Like a building, a security operations center (SOC) needs a solid foundation to protect an organization against cyber threats. The SOC’s structure comprises best practices for cybersecurity compliance, information protection protocols and procedures, and round-the-clock security monitoring.
The SOC examines a company’s technological infrastructure around-the-clock to spot unusual activity and rank security incidents. To do so, the SOC must leverage centralized, actionable threat intelligence.
Establishing the SOC’s Scope
To effectively detect and mitigate threats, security operations centers (SOCs) need a broad awareness of an organization’s hardware, software, tools, and technologies. This enables the SOC to monitor and alert on unusual activity indicating an attempted compromise of business systems or data.
SOC teams also need to understand how the technology stack interconnects, allowing them to detect potential anomalies in real-time and prioritize alerts based on severity. A SOC must also have mobile acquisition hardware to gather artifacts and forensic images from remote devices to investigate cyber attacks or security incidents.
A SOC logs all activity and communication across the enterprise, so the team can backtrack to identify suspicious actions that may have led to a breach. These logs are analyzed for indicators of compromise using a threat modeling framework.
A SOC also performs vulnerability management and compliance auditing to ensure that the company’s technology is up-to-date on security protocols and that the organization complies with regulations. These processes aim to safeguard the company’s sensitive information from breaches that can cause significant financial and reputational damage. Whether the SOC is internal or outsourced, all these processes must be aligned to deliver the full functionality required by the business.
Monitoring
The success of a security operations center framework depends on its ability to monitor and detect threats. This requires a vast pool of security data, including information collected from network devices, endpoint agents, servers storing sensitive information, and tools to collect, centralize and analyze this data.
In addition, successful SOCs must perform round-the-clock monitoring to identify new cyberattack indications and threats. Given the cybersecurity skills shortage, IT teams often need help attracting and retaining staff with the expertise necessary to conduct this type of monitoring at scale.
As a result, the average enterprise faces significant delays in identifying and responding to threats, potentially resulting in substantial damage and data loss. Organizations must establish a SOC framework that automates work to address these challenges so that skilled IT teams can focus on what matters most.
This includes implementing security solutions that support collecting and analyzing a large volume of logs, providing alerting capabilities, and documenting and logging incidents. Ideally, these tools should be integrated into an overall security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solution or security platform that delivers built-in support for incident remediation, enabling analysts to take action against identified threats as soon as they’re detected. This allows a faster and more efficient response to incidents, improving security operations and reducing the risk of potential data breaches.
Detection
The SOC takes telemetry from your network’s devices and infrastructure, monitoring them for anomalies. It can also integrate Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions to help in the detection process. SIEM tools gather and analyze event data from network devices, servers, and other sources to provide a comprehensive view of your security landscape and the threats it faces.
The goal of detection is to prevent cyber attacks and detect when they occur before they cause any damage or impact on your organization’s services. The SOC should be able to monitor firewalls, their logs, and any configuration changes that could indicate an intrusion or a potential compromise. It should also be able to identify and classify incoming threats to make the right decisions about response and mitigation. It would help if you also ensured that your policies, procedures, and technologies comply with industry-specific standards and regulations. Establishing a security culture within your organization is essential to support the processes and tools necessary for detection and remediation.
Response
If a security incident occurs, the SOC must be ready to respond promptly. Sometimes, the response may be as simple as an alert notification, but a detailed plan for handling the threat is often necessary. This plan may call for using security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools to quickly identify the affected asset(s), determine its vulnerability, and apply patches to eliminate the threat.
The SOC must also monitor its internal and external systems and identify potential organizational threats. This may require it to gather various data from sources, including perimeter defenses, network devices, endpoint agents, third-party services, and data centers. A SOC framework must include tools to gather, fuse, correlate, and analyze this data.
Detection capabilities must be prioritized to focus on the most severe threats and reduce an adversary’s time to conduct attacks and reach sensitive system assets. A SOC team should be trained to recognize, triage, and communicate with other groups to quickly and efficiently handle incidents and minimize the impact on the business.
In addition, the SOC must continually assess and improve its detection and response capabilities to address changing threats and vulnerabilities. It should have access to up-to-date cyber threat intelligence, scanning, and monitoring solutions to detect unknown threats.
