Whether you're scoping out your strategic survival plan in the event of a potential zombie apocalypse or drafting up your company's security strategy, you can help increase your chances for a healthy outcome by outlining some key rules of engagement. In either scenario, early detection and advanced preparation will ensure your best chance of survival.
Similar to preventing a zombie infestation, defending against cyber threats includes discovering, evaluating, and mitigating the risks – no chainsaws or tactical knives required.
While many theories on the origins of zombies exist, one of the most credible is that of the contagion, Solanum–a virus that travels through the bloodstream to the brain, infecting its host, as noted in Max Brooks' book, The Zombie Survival Guide. It is thought that the virus is able to replicate using the cells of the brain's frontal lobe, and destroying them in the process.
That said, zombies can't exist without vulnerable hosts to prey upon, and nothing is more vulnerable than a SOC operating with blind spots. Security teams are doing their best to secure their environments, but manual processes and fragmented visibility may mean those teams can't see threats until it's too late. Each visibility gap is a potential risk that can be targeted by malicious actors.
The distinguishing feature of a threat is that it needs a vulnerable host to operate
Three Anti-Zombie Steps
1. Avoidance/Prevention
As you might guess, the presence of zombies renders an area uninhabitable. Get the heck out of there if you can, and gather essential survival supplies in the event of a lengthy absence. It could be weeks or even months before an area might be cleared for re-entry.
Like any emergency preparedness kit, for the zombie apocalypse or security operations, have a checklist in mind for the essential items to keep you and yours safe. And, when it comes to evaluating a SOC platform solution, use the following checklist to ensure you've done your due diligence when considering options:
- Has the solution demonstrated the ability to scale to the size of the organization's network?
- Does the solution use multiple sources to comprehensively discover and automatically attribute assets and threats across your environment?
- Is the false-positive rate for alerts acceptable? (AI-powered correlation and prioritization is ideal.)
- Can the solution help identify a wide range of issues across endpoints, network, cloud, and identity?
- Can the solution integrate with your existing security infrastructure and identify advanced issues?
- Does the solution require manual detections to be built by you, or come with advanced out-of-the-box detections and options for building custom analytics?
- Does the solution help uncover both unknown threats in your network and unknown communications to your network?
- Can the solution seamlessly integrate existing tools through automation and orchestration?
- Does the solution provide dashboards or executive-level reporting?
- Do the solutions provide a dedicated support team and not just documentation or email support?
2. Termination/Remediation
The best zombie is a dead (really dead) zombie. While you might be equipped with the most technologically advanced weaponry, a simple garden hoe could suffice in neutralizing the threat. Non-effective termination methods include any trauma to the upper or lower extremities. While a blow to the chest or severing a leg or two might stop or slow a zombie down, these methods remain ineffective in your core objective: complete and utter destruction.
The only known methods for effectively killing a zombie are either cranial penetration (especially to the frontal lobe), blunt force trauma to the head (go for full-on pulverization if you can, but stand clear of any eruptive fluids), or decapitation (an oldie, but a goodie.)
Using Cortex XSIAM, organizations can quickly discover threats, assign risks for remediation, and automatically respond to incidents—helping to identify, prioritize and route issues to the relevant stakeholders. Unlike siloed tools that automate single tasks, XSIAM leverages AgentiX for end-to-end workflow autonomy. This new AI workforce is not built from scratch; it is trained on the battle-tested expertise of 1.2 billion real-world playbook executions from over a decade of security automation leadership.
With all that time freed up, teams can "...go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this to all blow over."
3. Mitigation/Resilience
The disposal of a "dead" zombie should be handled with caution as much as any hazardous material. Use protective masks and gloves, being careful to cover any open wounds as infection can occur through any fluid exchange. If you can, remove the head just as an extra precaution, because you know…zombies.
Do not attempt to incinerate any remains as this may release airborne toxins. Your best option is to use waterproof material such as a tarp or heavy plastic to seal the remains prior to burial. If you have access to duct tape, use it liberally.
