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The function of the security operations center (SOC) is to monitor, prevent, detect and protect by investigating and responding to cyber threats around the clock. SOC teams are charged with monitoring and protecting the organization’s assets including intellectual property, personnel data, business systems, and brand integrity. The SOC team implements the organization’s overall cyber security strategy and acts as the central point of collaboration in coordinated efforts to monitor, assess, and defend against cyber attacks.
What Does a SOC Do?
Although the staff size of SOC teams vary depending on the size of the organization and the industry, most have roughly the same roles and responsibilities.
A SOC is a centralized function within an organization that employs people, processes, and technology to continuously monitor and improve an organization’s security posture while preventing, detecting, analyzing, and responding to cyber security incidents.
Prevention, Detection & Protection : When it comes to cyber security, prevention is always going to be more effective than reaction. Rather than responding to threats as they happen, a SOC works to monitor the network around-the-clock. By doing so, the SOC team can detect malicious activities and prevent them before they can cause any damage. When the SOC analyst see something suspicious, they gather as much information as they can for a deeper investigation to protect the business.
Investigation: During the investigation stage, the SOC analyst analyses the suspicious activity to determine the nature of a threat and the extent to which it has penetrated the infrastructure. The security analyst views the organization’s network and operations from the perspective of an attacker, looking for key indicators and areas of exposure before they are exploited.
The analyst identifies and performs a triage on the various types of security incidents by understanding how attacks unfold, and how to effectively respond before they get out of hand. The SOC analyst combines information about the organization’s network with the latest global threat intelligence that include specifics on attacker tools, techniques, and trends to perform an effective triage.
Response: After the investigation, the SOC team then coordinates a response to remediate the issue. As soon as an incident is confirmed, the SOC acts as first responder, performing actions that such as isolating endpoints, terminating harmful processes, preventing them from executing, deleting files, and more.
In the aftermath of an incident, the SOC works to restore systems and recover any lost or compromised data. This may include wiping and restarting endpoints, reconfiguring systems or, in the case of ransomware attacks, deploying viable backups in order to circumvent the ransomware. When successful, this step will return the network to the state it was in prior to the incident.
Building a security operations centre team:
A security operations centre can take a variety of forms based on requirements, technical skills of employees, physical resources and organizational models. Therefore, building a perfect SOC and its team is a personalized approach and big challenge in this domain.
SOCs are staffed with a variety of individuals that play a particular role in overarching security operations. Job titles and responsibilities that may be found in a SOC include as shown in below.
A SOC's monitoring efforts is likely to extend beyond incident response. A SOC might harvest and collect metrics to support customer service or service delivery (at a managed security service provider, for example) or it might support management reporting like preparation of metrics and data to support risk assessment or for audit support. While a SOC often comes up in the context of incident response, it almost always has other elements of security within its scope of responsibility. A SOC is likely to have a broader operational purpose and scope than a CSIRT or CIRT. If there is a SOC in a given organization, incident response likely falls within the purview of the SOC as an operational security function. Again, the specifics depend on the organization.
CERT/CSIRT/CIRT or SOC?
With a clear understanding of these terms, organizations can identify which type of incident response team is right for them and how to build the security team of choice. The choice should be based on your organization's goals, structure and use of resources. For example, if the need for monitoring is paramount and your organizational structural is conducive to allowing centralization of that in one physical or logical location, there may be advantages to creating a SOC (for example, economies of scale or a simplified reporting hierarchy). By contrast, if your organizational structure is more decentralized, or otherwise not conducive to centralization of monitoring and other security operations, a CSIRT may make more sense.
SOC manager- This employee is responsible for managing the everyday operations of the SOC and its team. It is also a part of their role to communicate updates with the organization’s executive staff.
Incident responder- This employee handles attacks or breaches that have successfully occurred, implementing whatever practices necessary to reduce and remove the threat. Some incident responders have experience with white hat
Forensic investigator- This employee is in charge of identifying the root cause and locating the source of all attacks, collecting any supporting evidence that is available.
Compliance auditor- This employee makes sure that all SOC processes and employee actions meet compliance requirements.
Security analyst- This employee reviews security alerts to organize them by urgency or severity and runs regular vulnerability assessments. Skills this employee might have include knowledge of programming languages, sysadmin capabilities and security best practices.
Threat hunter- This employee reviews data that is collected by the SOC to identify threats that are hardest to detect. Resilience and penetration testing may also be a part of their routine schedule.
Security engineer- This employee develops and designs systems or tools that are necessary for carrying out effective intrusion detection and vulnerability management capabilities.
In addition to deciding which job roles are included on the team, the different types of organizational models that a SOC can implement also plays a big role.
SOC Challenges
SOC teams must constantly stay one-step ahead of attackers. In recent years, this has become more and more difficult. The following are the top three challenges that every SOC team faces:
Shortage of cyber security skills: Based on a survey by Dimensional Research, 53% of SOCs are having difficulties hiring skilled personnel. This means that many SOC teams are understaffed and lack the advanced skills necessary to identify and respond to threats in a timely and effective manner. The (ISC)² Workforce Study estimated that the cyber security workforce needs to grow by 145% to close skills gap and better defend organizations worldwide.
Too many alerts: As organizations add new tools for threat detection, the volume of security alerts grows continually. With security teams today already inundated with work, the overwhelming number of threat alerts can cause threat fatigue. In addition, many of these alerts do not provide sufficient intelligence, context to investigate, or are false positives. False positives not only drain time and resources, but can also distract teams from real incidents.
Operational Overhead: Many organizations use an assortment of disconnected security tools. This means that security personnel must translate security alerts and policies between environments, leading to costly, complex, and inefficient security operations.
Addressing SOC Challenges
For many Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, finding malicious activity inside the network is like finding a needle in a haystack.
They are often forced to piece together information from multiple monitoring solutions and navigate through tens of thousands of daily alerts. The results: critical attacks are missed until it’s too late.
My coming web application tool can address few of this issues and make the SOC challenges bit easier and also it enables security teams within less time to expose, investigate, and shut down attacks faster, and with 99.9% precision. it can be easily deployed as a unified cloud-based platform, it increases security operations efficiency and ROI.
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