Security Operations Center (SOC) : The command center of your security

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The threats of data breaches are becoming more common. They are also more difficult to detect and mitigate. The most dangerous issue is the time taken to detect and contain it. Some APTs intrude and  prevail in your system undetected for a long time. This requires your business to have an efficient  detection, mitigation and prevention process against data breaches. 

the best solution for detecting and preventing threats to information security. The aim of SOC is  to protect the organization from security breaches by monitoring, detecting, analyzing, and reacting to information security threats. The SOC team comprises of security analysts, security engineers. and a manager. They work with IT and operational teams for threat detection, and decrease the likelihood of security breaches. They monitor servers, databases, networks, endpoints, applications, to identify security threats, investigate, and respond to security incidents as they occur.

The SOC uses a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. The SIEM collects logs and events from various security tools and information systems, analyzes, and generates actionable security alerts for SOC team to respond. The SOC team is responsible for organisation security,  investigates suspicious and malicious activity within the networks and systems, as well as maintain security tools with up-to-date patches.

The SOC collects log data, corelate them,  analyse to and detect,   prioritize security events, remediate and recover from incidents. They also conduct investigations to find root cause of of incidents. SOC team performs forensic analysis to ensure full containment, evidence collection, and reporting on the lessons learned from the incident.T

The focus areas of SOC includes :

• Monitoring and Detection of threats
• Security Risk Management 
• Implement security controls
• Conduct  digital forensics
• Enforcing compliance to standards
• Threat intelligence and threat hunting 
• Penetration testing and vulnerability testing
• Network and System Administration 

SOCs can be setup as a inhouse facility with full-time staff, operating 24×7 basis, or distributed service with some full-time and some part-time staff operating 8×5 in each region, or multifunctional Network Operations Center (NOC) and a SOC with a dedicated team, or Virtual SOC No dedicated facility, or part-time team members usually reactive to a high-profile alert or security incident.

Other option include Command SOC coordinates multiple SOCs in a global enterprise providing threat intelligence, situational awareness, and guidance, Managed SOC which outsource Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) provide SOC services that co-managed with in-house security staff.

Security operations center roles and responsibilities:

Security analyst is the first to responder to incidents. They detect threats, investigate and respond. Security analysts works with  IT staff and business managers for increasing security awareness of employees and  documentation of procedures.

Security engineers designs the security architecture, implement and  maintains monitoring and analysis tools, as well as detect and prevent security incidents submitted by analysts. They also document procedures, requirements, and protocols.

SOC manager manages the security operations team and reports to the CISO. The SOC manager oversees the activity of the SOC team, including hiring, training, and assessing staff. In addition SOC manager is  responsible for creating processes, assessing incident reports, and developing and implementing crisis communication plans. SOC manager writes compliance reports, assist in auditing, measuring SOC performance, and reporting on SOC operations to top management.

CISO  defines the security operations of the organization,  communication with top management, responsible for overall risk management, establishing security policies, strategies,  procedures, and maintaining the compliance . 

Main tasks of SOC includes incident response that operates around the clock to detect and respond to incidents. They also engage in threat intelligence and rapid analysis of threats to quickly identify and make appropriate responses.

The emerging ares of SOC includes implementing next-generation SIEMs, which include capabilities such as behavioral analytics, machine learning, and SOC automation. They can  significantly reduce false alerts  with entity behavior analytics (UEBA) that goes beyond correlation rules, helps reduce false positives, and help discover hidden threats. SOCs can improve their MTTR by integrating Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), which enables threat and vulnerability management, incident response, and security operations automation to accelerate and streamline time-intensive processes . They come with pre-built workflows for common use cases to help automate across security and IT processes. 

Niranjan Meegammana