The Challenges of In-House Security Monitoring

Security monitoring tools generate a large volume of alerts. Sifting through these to identify genuine threats from false positives is highly resource-intensive and this can lead to important alerts being ignored.

Setting up a Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) to undertake 24/7 security monitoring is often cost-prohibitive. Rather than recruiting and training dedicated in-house experts and arming them with the latest technologies and intelligence, many organizations are instead opting for a specialist managed service.

Why is security monitoring important?

As the modern workplace becomes increasingly digitized, with BYOD and remote working on the rise, the traditional security perimeter is becoming blurred. Cyber threats are evolving to take advantage of new vulnerabilities that emerge daily.

With breaches now an operational reality, proactive detection is essential. While technology alone can block many common signature-based threats, a deeper level of cyber security monitoring is required to identify the latest sophisticated cyber threats, including the latest types of ransomware and memory-resident malware.

Continuous cyber security monitoring helps organizations to:

• Improve threat visibility
• Detect a broader range of threats
• Reduce incident response times from months to minutes
• Evaluate the performance of existing security controls
• Comply with industry and regulatory requirements

A DEFINITION OF THREAT MONITORING

A DEFINITION OF THREAT MONITORING

Threat monitoring refers to a type of solution or process dedicated to continuously monitoring across networks and/or endpoints for signs of security threats such as attempts at intrusions or data exfiltration. Threat monitoring gives technology professionals visibility into the network and the actions of the users who access it, enabling stronger data protection as well as preventing or lessening of the damages caused by breaches. Today companies employ independent contractors, remote workers, and staff who use their own devices for work, posing additional risk to the company’s data and sensitive information and driving the need for threat monitoring at enterprises.

HOW THREAT MONITORING WORKS

Threat monitoring involves continually analyzing and evaluating security data in order to identify cyber attacks and data breaches. Threat monitoring solutions collect and correlate information from network sensors and appliances as well as endpoint agents and other security technologies to identify patterns indicative of a potential threat or security incident. Once a threat is identified an alert is issued to the security team for mitigation or incident response.

THE BENEFITS OF THREAT MONITORING

Using threat monitoring enables organizations to identify previously undetected threats such as outsiders connecting to or exploring networks and compromised or unauthorized internal accounts. It can be difficult to detect these activities otherwise, but threat monitoring solutions correlate information about network and endpoint activity with contextual factors such as IP addresses, URLs, and file and application details to provide more accurate identification of anomalies indicative of threat activity.

Threat monitoring reduces insider threat risks and maximizes data protection capabilities. Organizations are in a better position to defend against insider and outsider threats when they have full visibility into data access and usage and can enforce data protection policies to prevent sensitive data loss. Specifically, threat monitoring brings several benefits by helping security professionals:

• Learn what is happening on networks, who is using them, and whether or not they are at risk
• Understand how well network usage aligns with policy requirements
• Meet the standards of regulatory compliance or business partner agreements that require monitoring of sensitive data types
• Find vulnerabilities in networks, applications, and security architecture and understand how to fix them