5 Essential SOC Features To Strengthen Cybersecurity Defense

Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous. As a result, SOC features protect company networks and customer data from malicious actors.

To do this, SOC analysts must review system reports to identify and triage threats. They also analyze threat tools, trends, and methods to prevent and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks.

SOC Automated Incident Response

One vital part of the SOC features is incident response (IR), where security teams can immediately react to threats and mitigate them before they cause significant damage. However, this is a complex task as numerous internal and external stakeholders need to be communicated with during an attack. Automated IR tools with built-in playbooks can streamline communication by automatically bringing together the right people at the right time to resolve incidents quickly and efficiently.

A platform can take routine and repetitive tasks off the hands of security analysts, freeing them up to focus on high-value activities such as alert triage and proactive threat hunting. It also enables central reporting, allowing a clear picture of SOC operations to identify bottlenecks and improve performance.

Increasing the efficiency of your SOC is an essential step toward meeting key KPIs like the mean time to detect and the mean time to respond. Look for a solution that combines automated incident response with log management capabilities so security teams can search, prioritize, and triage alarms across multiple private LANs, data centers, and cloud environments.

SOC Advanced Threat Detection

Advanced Threat Detection (ATP) is a set of tools that help you defend against sophisticated attacks. These include zero-day exploits, polymorphic malware, ransomware, and other types of malicious software designed to evade signature-based detection and attack prevention technologies. They typically require extensive reconnaissance and are highly targeted, making them a challenge to repel with standard security solutions.

The latest ATP solutions use machine learning and artificial intelligence to examine network activity and identify threats that might go unnoticed. Using various methods, including sandboxing, they isolate corrupt or suspicious files and process them to detect any malicious code. They also look at the sensitivity and value of enterprise data to determine what kind of response would be appropriate.

Having the right ATP solution in place helps you reduce the number of false alerts and allows you to react quicker to cyber attacks, which can be costly financially and in terms of reputation. By combining these technologies with best-practice functionality, such as correlation response and integration with other SOC tools, provides real-time protection against malicious activities in your internal networks.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Like a carpenter who needs to know how to use a hammer before they can start driving nails, a SOC team must understand security tools and processes before they can effectively respond to threats. This is why SOC teams should have access to ongoing training and development opportunities that will help them stay current with emerging technologies and the latest threat intelligence.

SOCS needs to gain complete visibility of the entire network. This includes monitoring endpoints, software, servers, and anything that connects to the data center, including third-party systems. Using an advanced SOC tool that incorporates user and entity behavior analytics reduces alert fatigue, eliminates false positives and uncovers hidden threats.

SOC teams also need to be able to integrate their tools into a single platform for comprehensive management and analysis. This allows them to prioritize alerts and make informed decisions when responding to incidents. It also helps them improve their MTTR through automation and security orchestration, automation, and response capabilities. These features ensure that they’re addressing the right things at the right time to minimize damage and business disruption.

Data Loss Prevention

Data breaches are more common than ever before. It’s crucial to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands by implementing a data loss prevention (DLP) strategy.

A DLP solution can help prevent the sharing, transfer, or movement of sensitive data outside of authorized channels by identifying and blocking activities that violate security policies and regulations such as GDPR. This can be done by using rules and regular expressions to analyze data, database fingerprinting that searches for exact match data, and other techniques such as content awareness.

A solid DLP plan can help protect your business from threats, both external and internal. This includes disgruntled employees who steal or unload data before leaving the company and malware and phishing attacks. It’s also essential to have a training strategy that ensures all employees know what constitutes sensitive information and how to handle it properly. This will help prevent unauthorized access to confidential information, damaging your company’s reputation and leading to fines and other penalties for non-compliance with data protection laws.

SOC Threat Intelligence

SOC teams need to stay up-to-date on the latest cybercrime tools and techniques. This preparation helps them create plans for dealing with future threats before they can even hit the network.

Threat Intelligence involves monitoring and analyzing all the data that flows through an organization’s security systems. This includes information on all the devices on its network, the activity they are doing, and the data they are exchanging with third-party services. This intelligence can help a SOC team figure out how a threat penetrated the network and identify what it was doing. It also allows the SOC to prioritize emerging threats and apportion resources accordingly.

Monitoring tools generate massive alerts, but some are false positives and divert SOC teams away from actual threats. To address this issue, SOC teams need to have a set of tools that can parse, filter, correlate and aggregate these alerts for easy analysis in one place. some tools are a great example of this type of tool as they analyze logs from firewalls, endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, and other security devices to identify anomalies in network traffic.