Why proactive threat hunting will be a necessity in 2021

We all witnessed how merciless 2020 was for a wide range of organizations. Even the mightiest, most prestigious companies and enterprises are not exempt from the deadly grasp of sophisticated cyber attacks.

What this means for security professionals is that they should take a proactive, rather than a reactive stance.

But how do you anticipate the unknown? Many security professionals would wonder.

It starts with gaining extra visibility across your entire organization and launching proactive threat hunting procedures.

Why SOCs shouldn’t wait for an alert to start searching for breaches

Today’s complex networks present excellent hiding places for cyber criminals, who may be lurking around the corner, silently retrieving valuable information and causing irreparable damage in the process.

The sad reality is that most organizations are too slow to discover cyber threats. That was the case with Marriott International data breach in 2018, which resulted in a 4-year long data breach before the criminals were discovered, ultimately exposing the data of a record-breaking 339 million guests.

And, on top of that, when you take into consideration the fact that hackers are now using more stealthy means of infiltrating networks, it’s high time that organizations take proactive precautionary measures, and act in a preemptive, rather than a reactive manner.

It’s clear that cyber criminals can penetrate systems without being detected, which is why threat awareness needs to be improved in 2021, with a specific emphasis placed on proactive threat hunting.

Adding extra layers of visibility is key

To anticipate the unknown and stay one step ahead of cyber criminals, SOC teams must be wary of every potential vulnerability in their system. And, with organizations becoming more interconnected due to the implementation of various IoT devices, security professionals must bring their A-game if they want to prevent attacks from taking place.

Plus, with the COVID-19 pandemic prompting remote work as a necessity, more employees are using their insecure personal networks instead of their considerably more protected workplace networks.

Unfortunately, as networks become more and more complex, that means SOC teams have less visibility, allowing hackers to swoop in undetected and infiltrate the systems.

This is why it’s imperative to use visibility-enhancing technologies that instantly add much-needed security visibility across all endpoints to ensure maximum security. Increasing visibility across your network means knowing exactly:

• Who has access to your network

• Who should have access to your network

• Which applications are being used

• What data is being accessed

All of this means that cyber criminals are definitely going to be on the lookout for more opportunities to exploit, and SOC teams have to make every second of their threat-hunting count.

Top cyber threat predictions for 2021

Every security professional is aware that the current pace at which cyber threats are evolving, every organization needs to buckle up and considerably invest in reinforcing their cybersecurity posture.

Now, our predictions are based on educated guesses, but we’ve seen how the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered null all the top predictions security professionals had for 2020. So, we advise you to take these meticulously analyzed predictions with a grain of salt:

• More false positives

• More targeted ransomware attacks

• Financial and healthcare institutions continue to be prime targets

• More sophisticated cyber attacks

• Data breach among the most frequent attacks

• Increased targeting of mobile devices

• Cybersecurity awareness will be elevated among all employees

• Malicious actors will continue to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has largely contributed to the imminent increase of cyber attacks. Naturally, cyber criminals were expected to take advantage of the increased number of remote workers who rely on their own personal networks, which are far less secure than their workplace networks. This is why only those organizations with the ability to adapt to the aggravated changes prompted by unforeseen events are deemed capable of properly responding to such harsh conditions.

The cybersecurity landscape is evolving by the day, and keeping up with the most sophisticated cyber threats means using the most sophisticated technologies to battle those threats.

How SOAR helps elevate your threat hunting game

SOAR is a term coined by Gartner and stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. In practice, SOAR is a highly advanced security solution that makes an instant impact on your SOC’s capabilities to perform SecOps in a faster and more efficient manner.

The biggest benefits of SOAR revolve around the fact that this technology relies on progressive automation and orchestration, which means that SOAR uses machine learning to optimize your conventional workflow processes.

What SOAR can do for the efficiency of one SOC is truly astounding, as many relevant aspects of how the SOC operates are being enhanced by SOAR. For instance, Cloud SOAR’s track record shows an indispensable impact on a SOC’s performance:

• Improved reaction time by 80% with over 150+ incidents automatically processed per day

• 500+ alerts triaged per day in 55 seconds before being turned into full incidents

• Reduced false positives

• 10x SecOps productivity

• Increases the number of resolved incidents by 300%

• Enhances incident response time by 80%

What makes SOAR different from any other security technology is that SOAR directly affects your workflow processes by utilizing progressive automation. What this means is that SOAR learns from the experience it has with certain types of alerts, distinguishes false alerts, and deploys a recommended set of actions when a similar alert is being detected in the system.

Furthermore, by offering a unified dashboard, SOAR allows SOC teams to have far greater visibility across all endpoints, allowing analysts and threat hunters to elevate their threat hunting capabilities and catch cyber threats in the act.

And, with the thousands of alerts being directed toward SOCs nowadays, every SOC team is in dire need of a solution that would almost double their incident response time and triple their number of resolved incidents.

Only with SOAR, your analysts can have the time and freedom to use the potential of their threat hunting skills and successfully respond to every alert that arrives in real-time.

Find out more about how SOAR can improve your threat hunting and overall SOC productivity by reading this thorough guide.