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How to Respond to Threats Faster with Active Sensing Fabric

Welcome to the age of big data, and even bigger threats.

As technology advances with the growth of cloud environments and connectivity across endless devices, we’ve also increased the amount of data our security teams are tasked with monitoring and protecting. What happens as data grows? The number and sophistication of incoming threats skyrocket.

Security teams are responsible for assessing a large number of incoming alerts from security tools such as SIEM, XDR, and others. These tools grant visibility into suspicious activities and attacks and that’s important — but do they give enough visibility? And more importantly, are these tools capable of providing the most effective response possible?

The Culprits: Larger & Broader Datasets

Security analysts’ jobs are getting harder by the day thanks to the need to ingest big data – larger and more diverse datasets – in order to effectively detect and respond to the growing number of threats. That’s no surprise to anyone. What is a surprise, though, is how few security tools actually have visibility into these hard-to-reach telemetry sources and have the response capabilities needed to stop threats at the source, no matter where they occur.

Security analysts need to be able to respond quickly to security incidents, but humans can only handle so much. How can they respond to thousands of alerts if security systems are not designed to deliver instant visibility and actionability? The only way to stay ahead of threats is to utilize tools that detect them the instant they occur.

Innovations like Active Sensing Fabric help you solve this problem by providing real-time threat detection and analysis across your entire environment. It allows you to identify threats and respond faster, stopping breaches earlier in the attack lifecycle so that their impact on the business is minimized.

Security Tools for Faster Responses

Today’s security teams are overwhelmed with the amount of data they need to ingest, analyze, and respond to in a timely manner.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms can help with aggregation and alert triage, but they don’t have the ability to respond or automate the process. These solutions are not built in a way that’s easy for analysts to keep pace with alerts and manage effective response processes or case management out of the SIEM directly.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) tools can detect alerts across multiple sources, but they have an inherently closed ecosystem, leaving customers without visibility to hard-to-reach (yet important) telemetry sources. Yes, these tools extend detection – but they also extend human monitoring requirements. This doesn’t allow for a true extended response, at least to the caliber security leaders need.

Legacy Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions are not user-friendly, which makes them impractical for smaller, less code-reliant security teams. They require complicated visual programming environments that make them difficult for non-developers to use effectively — let alone quickly enough to stop threats before they cause damage.

Low-Code Security Automation utilizes an innovative technology called Active Sensing Fabric to take action the instant threats occur – not after detection, aggregation, and manual alert triage processes. This functionality allows organizations to automate responses based on pre-defined rules or policies set by security experts. These tools have become increasingly popular because they help reduce analyst workload, improve response time and increase efficiency by automating common use cases and repetitive tasks.

What is Active Sensing Fabric?

Active Sensing Fabric allows security automation solutions to expand beyond legacy SOAR platform telemetry sources by ingesting larger and broader data sets and taking immediate action at the source so that technology silos are connected without the need for heavy coding. It gives the ability to identify, track and respond to threats faster than ever before.

How it Works

The purpose of Swimlane Turbine’sActive Sensing Fabric is to make the evolution of security operations possible. To do so, it ingests data at cloud-scale across multiple, distributed big data sets. This is essential for modern infrastructure, which contains various data streams with webhooks, poll requests, pub/sub, file creation, SMS messages, email messages, and IoT.

By using the three main features below, Active Sensing Fabric allows automation platforms to pull data directly from these sources, in addition to SIEM logs as needed, in order to move action closer to the source to reduce dwell time. The Active Sensing Fabric listens across the security ecosystem, taking immediate action directly at the source.

Powerful Pre-processing and Inline Enrichment = Immediate Action

Eliminating noise must be a top priority for security tools. Low-code automation solutions execute on thousands of simultaneous automations in order to eliminate noise in the customer environment, which alleviates analyst burnout from alert fatigue. Business logic and processes inform the application with custom data filtering, pre-processing, deduplication, and inline enrichment in order, which reduces data overload. The result: faster analyst responses.

Dynamic Remote Agents = Secure Distributed Organizations

Remote agents empower both organizations to connect internal applications and systems to security automation platforms in a highly-secure and frictionless manner. This architecture eliminates the need to configure multiple VPNs or complicated networks in order to connect various technologies. For larger organizations, this helps with a seamless connection across multiple business units or segmented environments. For managed security service providers (MSSPs), it becomes easier to manage multiple infrastructures across a diverse customer base.

Flexible Webhooks = Simplify Data Ingestion

The webhooks feature makes it possible to expand actionability. Flexible webhooks enable products, vendors or services to push real-time communication into the overarching security automation platform. New webhook listeners can be created for any technology that supports webhooks and can be plugged directly into low-code security automation playbooks within seconds. They are easily managed with flexible authentication options to cover a wide variety of capabilities found in third-party tools. By using webhooks in playbooks, analysts get real-time visibility into events, which quickly improves MTTD and MTTR security metrics.

Benefits for Security Operations

By adopting an Active Sensing Fabric approach, security teams improve their ability to detect threats and respond to them faster. This can help security operations teams to:

  • Improve security metrics by reducing dwell time and speeding up MTTD and MTTR.

  • Improve your analysts’ experience by reducing alert fatigue and freeing them from manual tasks.

  • Unify complex environments by connecting distributed organizations, siloed business units, or segmented environments.

  • Take action in real-time to expand visibility and actionability so that organizations are more efficient and effective.

Security teams have the challenging job of playing defense, anticipating threats, and implementing systems that stop unwanted actors from accessing the organization. Active Sensing Fabric is a new feature in low-code security automation solutions, like Swimlane Turbine, that allows security teams to respond faster by tracking the threat at its inception.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Swimlane (en-US) authored by Ashlyn Eperjesi. Read the original post at: https://swimlane.com/blog/active-sensing-fabric/