Uncovering The Critical Role Of Threat Intelligence In Securing Your SOC

You are required to know what the activities look like, what the cyber attackers are interested in, and most crucial is to find these activities on your systems and networks while monitoring your network for malicious activities. All you have is a lot of bread crumbs and no definite trail. Threat intelligence helps in this by securing your SOC.

To analyze these bread crumbs and attribute them to attackers and understand their attack ways is the responsibility of a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst. On the other hand, SOCs are struggling under the burden as cyberattacks are constantly evolving. The new attack vectors and vulnerabilities keep growing as the humongous volumes of threat data created every day.

SOCs should have access to the right context with the right threat data at the right time in order to be effective. This is where threat intelligence plays a key role.

You must be wondering what is SOC? Why do you need cyber threat intelligence? How threat intelligence secures your SOC? Ugh…too many questions. No worries! This blog has the answer to all your questions. So be with us and find out the answers to all your questions.

Let’s get started!

What Is SOC?

A team of IT security professionals that safeguard enterprises by continuously monitoring, detecting, analyzing, and investigating cyber threats is called a security operations center, or SOC. Networks, servers, computers, endpoint devices, operating systems, applications, and databases are continuously examined for signs of a cyber security incident. The SOC team analyzes feeds, establishes rules, identifies exceptions, enhances responses, and keeps a lookout for new vulnerabilities.

In the modern enterprise technology systems run 24/7, to ensure a rapid response to any emerging threats, SOCs usually function around the clock in shifts.

Why we need Cyber Threat Intelligence?

To rapidly gain situational awareness, contextualize huge amounts of data being shared, and prioritize remediation of significant attacks, cyber threat intelligence is needed. It has been seen in the past incident pattern, that the Exploiter, once aware of the scope of the Threat that has already been used, then tends to use the loop-hole as the Security Team scrambles to plug holes and deal with the impact of these attacks. Various advanced persistent attack groups as well as cybercriminal groups were spotted targeting the vulnerabilities. To safeguard yourself from these threats, Cyber Threat Intelligence is needed.

SOC and Threat Intelligence

To detect and respond to cyber threat detection and response, SOC and threat intelligence is the best combination. To enable robust security measures as well as to adopt an efficient and streamlined workflow, analysts integrate cyber intelligence within a SOC.

The SOC Team is always under pressure with the burden of not the need for information, but the pressure of deciding what is of relevance and otherwise. For under-pressure security teams, the ability to automate repetitive, time-consuming, low-level tasks is essential. If a tool can combine this automation with the real-time data and context needed to empower analysts to investigate the high impact, time-sensitive incidents, even better.

Threat Intelligence Use Cases in SOC

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle Automation

To analyze actionable threats, to make important decisions, and to respond to them, a security team is built. It is not built to examine through piles of data, perform repetitive tasks, and get alert fatigue. This is where threat intelligence lifecycle automation plays an important role. It integrates data with your existing tools or solutions, automates data collection,extracts unstructured data from disparate sources. It even finds patterns by providing context on indicators of compromise (IOCs) and TTPs of threat actors. The whole lifecycle enables the SOC team to analyze IOCs, assist them understand the attack as well as defend their network or systems from similar attacks in the future.

Vulnerability Management

To proactively diminish organizational risks, vulnerability management is an accordant use case of good cybersecurity practice. However, vulnerability management may create major pressure on security SOC teams when faced with an ever-evolving critical mass of threats. The challenge is not only the need to detect the presence of vulnerabilities, but also the need to devise a scalable decision-making process that precisely emphasizes which vulnerability to patch first with finite resources. With the help of best threat intelligence platforms, this capability can be enabled. To identify critical vulnerabilities as well as to establish optimal mitigation strategies, security analysts use threat intelligence.

Signature Management

The rules or signatures for IOCs are created by SOC teams that design alerts in SIEMs, IDS/IPS, as well as endpoint protection products. Signatures allow the detecting the true priority of the alerts as well as help in responding to threats while individual signatures are low in context, when contextually connected with threat indicators, intrusion phases, and other amplifying data. Threat intelligence platform security puts signatures in context, thus, speeding responses as well as minimizing alert confusion.

Strategic Security Planning

By serving as a knowledge repository, threat intelligence platform security allows for strategic security planning. To locate the most efficacious defenses, it assists in detecting centers of gravity for adversary activities. To direct security budgets, talent-resource requirements, as well as investments within a security SOC team, this knowledge can be consequently leveraged.

Threat Data Dissemination and Actioning

The sharing of human-readable threat information can be enabled with the help of threat Intelligence security that too from both internally and externally deployed security tools. A sophisticated threat intelligence platform allows SOC teams to witness machine-to-machine dissemination and actioning. Threat intelligence platforms empower SOC teams with quick actioning by delivering enriched intelligence, threat hunting, incident response, and red teams to SOCs. By automatically circulating analyzed as well as enriched threat data to security tools, advanced threat intelligence platforms are capable of automating intel actioning.

Threat Hunting

A significant pillar of a SOC is Threat Hunting. In today’s world which is becoming more and more digital each day, it requires a modern-day threat intelligence platform security that can offer the automation as well as collaboration teams need to quickly handle the threat hunting process. To automate the process of gathering intelligence and searching for IoCs such as malicious IP addresses, domains, as well as file hashes, the best threat intelligence platforms are required. SOC teams may face challenges by heaps of logs generated by the IT and security tools they employ in a threat hunting process. This is where the threat intelligence platforms play a key role in security by enabling SOC teams to create a library of the collected intelligence, cataloging, curating, as well as automating everything to improve the effectiveness of SOC operations.

Conclusion

People, process, and technology are the three main elements of a successful SOC. People are important for their skills and familiarity with security-based alerts and scenarios. In managing threats, processes make sure that companies follow industry standards. For strong security infrastructure. To identify the type and severity of the threat, SOC aggregate information from a myriad of sources and enrich the information thus SOCs are needed to understand the threat landscape and take appropriate measures.

Keen to know how threat intelligence safeguard your SOC? Sennovate experts are here to help you.

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About Sennovate

Sennovate delivers Managed Security Operations Center (SOC) solutions, custom Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions and Social Engineering Defence (SED) services to businesses around the world. With global partners and a library of 2000+ integrations, 10M+ identities managed, we implement world-class cybersecurity solutions that sa ve your company time and money. We offer a seamless experience with integration across all cloud applications, and a single price for product, implementation, and support. Have questions? The consultation is always free. Email [email protected] or call us at: +1 (925) 918-6618.