Network Security and Proactive Monitoring
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, it now costs organizations an average of $4.35 million when a successful cyberattack targets their network. This is almost wholly due to the lack of tools and resources required to identify and remediate these devastating attacks when they occur. Unfortunately, traditional security methods aren’t keeping up with these highly sophisticated attacks.
Organizations need a better way to identify and stop the threats that have evaded their perimeter security and are hiding within the network.
The Weak Points in Your System
There are three main points of vulnerability that an organization must address to stay protected from today’s attacks: Visibility, false positives and expertise.
- Visibility: It’s estimated that due to today’s hybrid environments, organizations only have visibility into 30% of their enterprise network. This leaves 70% of the network vulnerable to attack by cybercriminals.
- False positives: Knowing which alerts require immediate attention and which are false positives can mean the difference between successfully thwarting an attack and wasting the time of an already overtaxed IT team. Alert fatigue is a significant issue.
- Expertise: Most organizations lack specialized network security operations (NetSecOps) experts and are grappling with limited resources. This is an age-old problem: How do you do more with less? Not every company can afford a massive IT team with very specialized positions.
These are three significant challenges that organizations need to carefully consider, but they aren’t insurmountable with the right tools.
Fixing the Cracks Before They Leak
The old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is uniquely true when it comes to cybersecurity. Simply put, it’s better to proactively identify problems and address them than it is to try to patch things up after a security incident occurs.
How can an organization make this happen? It requires proactive monitoring to identify potential weak points in the enterprise network’s perimeter. IT teams need to be able to see the threats that the perimeter security solution is missing. This is one of the benefits that network detection and response solutions offer.
While network professionals are being bombarded by alerts and reports about every network anomaly, a lack of resources makes it difficult to isolate specific problem areas and effectively address real issues. Network detection and response (NDR) can help to reduce false positives so that IT teams can focus their limited resources on the anomalies that matter.
A Solution For All Levels of Expertise
Most NDR solutions are built for those with advanced security expertise. What’s needed is a solution that can deliver context and intelligence about the alert–delivered in a way that even a generalist can understand. This simplifies threat hunting and allows organizations of all sizes to quickly understand the severity of an incident and respond accordingly.
And that solution should make possible:
Alert detection: Network metadata makes every aspect of every action in an enterprise’s network visible, including those performed by servers, users and services. Additionally, IT teams can use metadata to automatically track every device on the network, providing them with the ability to find attackers who may have slipped past perimeter security measures or are buried deep inside the network.
When malicious behavior is detected, an NDR solution delivers meaningful alerts with severity levels that help guide teams to the incidents that require immediate action.
Smarter threat hunting: Strict detection can result in many false positives. An NDR solution should monitor pertinent behavior and correlate it with network components to provide context and aid in prioritizing more pertinent incidents so that the IT team is aware of where to concentrate their efforts.
So that it’s simpler to understand threat behavior and plan for proper remediation, alerts are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework where they are reported depending on severity and the indicated purpose of the identified methods.
Simplified investigation and forensics: In the modern world, breaches are unavoidable. When the inevitable happens, what’s needed is an NDR solution that makes it easy to rapidly assemble the facts and supporting proof. In order to make it simple for an IT team to gather, store and retrieve the forensics data required to satisfy more in-depth investigations into potential breaches, an NDR solution must meticulously gather data directly from the network.
Converged NetOps and SecOps with a single platform: This will facilitate both performance and security, eliminating functional silos. Gartner noted in its Market Guide for Network Performance Monitoring that infrastructure and operations leaders must “increase alignment between network operations and security operations by coordinating NPM procurement decisions with security analytics solutions, including Network Detection and Response tools.”
Fill the Cracks in Your Network
It’s clear that network security and proactive monitoring are essential for quickly identifying potential weak points in an enterprise network’s perimeter and reducing dwell time of malware attempting to breach it. NDR can help fulfill these objectives but it’s important to make sure the chosen NDR solution can pass muster. Using the above criteria to evaluate the solution will help ensure that an organization gets the best option for its unique needs.
Image: router–stephen-phillips–unsplash
