SBN

How to Use Threat Stack to Enable Proactive Security

We recently discussed some pretty sobering statistics in the world of cybersecurity, ranging from astronomical misconfiguration rates to the depressing lack of speed with which breaches are detected. Not only are attacks more sophisticated than ever before, but infrastructure is too, with sensitive data spread across various servers, service providers, containers, and even SaaS platforms. No matter how worrisome these statistics, however, each and every one can be mitigated, for the most part, when an organization takes a proactive approach to security.

So what does a proactive security approach look like, exactly? It involves SecOps best practices, where Security is integrated with Development and Operations from the outset and where communication between teams takes priority. It also means putting in place repeatable processes and replacing costly, time-consuming, ad hoc procedures with automation wherever possible.

Transforming your culture to support a proactive security culture can be a daunting prospect to be sure. While 85% of respondents to our recent survey said that employing SecOps best practices is an important goal for their organizations, only 35% reported that SecOps is currently an established practice. Held back by overworked and under-resourced security professionals thanks to an industry-wide skills gap, many organizations simply don’t know where to begin when it comes to establishing a more proactive security posture.

Here’s the good news. The Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform® enables your Security and Operations teams to build security into their workflows from the start to make your organization’s approach to security more proactive. Here’s how.

Configuration Auditing

Threat Stack’s Cloud Configuration Auditing is the first step in building a secure environment, eliminating the risk of a misconfigured AWS service by comparing your configuration settings against AWS Security Best Practices and CIS benchmarks for CloudTrail EC2, IAM, RDS, and S3. Within seconds, you’ll receive a score to easily view what your team has configured correctly and what needs to be corrected or resolved. And since security is never a one and done thing, you can use Configuration Auditing to conduct periodic audits in order to make ongoing refinements to your settings.

Threat Stack then runs regular, automated scans, establishing your baseline and monitoring how your environment changes to understand where new risks may exist. Alerts are prioritized from across multiple AWS accounts in one central location and are integrated with the alerting tools you already use. This allows you to easily verify the most important settings and detect CloudTrail alerts immediately by integrating with operations tools such as Slack, PagerDuty, and VictorOps or by using the Threat Stack API to streamline your workflow.

These automated configuration checks performed across all services replace hit and miss ad hoc procedures, allowing you to establish a more proactive security posture. With the data in hand from your configuration audit, you can then move toward true SecOps maturity in terms of the infrastructure control plane, securing your APIs and cloud console as you would an on-premises data center.

Automated Alerting

If you’re handling alerts manually, you’re spending countless hours sifting through the noise in order to determine which alerts signify actual problems. Not only is this manual alert handling time-consuming, inefficient, and costly; there’s the very real threat of alert fatigue, in which important alerts get lost in an ongoing barrage of daily alerts.

In order to understand quickly whether an alert indicates a real problem, you need valuable context that describes the who, what, and why of an attack. Presented on a single dashboard, Threat Stack’s Cloud Security Platform provides you with:

  • Relevant system activity that indicates who did what
  • A TTY Timeline that allows you to go back in time to see exactly what happened
  • An activity trail that shows contributing events

Threat Stack also provides you with the historical information you need, going a step beyond baselining to show whether an alert matches up with the way similar alerts have been triggered in the past. This enables you to identify possible anomalous behavior while eliminating the need to manually dig through multiple systems, endpoint tools, and servers as part of a lengthy forensic investigation.

With the right history and context behind your alerts, you can stop simply reacting and start taking a proactive approach. You’ll find yourself with a greatly reduced Mean Time to Know that enables you to begin remediating security breaches within minutes.

Getting Started

Ready to get proactive but unsure where to begin? We created the Threat Stack Cloud SecOps Program℠ to help organizations benchmark where they currently stand and then set actionable goals to leverage SecOps at scale.

Using the program’s Threat Stack Maturity Framework℠, you’ll receive a score of one to five, from completely ad hoc and manual to fully proactive and automated. With a realistic view of your current security maturity level, we then help you define your roadmap and set attainable goals to move toward a more proactive security stance to reduce risk, increase efficiency, and operate securely at speed.

To begin assessing your own security maturity, take our Cloud SecOps Maturity Assessment now, and be sure to request a demo of our Cloud Security Platform to learn more about how it can help you develop a stronger, more proactive approach to managing security in your organization.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog – Threat Stack authored by Christian Lappin. Read the original post at: https://www.threatstack.com/blog/how-to-use-threat-stack-to-enable-proactive-security