Building Cyber Fusion Center the Right Way

In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, conventional approaches to defending an organization’s assets and networks against advanced threats have a low success ratio. The traditional approach to security operations visualizes the security apparatus of the organization being spread across multiple teams using a complex set of security products and solutions - which leads to the creation of information silos as security teams slowly become insulated against each other. Besides this, the complex myriad of security tools deployed within the organization generates voluminous threat information in different formats. Analyzing, correlating and prioritizing this information poses a humongous challenge for security analysts to effectively triage and respond to critical incidents. To address the pitfalls and limitations of the traditional approach, organizations are now moving towards a more unified approach to security, the keystone of which is the modern Cyber Fusion Center (CFC).

Cyber Fusion Center unifies several security functions such as Threat Intelligence, Vulnerability Assessment, Incident Response, Security Operations, and others into a single connected unit with the capability to coalesce all comprising units for managing threats in an integrated and comprehensive manner. Adopting this next-generation approach to respond to threats has proven to be a game-changer for many organizations. However, implementing this strategy may not always be straightforward.

Cyber Fusion: The cutting-edge in Threat Response

The concept of a CFC originates, like several other cybersecurity strategies, in the learnings that military intelligence agencies have gained from monitoring threats and carrying out complex missions over the decades. This has inspired a novel approach to cybersecurity for organizations around the world.

With the introduction of CFC, the traditional Security Operations Center (SOC), Security Intelligence Center and Threat Response Teams are replaced by one functional unit. CFCs enable enhanced collaboration and synergy across teams focused on various security functions, thereby resulting in increased operational efficiency, accurate intelligence, along with quick and effective threat response.

As organizations strive to upgrade their antiquated capabilities against security threats, several challenges lie in the way. Whether it is the integration of separate teams or changes in procedures, tools, or technologies, such steps can take a lot of time and effort to implement in large organizations.

What matters the most?

Let us take a look at the key areas to address for any organization when setting up a Cyber Fusion Center.

• Common Goals - A typical Security team consists of different units focusing on Threat Intel, Incident Response, Vulnerability Management, and more. These teams operate distinct sets of tools and have access to different sources of information. Such an arrangement results in a lack-luster response to advanced threats because of distinct goals and priorities for each unit. On the other hand, a CFC facilitates collaboration and allows the decision-makers from each unit to come together to respond to a threat. This means the entire security apparatus functions as one unified team with common goals and the same understanding of threats.

• Connecting-the-Dots - Besides streamlining security operations, organizations also need to make the most out of the internal and external information sources available to them. CFCs allow organizations to connect the dots by collating and correlating threat information from diverse sources to gain insights into adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). It allows security teams to proactively analyze threats, establish contextual links, and understand adversary behavior by leveraging the relevant intelligence on a wide variety of threats.

• Future-proofing - The risks posed by cyber threats and malicious adversaries are constantly evolving as threat actors find new attack vectors and employ new techniques to breach organizations. To ensure a lasting defense against cyber threats, a security team needs to eliminate manual and time-consuming processes so as to prioritize the most critical threats. CFCs allow organizations to harness the power of Threat Intelligence, Threat Response, Advanced Orchestration, and Automation to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Moreover, they also help realize collaboration, resiliency and threat visibility by providing a comprehensive picture of the threat environment including malware, vulnerabilities, Threat Intel, and threat actors.

• Making Security Tools Talk to Each Other - The threat response process often involves a variety of security solutions, using which, the security teams take the necessary actions to block and mitigate the threat. Such a process can get complex and time-consuming as modern security teams employ a variety of tools. Moreover, due to a complex security stack, valuable threat information often remains locked within certain tools as they do not communicate with each other. CFCs address this complexity by leveraging orchestration capabilities to fuse all threat data from existing security tools. This can be a very cumbersome task if done manually by an analyst due to the sheer volume and variety of information. In this way, a CFC establishes a single source of truth for information on various cyber threats. Additionally, orchestration also provides the ability to communicate information and execute actions within and across different teams. Besides, CFCs not only automate the fusion of threat information but also the threat response actions. Security teams can define customized playbooks to provide a quick and effective response to various threats without the need for manual intervention. Thus, a CFC unlocks the maximum potential of all the existing tools and the information available to a security team for optimal threat response.

As cyber threats continue posing a heightened risk, organizations can stay a step ahead of the adversaries with a streamlined and holistic approach to cybersecurity. By building cyber fusion capabilities with a focus on key areas of change, organizations can ride this storm and boost their security posture to effectively manage their cyber risk. Cyware Fusion & Threat Response (CFTR) is one such platform that enables organizations to establish a CFC without drastically changing their existing infrastructure. Organizations can gain an edge over adversaries with CFTR’s advanced threat actor management, vulnerability prioritization, asset dependency, and automation capabilities. Whether it is analyzing sophisticated exploits, monitoring vulnerabilities, or responding to threats, CFTR rightly serves as the linchpin for organizations aiming to establish a next-gen Cyber Fusion Center.