevate agent uses runbooks to gather evidence and show how findings informed its verdict.
- Teams can update runbooks with recurring false positives, new threat intelligence and useful investigative questions.
Article Details
- Topic
- How investigation runbooks complement detection rules by guiding analysts and AI agents through evidence gathering, legitimate explanations, and verdicts.