Touchdown! How Football Strategies Can Be Applied to Cyber Fusion (Part Two)

This is the second article in a two part series-breaking at halftime-highlighting how the same strategies that net football teams championship rings can be used to strengthen your security posture. Read the first article here .

This week we will consider an example wherein we are pitched against threat actors abusing emerging techniques that siloed teams alone often can’t tackle. In order to be successful, teams need to tap into collective defense, and that means strategically using threat intelligence to proactively thwart a run on your end zone.

The Larger Picture of Threat Intelligence

In football, each team player has individual skills, experiences, knowledge, and different responsibilities. However, they must come together and share their strategies with other teammates to defend against their opponents. If they do not share their techniques and tactics with each other, then they might lose the game. Similarly, every security team handles different processes and disparate tools, and threat intelligence sharing between them is essential. According to Forrester, 64% of security leaders report that sharing cyber threat intelligence between their SOC, incident response, and threat intelligence teams is limited.

With massive volumes of data, security teams can leverage threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) to collect, organize, and manage threat data. By employing an advanced, modern-day TIP, you can share and receive intelligence from your peers, threat intelligence providers, ISACs/ISAOs members, partner organizations, regulators, and subsidiary companies. TIPs facilitate threat intelligence management and related entities such as incidents, campaigns, adversaries, and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). TIPs collect information from disparate sources and enrich it to establish the gravity of the threat.

TIPs are an important component of a vCFC that enables security teams to efficiently manage the constant sharing of high-priority, relevant threat intelligence, strengthening an organization’s overall cyber readiness. It integrates threat intelligence across all security elements of an organization to address the targeted threats. Furthermore, it allows security teams to derive insights from malicious activities and orchestrate security operations across the network. With the help of cyber fusion, security teams can build threat intelligence programs that power improved security integration, enabling them to detect and respond to threats quickly.

In today’s metamorphosing threat landscape, security teams are in dire need of threat intelligence-driven incident response. To make it a reality, organizations are building vCFCs that automatically ingest threat intelligence from internal and external sources to quickly detect, prioritize, and respond to threats. A vCFC leverages advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the threat data gathered from various sources. It enables security teams to take quick actions or notify them in real-time about any crisis.

You Need to SOAR High

The growing popularity of football has boosted the need for technology-driven camera systems. Thanks to innovative technologies, the ball’s trajectory can be traced during the game and effective game play can be captured, thereby aiding decision-making within the game. A referee’s job could have been difficult if he had to distinguish between a goal or a near-miss by running after the players.

With technology reaching every nook and cranny, delaying automation in cybersecurity is not an option. The Forrester report highlights that 83% of security leaders are interested in SOAR, with 28% planning to implement it in the next 12 months.

You must understand that SOAR is an integral element of cyber fusion. The technology leverages workflow orchestration and automation, extensive security analytics, and threat management capabilities to automate and speed up human efforts. Designed with SOAR capabilities, a vCFC aids in augmenting the effectiveness and operational efficiency of security teams.

By bringing together people, processes, and technologies under one roof, SOAR enables security teams to automate and orchestrate security workflows. Organizations can set up vCFCs to deliver true SOAR integration capabilities, enabling security teams to determine the loopholes, describe the solutions, and automate threat response. Irrespective of the locations of teams, a vCFC amalgamates all the security functions meant for threat detection, response, and management in an integrated and collaborative manner. Your security teams can leverage SOAR to handle incident case management and triage efforts, proactively preventing malicious attacks.

Moreover, SOAR tools are capable of connecting the dots between incidents, malware, assets, vulnerabilities, and threat actors, allowing teams to gain contextual intelligence on complex threat campaigns, uncover attackers’ trajectories, and discover latent threat patterns. An advanced SOAR platform with cyber fusion capabilities supports complex orchestration across different deployment environments, including on-premise and cloud, without exposing your firewall to external traffic. In brief, the advanced orchestration and automation capabilities of a vCFC empower organizations to improve their security processes by making their existing resources work together.

Running for the End Zone

As the attack surface proliferates, a collaborative approach driven by threat intelligence and SOAR is required to address the evolving threat landscape. With cyber fusion becoming a reality, large enterprises, security vendors, and managed security service providers (MSSPs) have started espousing the technology for a wide range of use cases. Moving beyond the conventional SOC model, organizations are building vCFCs powered by collective defense, SOAR, and threat intelligence capabilities. This makes cybersecurity teams more proactive in addressing threats by employing robust defense strategies. In a nutshell, vCFCs enable organizations to tackle threats in real-time, respond quickly to threats, optimize threat intelligence workflow, and avert potential breaches.

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