SOARing on AI wings

For the past few years Oregon State University Security Operations has been working hard on finding ways to appear larger than we are to our adversaries. We’ve made good progress by customizing well designed tools and improving SOC training, but we’ve made leaps and bounds in the past year with the help of various AI. Our SOC Analysts put a greater focus on automating the repetitive parts of our workflows, which can be slow while learning difficult query languages. With the rise of AI assistance like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc we’ve found much faster success. We then doubled down on these capabilities by applying to Microsoft’s early access program for Security Copilot and becoming some of the first adopters of the tool. This whole journey has been such a learning experience, and we hope our findings can make it even smoother for others on the same path.