What Is A SOC?

Security operations staffing and organizational structure

The function of a security operations center (SOC), is to monitor, detect, investigate, and respond to cyber threats 24/7, 365 days a year. Security operations teams monitor and protect many assets, such as intellectual property, personnel data, business systems, and brand integrity.

1. Take Stock of Available Resources

The SOC is responsible for two types of assets—the various devices, processes and applications it’s charged with safeguarding, and the defensive tools at its  disposal to help ensure this protection.

• What The SOC Protects
  The SOC can’t safeguard devices and data it can’t see. Without visibility and control from device to the cloud, there are likely to be blind spots in the network security posture that can be found and exploited. So the SOC’s goal is to gain a complete view of the business’ threat landscape, including not only the various types of endpoints, servers and software on premises, but also third-party services and traffic flowing between these assets.
• How The SOC Protects
  The SOC should also have a complete understanding of all cybersecurity tools on hand and all workflows in use within the SOC. This increases agility and allows the SOC to run at peak efficiency without missing critical access points on the network.

2. Preparation and Preventative Maintenance

Preventing problems from occurring in the first place is the most efficient method of securing a network. To help keep attackers at bay, the SOC implements preventative measures, which can be divided into two main categories.

• Preparation
  Team members stay informed on the newest security innovations, the latest trends in cybercrime and the development of new threats on the horizon. This research can help inform the creation a security roadmap that will provide direction for the company’s cybersecurity efforts going forward, and a disaster recovery plan that will serve as ready guidance in a worst-case scenario. This alleviates to pressure on an organization’s internal team to stay abreast of the latest trends in cybersecurity, knowing the SOC is already ahead of emerging threats.
• Preventative Maintenance
  This step includes all actions taken to make successful attacks more difficult, including regularly maintaining and updating existing systems; updating firewall policies; patching vulnerabilities; and whitelisting, blacklisting and securing applications.  Companies who have a SOC can leave day-to-day updating and security to the experts and focus on building the company’s long-term technology vision.

3. Continuous Proactive Monitoring

Tools used by the SOC scan the network 24/7 to flag any abnormalities or suspicious activities. Monitoring the network around the clock allows the SOC to be notified immediately of emerging threats, giving it the best chance to prevent or mitigate harm. Monitoring tools can include a SIEM or an EDR, better even an XDR, with the most advanced options using behavioral analysis to “teach” systems the difference between regular day-to-day operations and actual threat behavior, minimizing the amount of triage and analysis that must be done by humans.

4. Alert Ranking and Management

When monitoring tools issue alerts, it is the responsibility of the SOC to look closely at each one, discard any false positives, and determine how aggressive any actual threats are and what could be targeted. This allows the SOC to triage emerging threats appropriately, handling the most urgent issues first.

5. Threat Response

These are the actions most people think of when they think of the SOC. As soon as an incident is confirmed, the SOC acts as first responder, performing actions like shutting down or isolating endpoints, terminating harmful processes (or preventing them from executing), deleting files, and more. The goal is to respond to the extent necessary while having as small an impact on business continuity as possible.

6. Recovery and Remediation

In the aftermath of an incident, the SOC will work to restore systems and recover any lost or compromised data. This may include wiping and restarting endpoints, reconfiguring systems or deploying viable backups in order to circumvent ransomware. When successful, this step will return the network to the state it was in prior to the incident.

7. Log Management

The SOC is responsible for collecting, maintaining, and regularly reviewing the log of all network activity and communications for the entire organization. This data helps define a baseline for “normal” network activity, can reveal the existence of threats, and can be used for remediation and forensics in after an incident. Many SOCs use a SIEM to aggregate and correlate the data feeds from applications, firewalls, operating systems and endpoints, all of which produce their own internal logs.

8. Root Cause Investigation

In the aftermath of an incident, the SOC is responsible for figuring out exactly what happened when, how and why. During this post-event investigation, the SOC uses log data and other information to trace the problem to its source, which will help it prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.

9. Security Refinement and Improvement

Cybercriminals are constantly refining their tools and tactics—and in order to stay ahead of them, the SOC needs to implement improvements on a continuous basis. During this step, the SOC uses the organization’s cyber strategy to effectively update and enhance existing network security.

10. Compliance Management

Many of the SOC’s processes are guided by established best practices, but depending on the type of business, some are governed by compliance requirements. The SOC is responsible for regularly auditing its systems to ensure compliance with such regulations, which may be issued by their organization, by their industry, or by governing bodies. Examples of these regulations include GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. Acting in accordance with these regulations not only helps safeguard the sensitive data that the company has been entrusted with—it can also shield the organization from reputational damage and legal challenges resulting from a breach.

Optimizing a security operations model

While dealing with incidents takes up much of the SOC’s resources, the chief information security officer (CISO) is responsible for the larger picture of risk and compliance. An optimized security operations model requires the adoption of a security framework that makes it easy to integrate security solutions and threat intelligence into day-to-day processes. SOC tools like centralized and actionable dashboards help integrate threat data into security monitoring dashboards and reports to keep operations and management apprised of evolving events and activities. By linking threat management with other systems for managing risk and compliance, SOC teams can better manage overall risk posture. Such configurations support continuous visibility across systems and domains and can use actionable intelligence to drive better accuracy and consistency into security operations.

Operationalizing threat management should start with a thoughtful assessment. In addition to defenses, an organization should evaluate processes and policies. Where is the organization strong? What are the gaps? What is the risk posture? What data is collected, and how much of that data is used? While every organization is different, certain core capabilities and security operations best practices represent due care today. A reasonable threat management process starts with a plan, and includes discovery (including baseline calculation to promote anomaly detection, normalization, and correlation), triage (based on risk and asset value), analysis (including contextualization), and scoping (including iterative investigation).

Effective visibility and threat management will draw on many data sources, but it can be hard to sort out the useful and timely information. The most valuable data has proven to be event data produced by countermeasures and IT assets, indicators of compromise (IoCs) produced internally (via malware analysis) and externally (via threat intelligence feeds), and system data available from sensors (e.g., host, network, database, etc.).

Data sources like these add context and make the information valuable and actionable for more precise, accurate, and speedy assessment throughout the iterative and interactive threat management effort. Access to, and effective use of, the right data to support plans and procedures is a measure of organizational maturity. A “mature” scenario would include a workflow that hands off the right information or permits direct action within operational consoles and across products. This flow integrates IT operations and security teams and tools into incident response when there is a critical event.

All these assessments will help prioritize where an increase in investment or reduction of friction is needed to make threat management implementation match goals. Consultants and penetration tests can help benchmark strategy and organizational maturity and health check security response against attacks to obtain a current measure of an organization’s ability to detect and contain malicious events. By comparing against peer enterprises, this vetted review can help justify and explain the need to redirect or invest in cybersecurity operations resources.