Individuals, technologies, and processes are the three underlying factors behind any successful cybersecurity program. But the fact is that cybersecurity is handled on an ad-hoc basis by too many organizations. Through operationalizing your core security functions to ensure that your security operations center (SOC) works securely, efficiently, and quickly, you can understand and define how your instruments, teams, and processes can work together in harmony.
The five main security functions that any enterprise should strive to operationalize are outlined here:
Monitoring
Monitoring should form the foundation of every SOC. To guarantee granular visibility at all times, there are simply too many data flows and devices for any internal team to monitor.
Define the company’s mission-critical data flows, along with the high-value assets and employee groups that impact your activities most while implementing your monitoring strategy. In so doing, you will concentrate on what matters most while building up your monitoring capabilities to add less-critical elements down the road. Also, remember that during working hours, attacks don’t often take place. Define your plan for the delivery of 24×7 coverage.
Finally, define the KPIs you would use to measure the efficacy of your methods, such as the percentage of coverage, ticket time, or time of remediation. By using transparent KPIs from day one, you will be able to track progress over time and guide new investments to where they will have the most impact.
Response
When surveillance is in place, you should act according to the information you receive. Create an incident management plan that outlines team roles, how incidents are categorized, and strategies for threat detection, remediation, and recovery. Don’t only clarify the steps themselves, but also how fast each step needs to be completed. This will help ensure that the technique is executed in an appropriate time frame in the case of a fast-moving attack.
Focus on the problems that arise most often, graph your workflows, and update your plan as you go. Test the plan regularly to ensure that everyone knows their roles and they are ready when the time comes. This will also help you find and repair flaws in the strategy before it’s too late, and you only discover the flaws in the plan in response to a real-world violation.
Vulnerability Management
The more efficient you are at patching, the more it will ultimately protect the entire network. But it can be tempting to put off patching when there’s a fire-drill task to handle, and it’s easy to forget patches for every last app and device in the company.
To ensure successful patching, create a vulnerability management plan that outlines the entire patching process. It should include what you scan and how often, and set a regular patch deployment schedule. Some legacy systems can be difficult to restore than modern systems, but that doesn’t mean you can exclude them. Patch what you can instead so that you can follow up later while keeping a good track of what you’re missing.
Threat Intelligence
Threat Intelligence will allow you to consider the possibility of attack from future and current risks. There are, however, far more signs of danger than the actual specific threats to the company. So, you need to know how to filter the threat intelligence.
Start by understanding the unique threats that affect your business, along with the types of adversaries that your industry most commonly faces. When you have this understanding, you can streamline your efforts to disrupt common sector-specific attacker patterns while shortening your defense where it is most needed. This will also allow your team to see the full extent of a sophisticated attack for crafting a suitable response.
Threat Hunting
It is difficult enough to protect the network from existing issues, let alone hunting for unknown security threats. As a result, the operationalization of threat hunting arrives only when the first four criteria are relatively mature within the enterprise. Start tiny, and scale it up over time as you begin to broaden your other roles and start incorporating hunting into your efforts at cybersecurity. Be sure that each stage of each threat search is reported so that you can assess what has succeeded, guarantee consistency, and identify opportunities for automation.
