Delivering Better Security Outcomes with SecOps

Leading enterprises can achieve improved security outcomes, and Security Operations Center (S0C) teams can stop drowning in a sea of alerts by utilizing a modern approach to Security Operations (SecOps), automating manual detection processes and focusing on detection coverage.

Security Operations (SecOps) teams spend their days looking for new threats and searching for known vulnerabilities. The competing priorities for SecOps are at the breaking point when these daily tasks are coupled with the impending changes to compliance guidelines and regulations.

Teams must be aware of the points of exposure present across all of their attack surfaces in order to appropriately prioritize cyber threats to avert loss. They also need visibility into the locations and maintenance status of critical assets in order to decide what and where to defend first.

Prioritizing risks begins with a thorough understanding of internal business processes, including the platforms and digital and physical systems used to support those operations, especially for big businesses with both OT and IT security requirements.

Once the information is gathered, SecOps can start evaluating the security risks and holes in those activities by combining it with their understanding of the adversaries attacking their business or industry.

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Cyber security experts can assess which risks are more urgent and how successfully they can prevent or stop a certain malicious behavior by intersecting these two points. Once possible risks have been detected, they can use MITRE ATT&CK or other kill-chain frameworks to prioritize and eliminate those vulnerabilities. Security leaders can define success criteria for their cyber protection program and report to key enterprise stakeholders with the matrix foundation.

Operationalizing Cybersecurity Through Frameworks for

Understanding the priorities of the key stakeholders in relation to the business and its security is the first step toward success. Organizations can prioritize and highlight the coverage or gaps in their security posture by adopting a security threat and risk framework that is in sync with those priorities.

Operationalizing cybersecurity through frameworks enables businesses to efficiently track their posture as new threats emerge and demonstrate progress against the crucial KPIs that interested parties need to analyze, despite the fact that this has historically not been an easy job.

The fact that the data they require is segregated across numerous data systems and cybersecurity solutions present the main barrier for most organizations when attempting to operationalize these frameworks.

Security data is spread over a number of locations, with organizations using various data logging systems or other data lakes as the basis for their threat hunting and research. To help correlate events and analyze data, the SOC will layer on platforms for Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and other tools along with these data lakes.

Before they can start detecting, hunting, prioritizing, and responding to threats, security analysts often spend hours extracting data from these systems, normalizing and tagging it, and ingesting it into their SOARs and SIEMs.

But cutting-edge tools are being created that use Machine Learning and automation to solve this issue. Now that they have a single source of truth from which to do advanced correlations, more precise detections, and maintain an accurate view of their coverage and threat landscape, organizations are better able to integrate and ingest alerts from across their data stacks. Modern SOC platforms provide security teams the ability to automatically query data wherever it resides, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, as well as ingest and integrate alerts from the security tech stack to rapidly correlate relevant data into reliable detections.

Also Read: Effective Collaboration Between IT and HR is Critical to Better Cybersecurity

The Way Forward

SecOps teams must have complete visibility into their coverage and a thorough understanding of what is actually happening across environments in order to succeed. The most successful SOC teams are actively involved in the security community and continuously evaluate their security posture from both a preventive and detective standpoint. The success of the community as a whole depends on SecOps teams that use security information from a variety of reliable researchers and sources to inform their own security posture and share it with the community.