Bridging the Gaps in Security Use Cases with Cyber Fusion

The concept of use cases originated in the software development industry where it was used to help convey a specific scenario in which a product or service could potentially be implemented. It became a common tool for system engineers and product managers to plan their product development process. Today, it sees wide applicability across a variety of industries.

 

The security industry sees the launches of dozens or hundreds of products catering to different use cases every year. Industry experts often analyze new products on the basis of use cases. This method of evaluating security products is quite helpful in choosing the right solution out of a variety of options in the market. To establish a strong cyber defense, security professionals need to ensure that their security stack addresses all the relevant use cases. In this process, security teams often end up using a large swathe of tools that increase operational complexity and may create loopholes for threat actors. In this blog, we will take a look at how Cyber Fusion, along with security orchestration and automation, helps bridge the gaps in security use cases.

An effective cyber defense is one which can protect against all the top cyber threats facing an organization. Some of the most common cyber threats affecting organizations worldwide include phishing, ransomware, data leaks, hacking, insider threats, etc. To execute such attacks, cybercriminals rely on a wide range of tactics, techniques, and procedures.

To ensure all-round protection, organizations must be able to detect, prevent, and stop threat actors from executing an attack and respond rapidly to any incident when necessary. Most security solutions are built with a focus on a specific set of use cases. Despite using multiple security tools, organizations often lack comprehensive visibility over the entire threat environment. Also, the use of varied tools by different teams within a Security Operations Center (SOC) may lead to the siloization of threat information, leaving room for serious security blind spots. Moreover, the operational delays and inefficiencies caused due to a cluttered security stack can also have an adverse impact on the threat response process. On the other hand, an organization with an established Cyber Fusion Center using the Cyware Fusion and Threat Response (CFTR) platform may avoid many of these issues. Let us analyze how Cyber Fusion addresses the issues faced by a conventional SOC.

The following are some of the top threats and other security use cases where the introduction of a CFC greatly enhances the efficiency and performance of security teams. 

Threat Detection - The detection of cyber threats in a timely manner is the first key to building a strong defense. Certain threats, such as ransomware attacks, require very prompt detection and mitigation to prevent it from impacting valuable data. It is being increasingly used to target public bodies such as county governments, school districts as well as private organizations such as healthcare firms. Ransomware can be injected into a company device or network through a variety of attack vectors such as email attachments, malvertising, drive-by downloads, and more. As soon as it gets downloaded onto an endpoint, the clock starts ticking for the security teams. Now, the threat response team can use the Threat Intel collected in CFTR to automatically verify the malicious nature of the payload. They can correlate it with the existing threat indicators such as file hashes from other similar attacks. Some ransomware variants are also designed with worm-like capabilities to spread laterally through the network using different techniques before it achieves its goals. To prevent this, security teams can leverage orchestration and automation features of Cyware Fusion and Threat Response (CFTR) to execute mitigation measures such as blocking the C2 communication of the ransomware and isolating the infected device. Thus, CFTR enables an effective containment of the threat to prevent network-wide ransomware infection. Additionally, CFTR allows defenders to actively monitor all their assets by orchestrating existing security tools including SIEM, IDS/IPS, TIPs, EDR, Firewalls, Honeypots, and DevOps tools, while also providing Playbook-based automation to level a quick and precise response.

Threat Analysis – In their daily operations, security analysts often face a deluge of alerts, each of which may require extensive analysis to determine the severity of the threat. Moreover, during the analysis, threat information collected from various internal and external sources needs to be correlated, enriched, and contextualized. Analysts need to identify relevant threats based on the attack vectors applicable to their organization’s specific threat environment. Analysts also need to identify patterns in adversary behavior to predict their next move. In addition, security analysts must eliminate false positives and irrelevant indicators. With large amounts of threat data generated every day, it is easy to see how this can become an unscalable position for security teams. In this challenging scenario, the Cyber Fusion capabilities of CFTR can help lower the workload on security analysts and enhance the threat analysis process. Through its orchestration capabilities, CFTR can integrate with a variety of existing security solutions such as SIEM, Firewall, IPS, IDS, and more. CFTR consolidates the Threat Intel received from external TI providers, internal sources from SOC, and other Intel gathered from historical incidents. With this automated threat analysis and correlation of Threat Intel to incidents, CFTR enables analysts to focus on more important things.

Threat Hunting - Threat Hunting is an activity where security analysts proactively look for any malicious activity within their network perimeter that has not triggered an alert yet. In this process, threat hunters need to choose which threats to look for and where to search for them. Since attackers can use a wide variety of techniques and tactics, narrowing down the hunt hypothesis is a challenging task. Here, the Cyber Fusion capabilities of CFTR come into play as it collates and correlates threat data from various internal and external sources. With the combined Threat Intel on malware, vulnerabilities, threat actors, and previous incidents, CFTR serves as the single central repository for Intel on all kinds of threats. CFTR maps threat indicators to adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in the Mitre ATT&CK Heat Map. With this, threat hunters can effectively target the hunt for threats that are lurking around. Moreover, CFTR also helps validate the hunt hypothesis through its bi-directional integrations with existing security solutions to collect, process and analyze threat data. Thus, CFTR boosts the efficiency of threat hunting operations by saving valuable time and effort in locating existing threats.

Threat Response - The biggest test for security teams comes when faced with the challenge of responding to threats as quickly as possible so as to minimize the damage to their organization. An effective threat response requires an interplay between Incident Response (IR) teams, Threat Intel teams, DevOps personnel, senior executives, and others. Due to the inherent complexity involved in this process, organizations need to eliminate any roadblocks that increase their time to respond. In such a challenging scenario, CFTR once again rises to the occasion by allowing security professionals to connect the dots using contextual intelligence gained from its incident correlation capability and unlike traditional IR platforms, CFTR focuses on all kinds of threats including malware, vulnerabilities, threat actors, and previous incidents. In addition, it provides comprehensive incident management workflow to reduce noise, false alarms, and response time (MTTR) with relevant threat intelligence ingestion, streamlined workflow automation, and sophisticated campaign management. Above all, CFTR’s bi-directional integrations with existing tools and automated implementation of defensive measures allow organizations to respond at machine speeds. In this way, CFTR provides a 360-degree view of the threat environment and covers all the dimensions of threat response.

Building an effective cyber defense requires coordination between multiple security functions and the efficient use of existing tools and technologies. CFTR enables this by helping address different use cases through the integration and interplay of various security solutions. With the added power of security orchestration and automation, CFTR ensures that any threat can be dealt with in a timely and effective manner.