How could your security operations center (SOC) reach its true potential?

You may not have control over when security incidents occur, but an effective and mature SOC can stop threats before actual damage occurs.

In brief

• As the threat landscape continues to evolve and attackers are using new strategies, it is important to know whether your defences are strong enough to stop them getting through.
• The security operations center (SOC) at the core of your cyber offense should be mature and advanced enough to keep up with anything which comes along its way.
• Cybersecurity leaders should critically review their SOC setup to realize its full potential and head towards the next generation of SOC.

Disruptive technology, like the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, 5G, the metaverse and quantum computing make hacktivism, ransomware and other cyber attacks a very real threat. The task of securing your organization has never been more complex – or important in leading transformational change and innovating at speed.

Although organizations cannot control when and where security incidents occur, they can position themselves to address threats and opportunities effectively. Whether a small team or a 24x7 operation center, maturing your SOC will improve your organizations detect and respond metrics in your fight against the evolving Cyber threats.

EY Global Information Security Survey 2021 (GISS)revealed that less than half 47%) of cybersecurity leaders say their organization understand and can anticipate the strategies attackers use. An organization cannot fine tune its security operations to the attacker’s techniques and tactics if they can not anticipate them. This finding reflects what we see in practice: many organizations are prevention-oriented with a compliance driven investment in monitoring and response capabilities. In this article, we reflect on the significant potential for improvement in how SOCs are designed and delivered.

SOC Maturity

Starting with the status quo, we can say that financial institutions often invest heavily in tools and technology for the SOC, but spend less time, money and effort defining how to use them efficiently. A SOC’s maturity can be assessed in five domains Business, People, Process, Technology, and Services domains.

We see higher maturity levels in process and technology than people, business and services in general. Lower maturity in subdomains usually is correlated with a cause and effect relation. Here are some examples with the pitfalls we see in general

Correlation rules

An organization may have a maturity level of “defined” when it comes to use case management process. What often happens: they build rules that are triggered against generic rules and signatures such as antivirus, end point detection and response (EDR) and intrusion detection systems rather than building correlation rules for specific attack patterns than are used against the organization. This is often correlated with a lower maturity level in Services sub-domains such as Threat Intelligence integration into SOC processes. We note that most companies copy their SOC use cases from best practice material. While this can be a good start, offering a useful baseline, best practice material is hardly confidential. When everyone – including attackers – knows your defenses inside out, they’re no longer suitable for serious cyber protection. Cross-organizational case management collaboration and automation is still a lacking feature even for a well-established SOC organization.

Automation

As important it is to have sound detection rules, the activities following to respond to a triggered alert is often manually intensive and takes a lot of time to sort and validate whether the incident is real or not. Often with a high percentage of false positives these take up the majority of a SOC analyst’s time. It often means team resources are not used effectively: highly qualified security analysts end up responding to potential incidents based on repetitive, checklist-based tasks.