By: Shrinivas Kulkarni, Principal Cyber Security Architect, LTI

In the era, where there is an exponential increase in a number of breaches per year and decrease in the time available to respond to these breaches, organizations are struggling to maintain their security posture to ensure that threats are kept at bay. The hacker community is constantly enhancing their skills to lead intrusions into the network, access the crown jewels and compromise on Confidentiality, Integrity & Availability of these jewels.

The gap between business growth aspirations and readiness of secured supporting technology continues to be parlous, leading to ineffective decisions. Among many, organizations still struggle to keep patching their vulnerabilities like a glue on the holes of a sinking ship just to prevent from being torpedoed.

If not now, then there is never a good time to go back to the drawing board to rethink about security strategy for the organization. One such core element of rethinking exercise should be the Active Cyber Defense Resiliency (CDR) which acts like a bespoke to manage the security infrastructure in near-real time and keeping threats at bay. To empower the security leadership in deciding whether Next-Gen Active CDR is definitely on their agenda (Saying NO is irrefutable, otherwise), LTI’s Cyber Defense & Resilience team explains top 5 features (more so reasons) why every company need to have Active CDR:

1. Automate to free up human capital
   In traditional SOCs (Security Operations Center), people are putting much effort and time in dealing with known threats than concentrating on hunting new threats. Research has revealed that 79% of the time, the analysts spend is on repetitive or mundane activities – Thanks to archaic SOPs! Incident response is still led through checklists without having any lessons learnt repository or cross knowledge sharing.
2. Harness the data
   Organizations have invested millions in data collection and computing systems. However, a security team is only powered to secure the data collected and not to use it for enhancing the security posture.
   This can be achieved by integrating data sources into a single platform to correlate across different systems and mapping impact through exploiting the identified vulnerabilities across the landscape. A strong layer of machine learning will enhance the visibility into vulnerabilities and potential risks.
3. Think like a human, but act like a computer
   The SOC needs to emanate behavioural use cases to detect and potentially prevent any threats. Investing in creating user, network, endpoint behavioural patterns and algorithms to visualize trends and detecting anomalies is the need of the hour. This can be achieved by creating and configuring realistic-to-business use cases to reduce the noise fatigue. Induction of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence into SOC platform will beef up the security posture.
4. Garner Intelligence from everything, literally
   As they say in the military “Wars are won through brains and not guns” – The intelligence factor on many such security projects is underinvested. Due to the sensitivity of time and willingness to stay ahead of threat actors, threat Intelligence sources need to be constantly increased in direct alignment with growth strategies like Brand monitoring, DarkWeb investigation, Social Media intelligence, Integration with CERT, ISAC, CIRT, etc.
5. Empower the security analyst, not replace
   How does military ensure that armed forces are equipped and ready to tackle any sort of attacks?
   The answer is continuous training! By automating most of the repetitive tasks, Analysts have time to get trained on newest form of attacks and enhance their skills into malware reverse engineering, writing new SOC playbooks, creation of threat simulation exercises, etc. This helps security analysts to think and stay ahead of threat actors.

LTI has been constantly investing on building Next-Gen Active SOC to serve customers across all business verticals.