Every Contact leaves a Trace

Anyone who is big fan of Crime Serials would know that no crime is fool proof and always leaves a trace to be detected over time and put the culprit behind bars. Luckily in cyber security space, every activity leaves a trace immediately and if monitored continuously using best of the tools, crime can be prevented to a great extent, minimize its impact and possibility to take faster corrective action just in case the hacker gets through the defenses.

All the IT assets when contacted will leave a trace in the form of log and the log sources for any Network Security Infrastructure (Firewall, Web Proxy, IDS/IPS Solution, AV Solutions etc.), Network Infrastructure equipment’s like Router / Switch / Load Balancer etc., User assets like Desktop / Laptop / Servers / Virtual Machines, Cloud Infrastructure, Application logs and Active Directory information to name a few. All these log sources need to get collected, analyzed and enriched with threat intelligence data to check for potential cyber-attack.

Any good SIEM tool would help you achieve this through correlation rule and presented through a dashboard for your security analyst to detect and make sense of the multiple data sources and its correlation to make faster decisions. Best SIEM tools should address Threat detection, help in Regulatory compliance audit, should detect Zero-day threat and help in capacity building.   

Having a good tool is the first right step, there is a need for continuous compliance monitoring and conducting regular Vulnerability and Penetration testing for your environments to detect possible loop-holes systems and applications have currently which could potentially be exploited. Effective Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM) is crucial for your organization to constantly monitor the threats for early detection and mitigate these risks by preventing your systems from being exposed or compromised.  

With sophisticated cyber-attacks happening across the globe with a range of threat vectors, the impact could be bigger than before. Threat detection using latest threat intelligence must be top priority for corporates. Importance of skilled resources who have the ability to find the correlation of the attack by analyzing the potential malicious behavior over the network and in-memory executions will help organizations stay a step ahead of the attacker. Another good practice is to perform threat hunting on your environment periodically. This will help you understand if any existing malicious activity is happening within your environment.

There is no need to FEAR – Forget Everything and Run, but with planned and clear objectives around cyber security, we can FEAR – Face Everything and Rise.

If you have any queries to answer or want to know more on how this can be addressed or implemented, you can reach out to [email protected]