vSOC As A Service

What is SOC?

An information security(Infosec) team that is In-charge of continuously monitoring and evaluating an organization’s security standard resides in a security operations centre (SOC). The objective of the SOC team is to identify, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity issues by utilising a range of technological solutions and a solid foundation of process , tools & procedures. Security analysts, engineers, and managers who handle security operations are often employed by security operations centres. SOC personnel closely collaborate with organisational incident response teams to guarantee that security issues are dealt with highest priority.

Searching for unusual activity that might be a sign of a security incident or a compromise, security operations centres monitor and analyse activity on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, apps, websites, and other systems. The SOC is in charge of making sure that potential security issues are promptly & accurately recognised, assessed, countered, looked into, and reported.

An organization’s security practises, procedures, and reaction to security incidents are unified and coordinated by a SOC, which is the main advantage of running either in-house or outsourcing it. This usually leads to better security policies and preventative measures, quicker threat detection, and quicker, more effective, and more affordable responses to security problems. Additionally, a SOC can increase customer confidence and streamline and strengthen an organization’s adherence to local, national, and international privacy requirements.

What an Security Operations Center (SOC) does

SOC activities and responsibilities fall into three general categories.

Preparation, planning and prevention

• Asset register. Applications, databases, servers, cloud services, endpoints, etc., as well as all the instruments required to secure them (firewalls, antivirus/anti-malware/anti-ransomware tools, monitoring software, etc.) must all be maintained in a comprehensive inventory by a SOC. For this task, many SOCs will deploy an asset discovery solution
• Regular upkeep and preparation. The SOC carries out preventative maintenance, such as applying software patches and upgrades, and continuously updating firewalls, whitelists and blacklists, security rules and procedures in order to maximise the effectiveness of the security tools and measures in place. In order to maintain business continuity in the event of a data breach, ransomware attack, or other cybersecurity catastrophe, the SOC may also make system backups or aid in implementing back-up strategy or processes.
• Incident response and planning . The SOC is in charge of creating the company’s incident response strategy, which outlines the organization’s activities, roles, and duties in the case of a threat or incident as well as the metrics by which any incident response will be judged successful.
• Frequent testing. The SOC team conducts vulnerability assessments, in-depth evaluations that pinpoint each resource’s susceptibility to potential dangers and the corresponding costs. Additionally, it does penetration tests that mimic particular assaults on additional systems. Based on the outcomes of these tests, the team adjusts or improves apps, security guidelines, best practises, and incident response strategies.
• Staying up to date. The SOC maintains up to date on the most recent security tools and techniques as well as threat intelligence, which is news and details on cyberattacks and the hackers who carry them out that are gleaned from dark web, industry sources, and social media.

Monitoring, detection and response

• Constant, round-the-clock security surveillance. The SOC continuously scans the network, apps, servers, system software, computing devices, cloud workloads, and other components of the extended IT infrastructure for indications of known exploits and any other unusual activity.
• Security information and event management, or SIEM, has become the primary monitoring, detection, and response tool for many SOCs. In order to detect potential risks, SIEM continuously gathers and analyses alerts and telemetry from network hardware and software. Extended detection and response (XDR) technology, which offers more thorough telemetry and monitoring as well as the capacity to automate incident detection and response, has also recently been adopted by several SOCs
• Managing logs. A subset of monitoring called log management—the gathering and analysis of log data produced by each network event—is significant enough to warrant its own paragraph. Even though the majority of IT departments get log data, analysis is what determines what constitutes typical or baseline activity and identifies abnormalities that point to questionable activity. In reality, a lot of hackers take advantage of the fact that businesses don’t always review log data, which enables their viruses and malware to remain undiscovered on the victim’s systems for weeks or even months. The majority of SIEM solutions have log management functionality.
• Threat recognition The SOC team separates the signals from the noise, separating the signs of real cyberthreats and hacker exploits from the false positives, before classifying the threats according to their seriousness. Artificial intelligence (AI), which automates these procedures and “learns” from the data to improve over time at recognising suspicious activity, is a feature of modern SIEM solutions.
• Incident response. The SOC takes action to contain the harm in the event of a threat or actual incident. A root cause investigation can be used to identify the technological flaws that allowed hackers access to the system as well as additional contributing factors (such poor password hygiene or ineffective policy enforcement).
• Deactivating hacked endpoints or removing them from the network
• Isolating vulnerable network locations or rerouting network traffic
• Stopping or pausing infected programmes or processes
• Erasing corrupt or malicious files
• Making use of antivirus or anti-malware software
• Passwords for both internal and external users can be decommissioned.