Be sure to find a safe spot for the grave, away from any water source should seepage of body fluids occur. And dig a hole at least 4 to 6 feet deep to prevent scavenging animals from digging up any remains. While animals have been shown to be immune to Solanum, no one needs to see a dug-up, half-eaten putrefied farmhand with a hatchet stuck in his sternum. Unless that's your jam.
For confidence in your security posture, XSIAM mitigates threats through an Autonomous SOC that unifies detection, investigation, and response. Using AI and automation to correlate events and autonomously handle low-severity incidents, it drastically reduces MTTR. This is powered by proven components like Cortex XDR, which achieved 100% detection coverage in MITRE ATT&CK evaluations.
To Help Prevent a "Cyber Zombie" Attack, Consider a SOC Platform like Cortex XSIAM
In the same way, one needs to protect the homestead from hungry ghouls circling the perimeter looking for weaknesses, Cortex XSIAM provides a unified security operations platform that transforms the modern SOC. By consolidating data from endpoints, network, cloud, identity, and other sources into a single, AI-driven platform, XSIAM provides complete visibility and becomes the foundation for all security processes. If you don't have complete visibility, it's impossible to discover, evaluate, and mitigate risks to your organization.
By processing over a trillion events per month and using AI and machine learning, XSIAM provides comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities. It automatically stitches data together, maps assets and users, and identifies who is responsible for each component in the organization. This data not only ensures complete visibility, but also becomes the foundation for security processes and managing risk–kinda like Brad Pitt in World War Z, but without the bad CGI.
Cyber-Hygiene Tips to Minimize Exposure and Further Compromise:
XSIAM transforms security operations from reactive detection and response to proactive risk management and automated threat prevention. Remediation and incident response protocols mirror those when faced with a zombie infestation:
- Remain calm.
- Assess the situation.
- Identify the threat/s.
- Identify how the host became infected.
- Identify how it spread.
- Learn what changes were made to the compromised host.
- Determine whether the vulnerability poses an immediate threat to the availability, confidentiality, or integrity of resources and data.
Regardless of how many systems are infected, disconnect from everything except your IR and forensics solutions immediately, isolating them via your EDR/EPP console. If this cannot be accomplished in a timely manner, or if more than a few systems are infected and you have not implemented strong firewall egress filtering and proxy servers, immediately block ALL outbound traffic to external networks.
Implement a SOC Transformation Plan to Help Reduce Your Chance of Infection
Creating a modern security operations plan with Cortex XSIAM can help move beyond the limitations of manual correlations, siloed tools, and alert fatigue:
- Generate an automated and continuously updated single source of truth by stitching together data from all internet-connected assets and security tools.
- Reduce your attack surface by identifying and remediating exposures across endpoints, network, cloud, and identity.
- Discover and identify threats with AI-powered detection using over 10,000 out-of-the-box detectors and 2,600+ ML models.
- Automate incident analysis and response with embedded SOAR capabilities and over 1,000 integrations.
- Find all exposures – vulnerabilities, suspicious behaviors, lateral movement, and advanced threats.
- Continue to monitor, discover, evaluate and mitigate risks as threats evolve.
These are the baseline SOC platform features an organization should expect, yet with Cortex XSIAM security practitioners will find all of them and have even more abilities:
- Unify SIEM, XDR, SOAR, and other SOC functions into a single converged platform.
- Automatically stitch and normalize data from all sources into Cortex Extended Data Lake (XDL).
- SmartGrouping to automatically link related alerts into comprehensive incidents.
- AI-powered SmartScore for dynamic risk assessment and prioritization.
- Operationalize via integrations and two-way APIs.
- Better understand threats with internal and external threat intelligence.
- Automate via embedded SOAR and Cortex AgentiX for agentic AI capabilities.
- Automatically and rapidly update protections according to events across 90,000+ customers globally.
Don't Lose Your Head! Happy Halloween 2025! All Treats, No Tricks!
To learn more about Cortex XSIAM and how it can help provide the unified, AI-driven security operations platform your SOC needs, request a demo today.