Security teams have an uphill battle in today’s threat landscape as they struggle to gain sufficient visibility over their environment while defending a variety of distributed assets.
Actionable threat intelligence and automated threat response can turn the fortunes in favor of cyber defenders. However, organizations need to overcome a number of challenges in gaining threat visibility through the integration of security functions, orchestration and automation of security workflows, and collaboration between SecOps teams.
Security teams lack the capability to efficiently ingest and process a large amount of threat data and derive actionable and contextualized threat intelligence out of it. This is a key reason for indecision or delays in threat detection and mitigation. In order to gain visibility, other areas of improvement for security teams include the integration of disparate security functions, collaboration between different stakeholders, and a proactive and automated approach to cyber defense.
How Cyber Fusion Drives 360-Degree Threat Visibility
Security teams today need to be equipped with high-fidelity threat intelligence and automated workflows for extensive threat visibility as well as quicker threat detection and response. This requires closer linking of diverse security functions such as incident response, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, threat hunting, and others.
The next-gen cybersecurity technology of cyber fusion brings these disparate and often siloed security functions together under a cohesive security operations unit powered by collaborative processes. Cyber fusion is designed to provide a more effective to contextualize and operationalize threat intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle by making use of security orchestration and automation, along with threat intelligence sharing. It offers the capability to gain comprehensive threat visibility by linking internal incidents with both internal and external threat intelligence.
Threat Intel Enrichment and Correlation
Threat data is available in abundance due to the proliferation of OSINT, dark web, security research, and commercial providers. Moreover, the telemetry from internally deployed security solutions like SIEM, firewall, IDS/IPS, UEBA, email security, and cloud security tools can be leveraged to establish the connection between observed activity and real-world incidents. While threat data is easy to find, it needs to be put into the right context, analyzed, and enriched to turn it into threat intelligence to enable security teams to take proactive defensive measures and hunt potential threats.
Cyber fusion takes this enriched threat intelligence into action by helping deliver it to all the stakeholders through real-time alerting and bi-directional sharing. It also enables collaboration in threat intelligence analysis, leading to sharper insights and easier removal of irrelevant information. Under a cyber fusion center, an advanced threat intelligence module adds to the security team’s ability to visualize all threat information at hand in a single place for more informed and strategic decision making. The proper enrichment and correlation of threat intelligence helps security teams pin down the root cause of a security weakness or threat much faster, thereby resulting in a reduced mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and mean time to contain (MTTC).
Connecting the Dots
Today’s threat actors often spend months gathering knowledge about their targets before launching an attack. This allows them to launch stealthy attacks that can go undetected for a long period of time. Security teams need the ability to identify the hidden attack patterns indicating potential intrusions or lateral movement by malicious actors.
Cyber fusion offers security teams an edge through automation in threat response and management that allows them to uncover the connections between reported incidents/alerts and all the historically observed malware, incidents, threat actors, vulnerabilities, attack campaigns, and other threats. In addition to this, security teams are also able to ascertain the true impact of any incident on all the entities within their organization so as to coordinate an investigation and execute the response process.
Governance and Reporting
Cyber fusion allows CISOs, SOC managers, and other key decision makers to direct, control, monitor, and manage their intel-driven, automated threat response operations from a centralized platform. This integration of governance and reporting capabilities under cyber fusion provides security leaders complete visibility into the cyber risks and profiles of prominent threat actors targeting their organization. With the introduction of cyber fusion, security teams can establish the right set of metrics and KPIs to improve the efficacy of their security operations while decision-makers can better manage the resources at their disposal to maintain cyber resilience.
Implementation of SOAR Workflows
Cyber fusion allows organizations to automate and orchestrate security processes using both low-code and no-code capabilities, enabling all stakeholders to connect and integrate their cybersecurity, IT, and DevOps technologies to deliver a single, centralized and orchestrated view of the threat environment across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid infrastructures. This results in a faster threat response against a variety of threats while also reducing the burden of manual tasks and processes for security teams.
A cyber fusion center takes threat response to the next level by leveraging advanced, decoupled SOAR module to facilitate threat data collection, analysis, incident prioritization, containment, and mitigation. A decoupled SOAR capability allows security teams to independently orchestrate tools and technologies in their security operations center without having to club it with incident response or case management tools. This brings a reduction in mean time to response (MTTR) and deeper visibility into the evolving threat landscape.
Security Collaboration
Every security team in cyberspace has a limited view of its environment. While threat actors continuously learn from each other to improve their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), security teams also need a high level of collaboration to gain greater visibility into the workings of the cybercrime world to ensure a strong cybersecurity posture. Cyber fusion fosters security collaboration by breaking down the silos separating different security functions through the means of real-time alerting and threat intelligence sharing.
The integrated security operations unit under a cyber fusion center ups the visibility of all teams and creates a collaborative environment for end-to-end threat detection, response, and management workflows. Moreover, the dissemination of real-time threat alerts to various stakeholders helps them learn about the potential threats facing their operations, improve their decision-making, and play a proactive role in threat mitigation.
Wrapping Up
Threat visibility comes from the continuous monitoring of the threat landscape while maintaining control over the security processes to proactively detect, analyze, and respond to threats. Security teams not only need a set of effective tools and technologies to protect their assets but also the right operational approach driven by cyber fusion to effortlessly gain comprehensive context and visibility to effectively curb critical cyber threats.