Many XDR solutions enable SOCs to automate and accelerate these and other incident responses.

Recovery, refinement and compliance

• Recovery and remediation. After an incident has been contained, the SOC eliminates the danger and tries to restore the impacted assets to their pre-incident state (e.g. wiping, restoring and reconnecting disks, end-user devices and other endpoints; restoring network traffic; restarting applications and processes). Recovery in the event of a data breach or ransomware attack could also entail switching to backup systems and changing authentication credentials and passwords.
• Post-mortem and refinement. The SOC uses any new information learned from the incident to update procedures and policies, choose new cybersecurity tools, or modify the incident response strategy in order to better address vulnerabilities and avoid recurrence. If the incident exposes a new or evolving cybersecurity trend, the SOC team may also attempt to identify it at a higher level. At a higher level, the SOC team may also try to ascertain whether the occurrence indicates the emergence of a brand-new or evolving cybersecurity trend for which the team must plan.
• Compliance management. The SOC’s responsibility is to guarantee that all software, systems, and security measures adhere to data privacy laws such the GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), CCPA PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). The SOC ensures that users, regulators, law enforcement, and other parties are informed of an incident in line with legislation and that the necessary incident data is stored for auditing and evidence purposes.

 HOW A SECURITY OPERATIONS CENTER WORKS

The SOC team is In-charge of the ongoing, operational aspect of business information security rather than formulating security strategy, designing security architecture, or putting defensive measures in place. The majority of the security analysts working in the security operations centre are collaborating to identify, assess, respond to, document, and prevent cybersecurity issues. Some SOCs may also be able to examine occurrences using advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering.

Building a defined strategy that takes into account business-specific objectives from various departments as well as input and support from executives is the first stage in establishing an organization’s SOC. The infrastructure needed to support the strategy must be put in place after it has been created. A typical SOC infrastructure includes firewalls, IPS/IDS, breach detection tools, probes, and a security information and event management (SIEM) system. So that data activity can be connected and evaluated by SOC employees, technology should be in place to collect data via data flows, telemetry, packet capture, syslog, and other techniques. In order to safeguard sensitive data and adhere to any applicable industry or governmental laws, the security operations centre also keeps an eye out for vulnerabilities on networks and endpoints.

BENEFITS OF HAVING A SECURITY OPERATIONS CENTER

The improvement of security issue detection through ongoing monitoring and data activity analysis is the main advantage of having a security operations centre. SOC teams are essential to ensuring prompt identification and response of security issues by continuously monitoring this activity throughout an organization’s networks, endpoints, servers, and databases. Organizations benefit from being able to fight against incidents and incursions regardless of the source, hour of the day, or type of attack because to a SOC’s round-the-clock monitoring. According to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report, there is a significant lag between attackers’ time to compromise and enterprises’ time to detection. Having a security operations centre enables businesses to close this lag and keep up with the threats posed to their environments.

Programmatic security

Enable a standards-based security approach that offers a solid, repeatable foundation for handling various security issues across your preferred platforms.

Ongoing security insights

Utilize visualisation and analysis tools to gain specialised insights about past, present, or future threats in order to inform ongoing security resilience throughout the enterprise.

 Proactive managed security

Utilize automation, orchestration, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning strategically to speed up detection, decrease false alarms, and enhance response times.

Automation and AI

Use security AI and machine learning to provide the necessary scale of security operations without the requirement for substantial staffing or coverage.

Next-generation security technologies

With tools for monitoring, management, and risk mitigation, you can better defend your company against new dangers in the IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT sectors.

Holistic threat management

Utilize a unified programme to address malware, security events, and efforts at infiltration and exfiltration.