Security transformation through Cyber Defense Center

Hackers are undoubtedly tough to tackle. The threats posed by them is an opportunity to change – an invitation to evolve beyond their dangers posed at you and telling them that your strengths are too extravagant for them to endure.

Be aware that they are well-armed, organized crime syndicates having a sophisticated arsenal of tools to unleash various cyber-terror forms at a massive scale. They have exquisite tact and diligence to leverage vast resources and progress their agenda for stealing what they want.

A Security Operations Center (SOC) single handedly cannot take on these fellas.

Why a SOC is not enough

A SOC has always remained a symbol of security excellence. A good SOC was supposed to meet the security objectives and enhance risk posture to take on any threat. With the increasing complexity of threats, SOC’s limitations became more glaring and couldn’t be ignored anymore.

The frequency of threats has also increased, SOC analysts spend most of their time to triage alerts and authenticating alerts. This leads to overlooking critical alerts that might result in collateral damage. SOCs also use a range of security technologies to drive daily operations and leverage threat data sources. Lack of skilled analysts is also a challenge is enabling appropriate response withing reduced response times.

What is the right security investment that can reduce the consequences of a complex attack? Will it result in the right ROI? Answering these questions with a SOC is next to impossible. Meeting new age regulations can also become a heavy bearing on SOCs due to its inherent slack in incident detection and response.

The exponential growth in cloud applications, IoT, social media, including connected devices and services, has expanded the attack surface. These digital ecosystems also create & store massive amounts of data, making them ideal targets for intelligent attack vectors. Such threats call for a security infrastructure that offers adversary protection more than just at a perimeter level to detect intrusions and rapidly respond to compromises and attacks proactively.

Its time to invest in something new and effective.

Cyber Defense Center – The new nerve center of security

The need is clear. We need a smarter version of SOC to take on these threats. The Cyber Defense Center (CDC) can help us overcome the limitations of a SOC’s legacy security approaches. CDC enables in the alignment of people, processes, and technologies, and is the cornerstone of excellence in security operations.

The people include expert vulnerability specialists, threat hunters, product specialists, architects, and forensic experts responsible for 24x7 monitoring, cyber defense, and mitigation. Processes include governance frameworks, audit regimes, management systems of policies, and procedures to implement breach protection tasks. Technology is the most formidable & reliable pillar in cyber defense that unites people and processes to deliver adequate threat protection. CDC integrates perimeter security, endpoint detection cloud security, threat intelligence, encryption protocols, monitoring, and detection under one roof.

A Cyber Defense Center adopts an integrated cybersecurity approach and unifies Managed Detection & Response (MDR) and Security Operations Center (SOC) services.

CDC leverage MDR to transform security posture. MDR services offer proactive, ML-driven threat detection, monitoring, and response capabilities for different technology infrastructure layers. Breach detection time is also drastically reduced through early notifications and swift contextualized remediation.

MDR helps provide security across the entire enterprise spectrum, including on-premise infrastructure, data center, cloud, and virtual environments. Teams of threat hunters, specialists, architects, investigators, and responders work closely with customers to run CDC processes by leveraging advanced technologies, 24x7.

MDR capabilities to strengthen CDC

• Proactive threat identification: Predict and neutralize threats, eliminate false positives.
• Alert Investigation: Ability to investigate huge alert volumes generated daily and find common ground between the alert, source, and destination IP.
• Alert Prioritization: Rank alerts based on their priorities and possible impacts.
• Endpoint Detection and Response: Record activities and events on endpoints and provide better visibility to security teams.
• Threat Analytics: Address the drawback of rule-based detection by applying big data, analytics, and machine learning to detect advanced malware.
• AI-driven Breach Prevention: Use automation to replace manual, mundane, and repetitive cyber defense processes
• ML-driven incident response: Incident analysis based on Machine Learning driven techniques for faster investigation.
• Rule-based Detection: Formulate and apply standard organizational rules on collected user activity logs to stop suspicious activity.
• Threat Intelligence Platform: Aggregate, correlate, and analyze threat data from multiple sources to create a defense mechanism by looking into IoCs like IP address, URL, domain names, email addresses, links, attachments, etc.
• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Process large datasets to identify potential threats by creating a baseline, risk scores, and integrating with SIEMs.
• Deception Technologies: Use of simulated and automated honey-nets/honey-pots for easier threat detection and response.
• Packet Capture: Focus not only to capture events but the total packet capture to understand the dynamics of an attack.
• Incident Analysis: Automate data collection and analysis to measure the impact of an attack, find attributes of an attacker, identify compromised assets, and investigate the root cause of an attack.
• Incident Remediation: Enable faster containment, recovery, and mitigation of threats.
• SOAR: Employ Security Orchestration and Automation (SOAR) to improve incident response and standardization of processes.
• Dark Web Monitoring: Provide visibility into the hacker community and underground marketplaces for any stolen data.
• Threat Hunting: Experienced team of threat hunters capable of blue teaming, red teaming, forensics, and investigation.
• SIEM Services and Operations: To control integration, process mapping, and relevant reporting.
• MITRE Framework Mapped Threat Cases: Mapping MITRE ATT&CK Threat vectors with SOC Threat Cases for better insights on the techniques and tactics used by the attacker.

CDC - The Future of Cybersecurity

Complex threat vectors are rising in a hyperconnected world. A mature security posture is, therefore, essential to enhance cyber resilience. Enterprises do have the challenge of choosing the right mix of security technologies while managing inherent data risks and meeting regulatory compliance needs. Interoperability is the hallmark of next-gen cybersecurity, and enterprises are demanding proactive threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities.

The Cyber Defense Center can help CISOs with:

• Behavioral-based analytics across users, devices, networks, applications, and cloud environments.
• More structured and cohesive workflows with seamless integrations.
• Intelligence on top of security tools and techniques to empower security teams implement risk and confidence based automated response actions.
• AI across detection, investigation, and response processes.
• Updated Out-Of-The-Box playbooks with the fast-changing industry mandates.
• Access to real-time reports and dashboards to plan, act, and refine their course of action regularly.
• Accurate security breach investigations through data analysis and machine learning.
• APIs to connect with every security control for improved investigation.

Keen to set up a Cyber Defense Center to take on next-gen threats? Talk to Aujas MDR experts at contact@aujas.com