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Introduction to SOC
The cyber threat landscape is growing and rapidly changing, and preventing possible cyberattacks necessitates constant monitoring and response. The longer a cybersecurity incident goes unresolved, the greater the risk of damage and expense to the organization. The Security Operations Center of an organization is responsible for dealing with these risks. It should be able to monitor cyber threats 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and respond to incidents quickly.
What is SOC?
A security operations center is a structure that contains an information security team that is in charge of continuously monitoring and assessing an organization's security posture.
The team uses a combination of a set of processes to detect, evaluate, and respond to cybersecurity problems. The team collaborates with organizational incident response teams to ensure that security vulnerabilities are addressed as soon as they are discovered. It monitors and analyze networks, servers, endpoints, databases, apps, websites, and other systems, which check for unusual behavior that could indicate a security incident or compromise. The security operations center is responsible for properly identifying, analyzing, defending, investigating, and reporting potential security threats.
What are the Responsibilities Of SOC?
The Security Operations Center leads organization incident response and pushes continuing security enhancements to defend the organization from cyber threats. A well-functioning SOC will give the following benefits by using a complicated combination of the proper technologies and the right people to monitor and manage the entire network.
Identify Assets
The activities of a SOC team begin with having a comprehensive understanding of the tools and technology available to them.
The team gains knowledge of the systems' hardware and software. Their extensive knowledge aids in the early detection of cyber threats and existing weaknesses.
Proactive Monitoring
A Security Operations Center's primary goal is to detect malicious network activity before it causes significant damage.
Rank Alerts as per their Severity
When a security operations center analyst finds a threat or irregularity, they must provide a severity rating for the occurrence. This information aids in prioritizing the event's reaction.
Continuous behavioral monitoring entails reviewing all systems 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, SOCs can provide equal weight to reactive and proactive efforts because any anomaly inactivity is identified immediately. Behavioral models can be used to train data gathering systems on what activities are suspect and to alter data that may register as false positives.
Incidence Recovery
An organization's data can be recovered through incident recovery. This covers system reconfiguration, updates, and backups.
Compliance Management
It is essential for ensuring that members of the team and the company adhere to regulatory and organizational requirements when executing business goals. Typically, one team member is in charge of compliance education and enforcement.
The security operations center collects data from across the network, and various devices watch for irregularities and inform employees of potential dangers using various methods. It does more than deal with problems when they arise.
What are the Different Types of SOC?
The following are numerous security operations center models that a business can employ and determine which job responsibilities are included on the team.
Dedicated or Self-Managed
This approach includes an on-site facility with in-house personnel.
Distributed SOC
A semi-dedicated full-time or part-time team member is hired in-house to operate with a third-party managed security service provider in a co-managed security operations center, also known as an MSSP.
Managed SOC
MSSPs provide all security operations center services to a company in this approach.
Another type is managed detection and response (MDR) partners.
Command SOC
This strategy delivers threat intelligence and security expertise to other security operations centers, which usually are devoted. It is only involved in the intelligence side of security operations and processes.
Fusion Center
This model is in charge of any security-related facility or program, including various forms of security operations centers and IT departments. Fusion centers have became advanced to collaborate with various enterprise teams like IT operations, DevOps, and product development.
Multifunction SOC
Although this model has its own facilities and employees, its responsibilities and roles extend to other essential areas of IT management, such as network operations centers (NOCs).
Virtual SOC
The acronym FTK stands for "forensic toolkit." It's data research and imaging tool that's used to forensically capture data while also producing copies of the data without changing the original evidence file. Producing forensic photos of local hard discs, examining the content of images saved on the local workstation, and exporting files and directories from forensic files are all functionalities of the FTK Imager. The FTK imager also has an inbuilt validation feature that generates a hash report that can be used to validate the hash of the Evidence both before and after it is imaged. There is no dedicated on-premises facility in this concept. It can be self-managed or administered by a business. In-house personnel or a mix of in-house, on-demand, and cloud-provided employees often staff an enterprise-run security operations center.
SOCaaS
Some operations are outsourced to a cloud provider in this subscription-based or software-based paradigm.
