M.A.R.S-Shield (Mitigating, Automating, and Remediating Security)

About 61% of incidents follow manual remediation of security issues in automated services, highlighting the risks associated with manual processes. Yet cybersecurity incident response still depends heavily on manual, slow work and static playbooks that can’t keep pace with modern threats. During a live incident, security face repetitive tasks, complex infrastructure, and communication breakdowns that delay containment and increase damage.   Rigid playbooks, such as those used by traditional security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, are ineffective against zero-day or unknown attacks and poorly suited to cloud environments where administrators have limited visibility of their assets. There is a need for a solution that can respond in real time, scale with modern infrastructure, and identify active, vulnerable or compromised systems during a cyberattack.   M.A.R.S-Shield address this by ingesting live security data and using AI to generate dynamic, incident-specific playbooks that guide teams step by step with contextual evidence at every stage. Unlike static runbooks, it maintains real-time awareness of the active infrastructure. A human-centred design approach earns responders’ trust and keeps human judgement at the centre of high-stakes decisions, freeing teams to focus on strategy rather than repetitive technical tasks.   The system is being validated with real-world incident responders and an external trial partner. It targets a reduction in mean time to recover (MTTR) from months to hours, reducing the financial and operational impact of cyber incidents and strengthening resilience for critical infrastructure and SMEs