A security operations center (SOC) is a critical tool for organizations that must protect sensitive data, consumer trust, and business operations. It also minimizes the risk of costly cyber breaches and erodes customer confidence.
SOC teams work around the clock to monitor an organization’s infrastructure and devices. They use both human analysis and advanced technology to protect against threats.
Detecting Threats
The SOC is the first line of defense in your cybersecurity infrastructure. It monitors your network 24/7 and identifies cyber threats and vulnerabilities before they can cause significant harm. A security operations center also focuses on improving your organization’s security architecture. This includes ensuring your organization has the tools and technology to mitigate and prevent future threats.
When a threat is detected, the SOC team immediately responds. This can involve removing the danger from an endpoint to prevent it from spreading. It can also include terminating processes on a host that are used by the threat to perform attacks on other endpoints. Ultimately, the goal is to eliminate the threat with minimal user activity disruption.
In addition to responding to threats, the SOC team is responsible for identifying them and ranking their severity. This helps them figure out how to apportion resources accordingly. A SOC team may use SIEM tools to correlate and analyze data from firewalls, operating systems, and endpoints.
Whether you build a SOC in-house or outsource it to a third party, planning and knowing your needs is vital. Some factors to consider are the scope of your network, if you need to comply with regulations, and how many endpoints you need to protect.
Preventing Attacks
In addition to detecting threats after they occur, SOC teams are also responsible for prevention. They monitor networks, systems, hardware, endpoint devices, databases, and applications for signs of an attack. This monitoring is done with a combination of tools, including SIEM (security information and event management) systems, IPS (intrusion prevention) systems, and threat intelligence platforms.
This monitoring process is crucial to reducing the number of cyber attacks that hit companies. Ideally, SOC staff will get alerts about potential threats before they can even penetrate the network. This can be accomplished through analytic software that will flag unusual activity within the system and send an alert if it detects anything unusual.
If an actual threat is detected, the SOC team must determine what kind of attack it was and how it was accomplished. This involves reviewing log data and other sources of information to see how the threat penetrated the network and where it originated from.
SOC teams are constantly refining their methods to keep up with the latest tools used by cybercriminals. This helps them avoid these bad actors, which can be tricky since many continuously evolve their tactics and methods. By staying current on these new methods, the SOC can prevent them from being exploited by creating a list of standard tools and implementing the necessary protections for their organization’s network.
Responding to Incidents
In addition to preventing attacks, the SOC is responsible for responding when cyber threats occur. Monitoring tools often issue alerts when they detect malicious or unusual activity within an organization’s technology infrastructure. The SOC team examines these alerts, discarding any false positives and determining how aggressive any actual threats are and what they may target. This helps them triage emerging threats appropriately, handling the most severe issues first.
When a threat is confirmed, the SOC acts as boots on the ground, such as shutting down or isolating endpoints, terminating harmful processes (or preventing them from executing), deleting files, and more. This is one of the critical roles SOCs play as it allows organizations to limit damage and restore networks quickly.
While building and maintaining a SOC can require significant time and resources, it is essential to cybersecurity effectiveness. Those with the budget or personnel to keep their own SOC can outsource some or all of their SOC’s responsibilities to managed security service providers.
A security operations center combines an organization’s security team and IT department to scan for potential risks and respond when a breach is detected. This allows them to improve threat detection and response, ultimately reducing the risk of data breaches, which can devastate businesses. A SOC’s continuous monitoring and detection capabilities help to protect against the growing number of sophisticated cyberattacks.
Restoring Networks
Whether working on the latest cyber security tools or evaluating if existing technology is being used optimally, SOCs constantly look for ways to improve their infrastructure and minimize potential threats. A SOC is your first line of defense and works around the clock to scan systems for threats while preparing strategies to respond quickly to potential breaches.
In addition to protecting internal infrastructure from external threats, SOCs are tasked with finding vulnerabilities within the organization. This is accomplished through ongoing software and hardware vulnerability assessment, including actively trying to hack the network in a practice called penetration testing.
SOC teams analyze an organization’s IT infrastructure 24/7/365 and use telemetry to identify irregularities and determine what to do when cyber security incidents occur. They also assign severity rankings to alerts based on their importance so that they can quickly prioritize and act upon the most serious ones.
In-house SOCs are recommended for more mature cybersecurity enterprises with the resources and budget to support round-the-clock, in-house efforts. However, it’s possible for even smaller organizations to create and manage a SOC using third-party services or by integrating the functionality of a SIEM (security information and event management) tool with other security technology.