What are the Benefits of a Security Operations Center?
Following are the benefits of the SOC
- Improved incident response times and practices.
- Decreased gaps between the time of compromise and mean time to detect (MTTD).
- Continuous monitoring and analysis for suspicious activities Effective communication and collaboration.
- Consolidated software and hardware assets for a more holistic security strategy.
Customers and workers feel more comfortable sharing sensitive information. - Increased transparency and control over security activities.
- A data chain of control, which is required if a company is anticipated to prosecute those attributed to a cybercrime.
What are the SOC Best Practices?
Following are the best practices of the Security Operations Center
Risk Assessment
Formal risk assessment procedures are used by the leaders to identify gaps in detection and response coverage and to influence future investments.
Data Collection and Aggregation
Security operations centers that are best in class use cutting-edge technologies to consolidate and analyze data from across the enterprise effectively.
Prioritize
Even the largest teams might be overwhelmed by the volume of security data and alarms. To avoid ignoring critical threats, defined mechanisms for prioritizing and triaging incident response are necessary.
Using Playbooks
Playbooks are operational procedures that provide structure and step-by-step instructions for common attack scenarios to analysts. They improve response time and investigative quality.
Automation
To enhance response time and provide analysts more time to complete work that requires human intervention, the security operations center automates data collection, processing, and key incident response stages. Everything should be measured and reported on. It aren't simply for responding to security issues; they're also for monitoring cybersecurity effectiveness and demonstrating compliance.
What are the essential tools for SOC?
Here are the important tools that can help in setting up Security Operation Center in an Organisation
Snort
A snort is an open-source tool. It is a network Intrusion detection tool. It is a packet sniffer tool used for monitoring network traffic, carefully inspecting each packet for malicious payloads or suspicious anomalies. Users may compile Snort on most Linux operating systems (OSes) or Unix, making it a long-time leader among enterprise intrusion prevention and detection software. A Windows version is also available.
Vulnerability Scanner
It's crucial to have a vulnerability scanner to assess and check if any asset is running with serious flaws that could lead to a breach of security assault if you want to be proactive about security. The Vulnerability Scanner is a program that includes various updated scripts for detecting system and application vulnerabilities. Scans and patches systems on a regular basis, especially those that are external or connected to the Internet.
FTK
The acronym FTK stands for "forensic toolkit." It's a data research and imaging tool that's used to forensically capture data while also producing copies of the data without changing the original evidence file. Producing forensic photos of local hard discs, examining the content of images saved on the local workstation, and exporting files and directories from forensic files are all functionalities of the FTK Imager. The FTK imager also has an inbuilt validation feature that generates a hash report that can be used to validate the hash of the Evidence both before and after it is imaged.
Wireshark
Wireshark is a network packet analysis tool. It catches packets as they go via the network and converts them to a readable format. Color coding, filters, and other capabilities of Wireshark allow us to go deep into the packets and inspect them individually. It's an open-source tool for developing and learning protocols. The main goal is to raise awareness of how network packets are extracted and processed from the machine's runtime state, as well as the difficulties and complexities involved. It's a terrific way to learn about and explore the analysis.
Maltego
Maltego is a crucial instrument for large-scale data collection.
Maltego can extract a lot of data from a single target or a group of targets, whether it's a domain, IP address, server, or something else entirely. It automates the procedure and helps you to present the data in a clear and understandable manner. Maltego is built on publicly available data, however, you must make sure that your data collection stays within the parameters you've specified. On Kali-Linux, Maltego is pre-installed and can be found in the information gathering section.
Conclusion
Ultimately every firm attempts to protect its infrastructure from modern threats and reduce the likelihood of data breaches—but security structures, tactics, and entities are not 'one size fits all. Security operations centers are one of the most effective threat detection and prevention tools available to businesses. SOC with a hybrid design, which supports small and medium-sized businesses, were previously regarded to be solely appropriate for giant corporations. The effectiveness comes with a hybrid design, which supports small and medium-sized businesses, has debunked this assumption time and time again. Which choice is suitable for you will be determined by your security requirements and organizational structure.
