Overview
It is a facility for an information security team responsible for monitoring and analyzing an organization’s security mechanism on an ongoing basis. Here the goal is to detect, analyze, and respond to cyber threat event using a combination of technology solutions and a strong set of processes. These are consists of security analysts, engineers and managers to oversee operations.
It monitors and analyzes activity on networks, servers, endpoints, databases, applications, websites, and other systems for anomalous activities. It is responsible to efficiently identified, analyzed, defended, investigated, and report potential security threats.
It continuously manages known and existing threats while working on identify emerging risks. The security systems, such as firewalls or IPS may prevent basic attacks but in order to deal with major threats human analysis is crucial.
It helps the company and customer’s needs and work within their risk tolerance level.
It helps to keep up with the latest threat intelligence and leverage. The SOC deliver insight into threats and vulnerabilities by consuming data from within the organization and correlating it with information from the external sources. This external cyber intelligence includes news feeds, signature updates, incident reports, threat briefs, and vulnerability alerts. This information helps to keep up with everyday evolving cyber threats.
The threat intelligence is being fed to the SOC monitoring tools to keep up to date with threats,
It can also discriminate between real threats and non-threats.
The incorporation of security analysts with security automation helps the organizations to increase their analytics power to enhance security measures in order to defend against data breaches and cyber attacks
How it works:
The first step of establishment SOC to an organization, is defining a strategy that incorporates business-specific goals from various departments with the input and other supports from executives. First the strategy has been developed .After that the implemented infrastructure has to be complimenting that strategy.
It includes equipments, such as firewalls, IPS/IDS, breach detection solutions, probes, security information, and an event management (SIEM) system. Compatible technology should be there for data collection via data flows, telemetry, packet capture, syslog, and other methods .the SOC staff then analyses and correlates of data activity. It monitors networks and endpoints for vulnerabilities to safeguard sensitive data and in compliance with industry or government regulations.
The team is responsible for,
Focusing on developing security strategy, designing security architecture, or implementing protective measures,
Taking care of the ongoing, operational component of enterprise information security.
The SOC staff primarily consists of security analysts who can detect, analyze, respond to, report on, and prevent cyber threats.
The SOC can do advanced forensic analysis, cryptanalysis, and malware reverse engineering to analyze incidents.
Benefit:
The main benefit is to have a SOC is to improve the security incident detection through continuous monitoring and analysis of data activity.
The organizational networks, endpoints, servers, and databases are being analyzed round the clock. It takes care of the timely detection and response of security threats. Regardless of source, time of day, or attack type, 24/7 monitoring is being provided by a SOC.
The annual Data Breach Investigations Report records the gap between attackers’ time to compromise and enterprises’ time to detection.
Responsibilities:
The “framework” of SOC comes from both the security tools.
Members of a SOC team include:
Manager: The one who can act as a leader to overseeing the overall security systems and procedures as well as can step into any role while also.
Analyst: Responsible for compilation and analyzation of the data, either from a period of time or after a breach.
Investigator: This person investigates to finds out what happened and why, working closely with the responder after any threat attacks.
Responder: This is responsible for responding to the number of tasks that come with responding to a security breach, and is indispensable during a crisis.
Auditor: This person keeps up with the requirements that comes with present and future legislation, and ensures the organization meets them.
Functionalities:
Stock Resources:
The SOC is safeguards the two types of assets—1) The devices, processes and applications they’re responsible with and 2) The defensive tools at their disposal to help ensure this protection.
SOC Protected items:
The SOC can only safeguards devices and data they can see. The devices that are on the cloud are not visible or controllable, so there are few vulnerable blind spots in the network security posture that can be threatened. So the goal here is to gain a complete view of the business’ threat landscape, that includes not only the various types of endpoints, servers and software on premises, and also third-party services and traffic flowing between these assets.
The protection processes:
With the complete understanding of all cyber security tools and the workflows within the SOC, increases the agility and allows the SOC to run at peak efficiency.
Preventative measures:
To help keep attackers at bay, it implements preventative measures, such as
Preparation:
Getting always informed about the newest security innovations, the latest trends in cybercrime and the development of new threats is the key here. It can help creating a security roadmap that directs the cyber security efforts in right directions .It also helps in creating a disaster recovery plan for the worst-case scenario.
Preventative measures:
This step is all about the actions that have been taken to prevent threat attacks. It includes regularly maintaining and updating existing systems; updating firewall policies; patching vulnerabilities; and whitelisting, blacklisting and securing applications.
Monitoring:
It scans the system network 24/7 to detect different types of threat. After an emerging threat gets detected it gets notified immediately, so that they can detect and take prevention measures. There are monitoring tools, such as SIEM or an EDR .
Alert Ranking and Management:
When it issues an alert, it looks closely at each one, to discard any false positives .It determines how aggressive any actual threats are and where they are attacking.
Response to a potential threat:
When an threat is detected, the SOC acts as first responder .It performs relative actions ,such as shutting down ,isolating endpoints, terminating harmful ,deleting files etc.
Recovery and Remediation:
It restores the systems and can recover the lost or compromised data.
Log Management:
It is responsible for collecting, maintaining, and regularly reviewing the log of all network activity and communications for the entire organization.
Investigation:
It figures out exactly how, when and why the threat has got effected . For this investigation, it uses log data and other information to trace the problem to its source.
Security Refinement and Improvement:
Cyberthreats have been improving everyday. So the SOC also needs to improve continuously.
Compliance Management:
The SOC is responsible for regular audits of the systems to ensure the compliance with the best regulations .
Application:
Business enterprises
