Security Operation Centers (SOCs) are one of the most effective methods to detect, respond to and resolve incidents. The key to success is having a SOC team properly staffed with individuals who have been trained on incident response best practices. SOC teams can help reduce time to detect and time to respond by taking advantage of their fully staffed cross-functional teams. These teams work together as a cohesive unit that includes members from various departments such as IT Operations, Security Engineering, Information security analysts (who would typically be found in the SOC).
To read more about how your organization can benefit from establishing an SOC or SIEM program visit our blog post here: https://www.hotzebra.com/blog/3-reasons-why-your-company-needs-a-securityoperationcenter
A SOC is a facility that houses an information security team responsible for monitoring and analyzing enterprise environments to identify security incidents, and to coordinate incident response team activities.
The SOC is a facility that houses an information security team responsible for monitoring and analyzing enterprise environments to identify security incidents, and to coordinate incident response activities. The SOC is also called a command center, or computer emergency response team (CERT).
Inadequate Training: Security teams often fail to provide individuals with the necessary training to handle new responsibilities. The constant pressure from upper management forces shortcuts that result in employees not being adequately trained.
Training is the key to success, and security teams must make sure their employees are properly trained in order to successfully respond to an incident. For this reason, it’s important to provide ongoing training that covers a variety of topics—not just for new employees but also existing ones who may be assigned additional responsibilities due to an increase in workload or company growth. This way, your team will be more prepared if they’re suddenly tasked with something outside of their normal scope of work.
Training should also be done in a safe environment so that no one gets hurt. It should be relevant and hands-on so people can understand what they’re learning about instead of just reading from a book or watching videos online; ideally, it should also be fun!
Lack of Process Alignment: Creating a documented process is an important first step towards establishing effective operations within a SOC, but what happens when you have multiple processes and no direction?
When you are establishing SOC processes and procedures, it is important to remember that the process should be documented and communicated to all employees. In addition, the steps in your manual should be clear, concise and easy to follow so that everyone involved in incident response understands what they need to do during an event. The process should also be reviewed regularly so that it can be updated as your environment changes or as new technologies are introduced into your organization. Finally, if there is deviation from these guidelines — no matter how small — they must be brought back into compliance immediately!
The severity of attacks is changing faster than most organizations can keep up with them. This becomes even more problematic when organization rely on legacy systems or simply don’t have the budget to update their systems.
The severity of attacks is changing faster than most organizations can keep up with them. This becomes even more problematic when organization rely on legacy systems or simply don’t have the budget to update their systems.
Examples of new threats that are emerging include:
- Ransomware (malware that encrypts files and requires payment in order to decrypt them)
- Crypto-jacking (malicious miners infecting networks without permission)
- Ad fraud (fake ads being placed within web pages, which makes more money for the attacker but not for you)
With so much data to sort through, it can be extremely difficult for security teams to correctly classify events as either threats or false positives. Even when the appropriate configurations are in place, humans still play a critical role in analyzing events and determining whether they’re related to a real threat or not.
Security teams need to understand that the volume of data going into their SIEM, along with its speed and variety, are increasing. This means that security teams must be prepared for an overwhelming amount of information that might not be relevant to the incident at hand. To get around this issue and ensure your team can properly respond to events as they happen, you should consider using an SOC.
When it comes down to it, a SOC serves as both a monitoring tool and alerting system. It can gather network logs from all connected devices (for example: firewalls or routers) and process them in real-time so you can react quickly when specific events occur on your network.
With so much data to sort through, it can be extremely difficult for security teams to correctly classify events as either threats or false positives. Even when the appropriate configurations are in place, humans still play a critical role in analyzing events and determining whether they’re related to a real threat or not.
The ability to be reactive and proactive during interruptions and attacks
When it comes to security, there are two types of responses: reactive and proactive. The most common response to an interruption or attack is a reactive one. This means that you wait until an incident occurs and then respond accordingly. A proactive response, on the other hand, involves anticipating threats so as to avoid them entirely or at least minimize their effects by taking action ahead of time or before they occur.
A centralized location for a collaborative response during an incident response
A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized location for a collaborative response during an incident response. The SOC is the hub of a company’s security operations, and it houses all technical resources needed to monitor, detect, and respond to incidents.
The SOC is the first line of defense against cyber attacks, so it is critical that it be able to monitor your network 24/7.
The ability to pivot between competing objectives – forensic evidence capture and containment of the threat
When executing an IR, your team needs to be able to pivot between competing objectives – forensic evidence capture and containment of the threat. This can create tension between two objectives that are both critical components at different times during an incident response.
When responding to a security event, your goal is often clear: you need to contain the threat before it spreads further or causes damage beyond control or recovery. However, there’s also another important component: capturing forensic evidence that will provide valuable information about how the incident occurred and what was affected by it. The ability (and desire) for companies today depends on their point in their evolution as a security organization and may require different toolsets than those used previously.
The ability of teams with limited experience managing these situations may be limited if they aren’t equipped with only one toolset for every type of situation encountered on site; however experienced teams understand that sometimes different toolsets are needed depending on what kind of situation they encounter at hand.
Gain efficiencies in incident response by properly staffing levels and cross-functional teams
Incident response is an incredibly important process, and it’s one that should be approached with a focused mind. By properly staffing levels and cross-functional teams, you can make sure your incident response plan is more efficient than ever before.
You need to ensure that your SOC team is properly trained so they know how to properly handle an incident; this will help them pivot between competing objectives — forensic evidence capture and containment of the threat
Properly trained SOC teams can help reduce time to detect and time to respond
A properly trained SOC team can help reduce the time it takes to detect an incident, as well as the time it takes to respond. This is because when you have a properly trained SOC team in place, you’ll be able to tell what is and is not an actual threat. If there are too many false positives or negatives, then it will take longer for your team to respond and recover from a data breach or cyberattack incident.
For example: if someone reports that there was suspicious activity on their device but upon further investigation by your team they realize it was just a false alarm because of some software problem or virus warning that popped up on their screen; this could cause some frustration among your employees who would have been busy cleaning up that mess while another attack happened somewhere else in your organization!
Security Operation Centers should be the center of an incident response plan
So, why should you use a Security Operation Center (SOC) during an incident response plan?
The SOC is the center of your incident response plan. It’s your first line of defense and is the hub where all information will be gathered, analyzed and acted upon by team members. The SOC should have all resources available at their fingertips so they can facilitate communication between teams and management. This can help reduce time to detect an issue or breach as well as time to respond overall because everyone will be in one place instead of scattered across departments or sites across your network infrastructure.
Conclusion
As you can see, SOCs are a great way to respond to security incidents. They allow organizations to quickly identify threats, eradicate them, and make sure that they don’t happen again. SOCs also help protect against future attacks by making sure that all systems are updated on a regular basis so they’re protected from known vulnerabilities.
