Say goodbye to the concept of “business as usual.” COVID-19 has changed virtually every normal process, including cybersecurity methods and approaches. This includes one function many companies never intended to manage remotely: their security operations center (SOC) teams and processes. Learn how a new SOC-in-a-box solution can help in these challenging times.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has changed what we all considered to be normal processes, and many operations may never go back to the way we used to do things. Companies are going to have to plan for this as they go forward and navigate to the new normal. Unfortunately some business operations are not currently built to allow such a radical shift.
At the top of this list is your security operation center (SOC). Why is this? To be effective, SOCs usually need many highly trained security “experts,” who staff it 24x7. Also, most SOCs rely on many disparate, siloed on-premises security applications and systems, which generate an extremely high volume of daily alerts and simply can’t be accessed or easily managed remotely.
Chances are good that you never even considered managing your security operating center remotely, and even if you did, you probably didn’t envision transitioning as quickly as the COVID-19 crisis has required.
Translation: Most companies never considered attempting to manage their SOC remotely, or even if they did, they would need more planning runway than the current COVID-19 crisis is giving them.
New cybersecurity risks
Attempting to create remote SOC teams and processes during the COVID-19 crisis riskier than ever. SOC teams are now facing what must be their worst-case scenario: attempting to detect and prevent cyber threats for an infrastructure that has grown well beyond the confines of traditional security approaches.
For example, the total number of people who must now work remotely and access your network has exploded, almost overnight. A senior NSA official recently issued a statement highlighting the increased vulnerabilities of VPN gateways. The use of VPNs are instrumental and widespread practices in remote work scenarios since they provide data encryption and ideally safe passage into an organization's network.
However, the increase in remote work has attracted attention to the security vulnerabilities found in these applications. This scenario makes it much more tempting for cyber-attackers who have increased their attempts to use ransomware, spear-phishing, credential stuffing, and other illicit means to breach your defenses. We recently highlighted these types of attacks, as well as six others. While these have always been difficult to defend against, now thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, the situation has become much worse.
According to a recent ZDnet article, the FBI reported that cybercrime attempts quadrupled during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (or IC3) serves as the main point to submit complaints about possible cybercrime. Normally, the IC3 receives up to 1,000 complaints per day but now, the FBI reports that they now receive between 3,000-4,000 per day, the majority of which are related to COVID-19.
Yet chances are good that your SOC teams are running lean and may be attempting to monitor security systems with skeleton staff. As described above, the number of network threats and attacks are growing exponentially, making it much more difficult for your SOC teams to maintain effective threat detection and response tactics.
It’s a real challenge, especially when you consider most companies still have a hard time detecting and stopping cyberattacks, even with on-site security resources. For example, in the case of the famous Equifax breach, the company had nearly 200 senior security professionals on staff, yet they failed to realize their network and systems had been breached for many months.
“SOC-in-a-box”: Take advantage of a virtual SOC
Now there’s a better way, and one built on innovative AI and ML capabilities to detect and stop evolving cyberthreats.
The ARIA SDS Advanced Detection and Response (ADR) application is a single AI-based platform that delivers full SOC capabilities—without the need of analysts. ARIA ADR detects and automatically stops cyberattacks that can do the most harm with Machine Learning powered threat models that can find and stop threats in just minutes. This is a powerful advantage of traditional cybersecurity methods that raise more noise than threats and require many highly trained (expensive) security operations center staff.
The end result is a powerful cybersecurity solution that fully automates threat detection and response and delivers complete “SOC-in-a-box” capabilities. With ARIA ADR, organizations can improve the way the manage their security operations center and enable them to:
- Stop more threats with improved visibility, analytics, speed, and accuracy
- Trust a single platform to replace so many disparate IR tools and (ineffective) processes
- Decrease costs with a powerful, fully automated solution, available at a fraction of the cost
- Reduce, even eliminate, the need for 24x7 highly trained, expensive security professionals
Overcome remote SOC concerns
We’re all facing unprecedented times and trying to determine the best ways to navigate to the new normal. Cybersecurity during these times are a real concern, especially considering the inflated risk and the challenges it now places on remote SOC teams. Now, the ARIA ADR solution can help you address these issues, and improve SOC approaches now—and beyond COVID-19.
About ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions
ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions recognizes that better, stronger, more effective cybersecurity starts with a smarter approach. Our solutions provide new ways to monitor all internal network traffic, while capturing and feeding the right data to existing security tools to improve threat detection and surgically disrupt intrusions. Customers in a range of industries rely on our solutions each and every day to accelerate incident response, automate breach detection, and protect their most critical assets and applications. With a proven track record supporting the Department of Defense and many intelligence agencies in their war on terror, and an award-winning portfolio of security solutions, ARIA Cybersecurity Solutions is committed to leading the way in cybersecurity success.