Early and effective threat detection plays a pivotal role in minimizing the impact of cyberattacks. In any threat detection effort, organizations need to concentrate on enhancing visibility, risk assessment, and understanding the potential impact on business operations. This awareness is particularly important in cloud and hybrid environments where security responses must be tailored to unique deployment considerations.
In today’s threat landscape, threat actors employ a diverse range of sophisticated methods to infiltrate vulnerable assets. Detecting these threats requires comprehensive visibility into different attack vectors and the expertise to create correlation rules to identify them. Additionally, it requires continuous tuning to minimize false positives and gain context for efficiently deploying resources to mitigate these attacks.
Following are five steps to bolster the effectiveness of your threat detection program:
Assess Your Business Objectives and Unique Attack Surface
Are you relying on public cloud infrastructure? How critical is the security of your web apps, especially those in the cloud? Choose a detection method that can address all of your workloads. For instance, cloud servers spin up and spin down constantly. Your detection must follow the provision and deprovision actions of your cloud provider and collect meta data to follow events as they traverse this dynamic environment.
Eliminate Vulnerabilities Before They Need Threat Detection
By implementing vulnerability assessments, you can identify and remove weaknesses before they are exploited which could include known vulnerabilities, password complexity, and misconfigurations. Assess your full application stack including your code, third-party code, and code configurations. Regular vulnerability assessment and remediation is a fundamental and impactful process any organization can use to reduce risk. Ensure you can quickly discover and visualize weaknesses in your deployed assets with an established automated network vulnerability scanning and health monitoring.
Align Data from Multiple Sources to Enhance Analysis
Collecting and inspecting web, log, and network data for suspicious activity is critical. Each data type has unique strengths in identifying certain kinds of threats and, together, present a 360-degree view for greater accuracy and actionable context. Your data sources should include those environments that are most critical: IPS/IDS for network, endpoint for users, and log management for systems.
Use Analytics to Detect Sophisticated Attacks
To detect focused multi-staged attacks, ensure your threat detection methods look at both real-time events and patterns in historical events across time. Apply machine learning and advanced analytics to find what you do not even know to look for. If you use SIEM, enlist machine learning to see what correlations may have been missed and to better tune your SIEM rules.
Consider Your Threat Detection Options
Delivering unrivaled threat intelligence and 24/7 managed security expertise to continuously keep your assets secure in any environment may require you to use a managed services vendor.
There are numerous security solutions your organization can consider for threat detection to improve your overall security and reach your identified security outcomes. With a managed detection and response (MDR) service, your IT environment will be protected by a curated set of technologies, advanced analytics, and high-level security experts as part of an integrated, single managed service. By partnering with an experienced, proven MDR provider, you’ll receive accurate, actionable threat insights and remediation advice, aligned with today’s threat environment and delivered at a predictable cost.
To receive the level of security protection your organization needs, learn why Fortra’s Alert Logic MDR can provide you unrivaled, comprehensive, proactive threat detection and response.
