Four States Join SOAR Cybersecurity Automation Pilot

July 16, 2020

StateScoop

Four state governments and one county are currently participating in a pilot project led by a Johns Hopkins University research lab to automate some of their cybersecurity processes as officials strive to make their information-security defenses more nimble. The IT agencies in Arizona, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Texas — along with Maricopa County, Arizona — are implementing tools developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory that automatically act on cyber threat intelligence, such lists of untrustworthy domains or malicious IP addresses, rather than wait for changes to be entered manually. The Security Orchestration, Automation and Response, or SOAR, tools are part of APL’s Integrated Adaptive Cyber Defense framework, a set of guidelines aimed at automating the more repetitive tasks of cybersecurity so human workers can be freed up to think and act more strategically.