Strategic Monitoring

CYREBRO’s Strategic Monitoring in a SOC

Strategic monitoring in cybersecurity is the act of collecting data and information, like logs, from all the sources in your organization, such as systems, networks, and processes, and then analyzing it to identify the signs of a compromise. It’s achieved through a combination of technology and cyber professionals who know how to provide protection for numerous attack vector types.

Naturally, it makes more sense to focus on your company’s security strategies rather than remediation, considering the amount of time that remediation can consume. Continuous 24/7 cybersecurity monitoring by a SOC can drastically enhance your security alerts.

Strategic monitoring can detect signs of compromise in real-time, resulting in early identification of potential breaches. The “strategic” element comes into play by creating correlations between the countless events, providing you with a more focused view of the alerts that could cause actual harm to your business.

These signs of compromise can include:

• Abnormal user-account access such as failed login attempts
• Changes to file configuration such as deletion, alteration, or replacement of critical files
• Misuse of privileged account
• Unauthorized port access
• Abnormal changes during the updates of scheduled patches

Keeping up with Compliance

Your SOC should be able to help you meet regulatory requirements that require continuous monitoring (such as PCI-DSS 10.5.5,11.5) of your cybersecurity controls and networks. Non-compliant organizations have to face legal penalties and reputational damage.

To learn more about cybersecurity and data protection laws click here.

What are the Challenges that Strategic Monitoring Face?

Cybersecurity monitoring has become a daunting task due to ever-growing and changing cyber threats and attacks, such as increased network traffic, malware volume and sophistication, ransomware, Trojan horse, bots, worms, and a lot more. These sophisticated attacks are able to circumvent your traditional cybersecurity controls. To deal with these recurring cyber threats, integrating a strategic monitoring process and technology into your SOC is crucial. Moreover, the massive use of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS also creates a big challenge for network organizations.

In the digital world, there can be infinite cyber threats targeting your organization. For example, your employees may use Bring-Your-Own-Devices (BYOD) and/or Internet of Things (IoT) that can introduce severe threats to any corporate network, further leading to a data breach. Even outsourcing can invite unwanted cyber-attacks. Mishandling of big data or disparate logs can also cause an intrusion.

Strategic monitoring plays a pivotal role in the SOC’s ability to keep you safe. Your SOC’s strategic monitoring abilities should include:

• Real-time detection of cyber threats
• Instructions on how to deal with each specific threat
• Meets compliance standards to avoid legal issues
• Provides proactive security such as threat hunting
• Allows integration with security operations and network
• Help you know your adversaries with threat intelligence

Network Security Monitoring for Businesses

Network security monitoring is also a big challenge for businesses. It involves network blind spots, communication issues between network operations teams and cybersecurity, and problems with data that is not collected on time. Your strategic monitoring tool should provide you with real-time network monitoring capabilities whereby network intrusions will be monitored in a timely manner.

Your network security monitoring incorporates various technologies that help to detect and respond to irregular network behaviors. To this end, your cybersecurity monitoring tool will utilize valuable data, including endpoint forensic data, firewall logs, and log data from servers and endpoints. It also encompasses network telemetry data and full-packet capture. Various other sources are listed below:

• VPN logs
• Active directory logs
• DHCP logs
• DNS query logs
• Log files and data that is provided by antimalware sandboxes
• Proxy logs
• IPS/IDS alerts

Strategic Monitoring for SMBs

In most cases, small businesses do not have the knowledge and the right tools to deal with a sudden cyber-attack. Your SOC’s strategic monitoring capability should help you monitor your system effectively to ensure that your business is protected against various cyber threats.

Successful Strategic Monitoring 

Successful strategic monitoring determines the status of systems, processes, and activities to meet specified information needs, in addition to the network data and information that have been collected through the course of the monitoring (discussed in the previous section). Below is the list of these systems, processes, and activities:

• System monitoring
• Configuration management
• Vulnerability management
• Incident management
• Business continuity management
• Third-party risk management
• Environment and physical security management
• Implementation of Information Security Management System (ISMS) processes
• Cybersecurity awareness and training
• Audits
• Risk treatment process
• Risk management process

Our Recommendation

A SOC’s ability to monitor a network is what enables businesses to thwart notorious data breaches by detecting threats at the early stages. It is imperative that your SOC should provide contextual visibility within and across all the systems to accurately discover the earliest signs of suspicious activity in real-time to ultimately avoid having to deal with additional security issues.

Contact us to get a free demo and further information on how CYREBRO’s cloud-based SOC can help your business stay protected.