Optimizing a security analyst's experience as they journey from detection to recovery

The weary security analyst notices yet another alert popping up on their phone. In the throes of the received alert, the analyst mutters, "Gosh, they keep coming." Another investigation looms. Picture the fatigue, the pressure, and the need for a streamlined journey from threat detection to recovery.

The security analyst's journey

As a SOC manager, how can you make this journey smoother for your team of security analysts? Let's delve into the eight crucial steps of a typical SOC workflow, addressing challenges and strategies at each turn.

1. Detection

• Challenge: Alert fatigue, false positives, and unknown threats make the detection phase strenuous. Without detection, the attack mitigation journey never begins.
• Strategy: To address these challenges, your first step must be to identify your organization's threat use cases. What are the top threats your organization is at risk from? You should invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that allows your analysts and detection engineers to create alert rules based on these threat use cases. Some of the latest solutions also have dual-layered detection technologies powered by adaptive thresholds. This capability, usually powered by machine learning, will augment your analysts' wisdom by recommending thresholds for alert rules. Additionally, threat intelligence feeds should also be utilized by your team to get alerts that are correlated with what's noticed in the outside world.

2. Triage

• Challenge: Gaining a contextual understanding of each incident and prioritizing them is the main concern in this phase. Ignoring this challenge can result in overlooking of critical incidents, resource misallocation, increased downtime, compliance breaches, and more.
• Strategy: Your team should be able to view all the details about an incident at one place. These details can include the analysts' notes about the incident, the evidence collected, which devices and users were involved, the incident age, its status, and more. A SIEM solution that brings all of this information together goes a long way in providing such contextual information, which aids efficient incident management. You should also implement a system that helps assess the severity of an incident quickly and effectively. Assigning severity levels based on potential impact—and prioritizing them accordingly—will help you make decisions about where to allocate resources first. You should also leverage automatic ticket-assigning mechanisms in your SIEM processes to improve your team's efficiency in the phase of triage.

3. Investigation

• Challenge: The main challenge in this phase is the inherent difficulty of performing root cause analyses and log forensics.
• Strategy: For a more efficient investigation, your team should have visibility into all the network activities performed by users and entities. These activities could have been performed on-premises or in the cloud. Using a solution with robust log collection and aggregation capabilities from across a hybrid network can help your team gather the information needed for a thorough analysis. To perform a root cause analysis, your team can use a solution that leverages elastic search to delve deeper into network events.

4. Containment

• Challenge: The containment phase is arduous due to the scarcity of staffing and difficulty in the identification of malicious sources. Isolating affected systems, blocking malicious traffic, or disabling compromised user accounts can be difficult without labor force.
• Strategy: This stage can be sped up by automating as much of the process as possible, and enabling rapid response to blacklisted IPs, domains, or URLs. Implementing a solution with threat intelligence, as well as external and internal threat mitigation capabilities, can come in handy here. Response capabilities such as adaptive thresholding, automated incident response workflows, and automated ticket assignment to security analysts can ensure that the first line of defense is enacted swiftly.

5. Eradication

• Challenge: This phase can be difficult, as the time required to deploy patches can be substantial. Removing malware, or cleaning up compromised systems that are core parts of the network, can result in business downtime.
• Strategy: Enabling smooth collaboration between your SOC team and the IT personnel can address this challenge. Using collaborative platforms and communication tools can ensure everyone is on the same page while patches are being planned.

6. Recovery

• Challenge: One of the major challenges in this phase is to manage business continuity and recover lost data.
• Strategy: The major threat of a data breach is the potential loss of data; hence, you must implement effective data backup and storage solutions for a smooth recovery process.

7. Documentation and reporting

• Challenge: Although this phase is popular, most SOC managers fail to implement a standard workflow for the process, leading to inconsistency and confusion during emergencies.
• Strategy: Standardizing incident documentation procedures can ensure consistency. You should implement templates for incident reports, and ensure all relevant details are recorded. This documentation will prove invaluable for compliance and future incident analysis.

8. Post-incident analysis

• Challenge: Implementing a culture of continuous improvement—as compared to a one-time fix—is a major challenge.
• Strategy: SOC teams often fail to learn from their fumbles. The post-incident analysis, which gives an in-depth view into the root cause of the incident, should help you pilot change in the preceding workflow so that the same faults aren't repeated. The incident response processes should be continuously updated and refined based on the derived insights.

To learn more about how to automate your team's incident response workflow, check out this blog.

Tools and technologies

It is evident from the above strategies that a solution with effective detection and response capabilities is required for the future of security. This is where SIEM comes into play. SIEM solutions have allowed SOC teams to stay up-to-date with the latest threats, conduct forensic investigations, automate redundant tasks, and more. Let's take a look at the key features of a SIEM solution that can improve the performance of SOCs:

• Attack detection: A SIEM solution with great attack detection capabilities is essential. Features like adaptive thresholds, real-time correlation, MITRE reports, and UEBA capabilities can act as kryptonites for attackers worldwide. These capabilities of the solution allow you to drastically reduce your team's mean time to detect (MTTD).
• Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR): SOAR-enabled SIEM solutions can automate incident response tasks, reduce redundancy, and speed up your incident resolution. Real-time alert notifications, automated incident response workflows, and automatic ticket assignment are all capabilities that can greatly help your team by making the overall workflow more efficient.
• Threat intelligence and mitigation: Threat intelligence is a key component of any SIEM solution. This capability provides your team with real-time threat intelligence feeds, helping them stay updated on the latest threats. Threat mitigation capabilities allow real-time alerting of both outgoing and incoming communication with blacklisted domains, IPs, and URLs and also allow for remediation through predefined response workflows. This helps your team stay updated on known threats and prevent the cost implication of a potential breach.
• Compliance management: The importance of compliance was emphasized in steps 7 and 8 of the security analyst's journey (documentation and post-incident analysis). An ideal SIEM solution should utilize advanced threat analytics, correlation, workflows, and more to enable your team to reconstruct the attack framework and conduct root cause analysis. Tamper-proof log data is also required for conducting post-incident analytics. Compliance breaches can result in hefty fines, brand damage, and loss of customer trust, therefore you should be vigilant.

Conclusion

The world of cybersecurity is evolving at a rigorous rate, therefore your defense and response mechanisms must stay ahead—or at least keep pace. The above-mentioned strategies are not set in stone and must undergo constant refinement proportional to the attack landscape.

A SIEM solution undoubtedly plays a vital role in optimizing the incident response workflow. As discussed, SIEM solutions are capable of reducing your team's false positives and redundancies, as well as improving the detection and response times. ManageEngine Log360 is a unified SIEM solution with SOAR, integrated compliance management, and threat intelligence capabilities. Embark on your cybersecurity optimization journey—sign up for a personalized demo now!