Making Smarter Decisions with Cyber Fusion

Starting from small Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) to modern-day security teams, security operations have expanded to include a wide range of activities. A modern organization can include in-house capabilities for Security administration, security architecture and engineering, Incident Response (IR), Compliance support, Data protection, Vulnerability management, Digital Forensics, Threat Research, Pen-testing, and more.

Along with the growth of security operations, the role of security managers and leaders in an organization has also grown significantly. How to set up a solid security architecture? How to maintain visibility over the threat environment? How to accurately evaluate and communicate cyber risk to the board room? How to effectively respond to a security crisis? How to maximize the efficiency of security resources? These are just some of the questions and decisions that today’s security leaders have to make. Let us take a look at how Cyber Fusion can help tackle some of these issues.

Maintaining Threat Visibility

One of the first orders of business for a cybersecurity leader is to gain a solid understanding of the scope of cyber risk facing their organization. Right from user endpoints and office appliances to applications and servers, every asset operated by an organization can be exploited by attackers to pose a cyber threat. Thus, it becomes crucial for security leaders to be able to maintain comprehensive visibility over their unique threat environment.

Cyber Fusion becomes an essential tool in this regard by providing security leaders a single-source-of-truth for information on various threats by combining threat data from internal and external sources. Additionally, it helps analyze and communicate cyber risks through quantification, visualization, and reporting capabilities.

Without a complete picture of the threat environment, security leaders would need to rely much more on the expertise of analysts at various operational levels to make decisions. This would increase the workload for analysts and decrease the overall performance of security teams.

Prioritizing Security Actions

The SANS 2019 SOC Survey highlights how many modern organizations have dedicated teams for over a dozen different security functions. This can include Security administration, security road map and planning, security architecture and engineering, Incident Response (IR), Compliance support, Data protection, Security monitoring & Detection, Vulnerability management, Digital Forensics, Threat Research, Purple-teaming, Red-teaming, Pen-testing, and more.

Amidst this complexity, security leaders also need to worry about prioritization of certain issues that require swift action over others that may not have any immediate impact. For example, if a zero-day vulnerability exploit in the wild is found affecting a popular software used by an organization, then it would take priority for immediate action to block any potential attacks.

Cyber Fusion helps decision-makers prioritize security actions based on a variety of contextual parameters related to the organization’s unique threat environment. It helps security analysts filter out and focus on the most pressing threats among the thousands of alerts that they may receive every day.

Accelerating Threat Response

Imagine a scenario wherein some endpoints on the organization’s network are found communicating with malicious domains, indicating likely intrusion on those devices. What should the course-of-action be after such a discovery? Should such devices be completely quarantined? Should those devices be wiped and restored to the previous state from backup? How can the security teams avoid disrupting business operations during this process? This is just one of the possible security crises that can occur in any organization. Such threats can crop up on a frequent basis for a sizable organization and security leaders need to have a plan in place to tackle it in the least amount of time possible.

The SANS 2019 Incident Response Survey shows that many organizations still take weeks or even months to contain and remediate an incident after initial detection. Considering the broad threat landscape of malware, vulnerabilities, data breaches, threat actors, etc., this may leave enough time for threats to steal data, intellectual property, or cause a financial loss to the organization. Thus, quick and effective response to threats is a paramount requirement for organizations. Cyber Fusion enables security teams to quickly analyze the attack lifecycle for any threat and take necessary actions through security automation and orchestration between different security controls. Along with improved threat visibility, this ensures a rapid and effective threat response.

Maximizing Collaboration and Communication

Often times, organizations use multiple tools for identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery purposes. Due to such differences in tools and data sources used by security, IR, and operations teams, it creates operational silos between them. Moreover, each team only knows a small part of the bigger picture in such a scenario, thereby making collaborative efforts that much more difficult.

Apart from incident response, many other activities such as security administration, determining the security strategy, building the security architecture, assessing risks, meeting compliance or industry standards, investigating threats, etc., require close cooperation and collaboration between diverse security functions. For decision-makers to effectively lead these activities, they should be able to communicate and operate under a single roof. This can be achieved by leveraging Cyber Fusion which brings members from different functions on to a single platform so as to facilitate robust communication and collaborative action. As per the SANS survey, nearly half of the surveyed organizations face a lack of automation, orchestration, and integrations between tools. The adoption of Cyber Fusion paves a clear way for building integration between different tools using security orchestration and automation so that security processes can be driven in a rapid, automated and reliable manner.

Improving the Cybersecurity Strategy

Besides daily security activities, Cyber Fusion also plays a role in helping improve the cybersecurity strategy for organizations. A security strategy sets a long-term plan in place for improving and maintaining the security posture of an organization. Through accurate threat visibility and in-depth threat analysis, Cyber Fusion provides the central knowledge base to aid the creation of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy.

Cyber Fusion helps organizations level up the capabilities and maturity level of their security operations at a more rapid pace while helping fend away advanced threats. Whether it is threat management, security resource management, or shaping the overall strategy, Cyber Fusion is a highly robust and versatile technology for security leaders to transform and effectively manage security operations.