Amplify Visibility and Unlock Your SOC

Security Operations Centers (SOC) are the nerve center of cybersecurity defense. The results of both tactical and strategic initiatives are manifested, tracked, and managed at the operational level, and the visualization of that level is the SOC. Despite the critical role they play, SOCs and the people who work there are under tremendous pressure; potential security events are growing exponentially, separating signal from noise is an increasing challenge, analysts are asked to do more with less and are tasked with taking on adversaries who are not constrained by rules of engagement.

SOCs are at an inflection point; while pressure to do more with less is increasing, supporting technology is also evolving rapidly to support automation, integration, correlation, and streamlining. Automating and providing better visibility into a Security Operations Center is mission-critical for effective cyber security, with the following considerations:

Security Analytics – Start by running data queries against a significantly larger (historical) data set to build more sophisticated and actionable threat models. You should be able to leverage log data going back years (not months) and immediately correlate historical information to new threats, increasing the efficiency and value of your existing SIEM (Security and Information Event Management) investments. By upleveling log management you can improve your SOC performance in multiple ways, including enhanced threat detection, more proactive threat hunting, contextualization and prioritization of alerts, and more comprehensive integration of threat intelligence.

Real-Time Monitoring – Monitor activity across all security telemetry and potential risk exposure, including cloud environments and your supply chain for immediate visibility and response. Real-time monitoring can improve the performance of the SOC by enabling timely detection, response, and mitigation of security incidents. More rapid threat detection also means reduced dwell time, as well as enhanced incident response and investigation, which can drive timely remediation and containment.

Threat Intelligence Correlation – Enrich and prioritize threat intelligence and attacker insights with data from SIEMs, augmented with curated and peer intel. By integrating data on potential internal attack surfaces with external security threats (including advanced threats that could bypass traditional security models), analysts can contextualize and prioritize security incidents. This can decrease MTTD/R and relieve pressure on security analysts. Properly executed threat intelligence correlation is designed to deliver actionable insights.

Network Security Event Telemetry (NSET) – NSET (e.g. Anomali Match) allows the collection of IoCs across a broad range of indicator types, integrated with threat intelligence and correlated to your potential attack surface. Gain detailed, real-time visibility into network security events to drive SOC performance through early threat detection and rapid, proactive mitigation. This can be used to drive security incident response, compliance monitoring, and accelerate remediation efforts.

Threat Hunting – Anomali can automatically prioritize intelligence and historical telemetry to optimize the threat-hunting process and uplevel the performance and scalability of your SOC team. By having an integrated and comprehensive view of your security landscape (IoCs, security gaps, etc.), your analysts can act on prioritized threats and deliver more efficient triage.

Workflow Automation – Automate precision threat detection and intelligence workflows with attacker context to quickly ingest, prioritize, enrich, score, and distribute intel, automating routine analyst tasks and reducing human errors. Workflow automation can streamline processes, enhance analyst efficiency, reduce costs, and drive a faster response to security incidents.

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing – Fully integrate threat intelligence data into the analysis of operational and supply chain systems. This will improve incident response effectiveness and drive continuous improvements through the application of best practices not only across your organization but across your entire supply chain ecosystem.

There is a wide range of challenges facing every security operations center, both internally and externally, but the right tools backed by the right policies and procedures can comfortably take your operation to the next level. To gain a real-world perspective on how Anomali’s Security Analytics can help you gain immediate, actionable insights into your security challenges, please contact us here.