Cyber Fusion Center: Cyware Security Guide
About three decades ago, military intelligence agencies introduced the concept of cyber fusion. They leveraged the concept to collaborate with various intelligence communities and obtain an in-depth understanding of the threat landscape. Thereafter, the idea gained more prominence post-9/11 attack, when the 9/11 Commission recommended establishing fusion centers to promote collaboration between law enforcement agencies via threat intelligence sharing. Today, cyber fusion is gaining traction in the cybersecurity industry and modern-day organizations are espousing the advanced technology of a cyber fusion center for the elimination of silos, enhanced threat visibility, and increased cyber resilience and collaboration between teams.
What is Cyber Fusion?
Cyber fusion is a next-generation approach to cybersecurity that unifies all security functions such as threat intelligence, security automation, threat response, security orchestration, incident response, and others into a single connected unit with the capability to coalesce all comprising units for detecting, managing, and responding to a potential threat in an integrated and collaborative manner.
Cyber fusion offers a more proactive and unified approach to dealing with potential threats by bridging the gap between multiple teams through cyber threat intelligence synthesis and inter-team collaboration. It also provides for the fusion of contextualized strategic, tactical, and operational threat intelligence for rapid threat prediction, detection, analysis, and incident response.
What is a Cyber Fusion Center? Why are Cyber Fusion Centers Important?
For quick threat response, modern-day organizations need real-time threat intelligence sharing and improved collaboration with disparate security teams. This becomes a reality with a cyber fusion-driven approach that enables automated ingestion of threat data from various sources and brings different security teams together to quickly detect, prioritize, and respond to incidents and threats. Subsequently, security teams can make informed decisions and take necessary actions.
A cyber fusion center combines threat intelligence with various security functions through automation. It supports the constant flow of threat intelligence among different teams and fortifies several security processes, fostering visibility and collaboration across security teams.
By bringing together technologies, teams, and processes under one roof, cyber fusion enables security teams to orchestrate and automate security workflows. Organizations catering to the cybersecurity domain are building virtual cyber fusion centers (vCFCs) that deliver advanced security orchestration and automation (SOAR) integration capabilities, allowing security teams to automate threat response workflows across cloud and on-premise environments. Irrespective of the geographical location of the teams, a vCFC amalgamates all the security functions in an integrated and collaborative manner. In a nutshell, cyber fusion-driven collaboration empowers teams to leverage SOAR, allowing them to handle incident management and proactively defend against threats.
Security automation powered by cyber fusion expedites monotonous security operations involved in incident response. The impact of cyber fusion on incident response can be seen while detecting and responding to threats in real time. From gathering malware intelligence to executing processes and addressing threats, cyber fusion helps security teams effectively handle alerts without manual intervention. By automating incident response, cyber fusion aids security teams in focusing their time on more vital and productive tasks.
Furthermore, several facets make cyber fusion imperative in today’s complex threat landscape. One of them is its ability to leverage robust technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to act on the threat information collected from internal and external sources. While internal sources include UEBA, SIEMs, Antivirus, EDR tools, and IDS/IPS, external sources consist of ISACs and ISAOs, CERTs, commercial threat intelligence feed providers, RSS feeds, research reports, threat intel reports, OSINT, and regulatory advisories.
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What are the Key Elements of Cyber Fusion Centers
Threat Intelligence
The cyber fusion approach focuses on integrating threat intelligence across all security aspects of an organization to tackle the targeted threats. This strategy allows security teams to contextualize insights into malicious activities and meaningfully orchestrate cybersecurity operations across the network. Cyber fusion helps in building threat intelligence programs that offer improved security integration enabling security teams to detect and respond to threats in a faster and smarter way.
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Threat Detection
Detecting cyber threats in a timely manner is the primary factor in building a robust defense. Threat response teams can use the intelligence collected in cyber fusion platforms to automatically validate the malicious behavior of the threats. The orchestration and automation capabilities of a cyber fusion solution allow security teams to block command and control (C2) communication and isolate the infected device. Cyber fusion enables an effective containment of the threat to prevent the network-wide spread and allows defenders to actively monitor all their assets by orchestrating existing security tools such as SIEM, IDS/IPS, TIPs, EDR, and Firewalls.
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Threat Analysis
With volumes of threat data generated every day, security teams find it difficult to manage. In this challenging scenario, cyber fusion capabilities can help reduce the workload on security teams and enhance the threat analysis process. Through its orchestration and automation features, cyber fusion-based platforms can integrate with a variety of existing security solutions such as SIEM, Firewall, IPS, IDS, and more. Such platforms are capable of combining and analyzing the threat intelligence received from external TI providers, internal sources from a security operations center (SOC), and other intelligence gathered from historical incidents and deducing actionable insights.
Threat Hunting
Threat hunting refers to an exercise that security teams perform to scrutinize malicious activities within the organizational vicinity that do not trigger an alert. In this process, security teams need to know which threats to look for and how to search for them. As the techniques and tactics used by threat actors are continuously evolving, security teams need to employ a cyber fusion-based approach to fully realize the threat-hunting process. A cyber fusion platform collects and connects threat data from a wide range of internal and external sources. With combined threat intelligence on vulnerabilities, malware, threat actors, and previous incidents, cyber fusion platforms can serve as a single central repository for every type of threat intelligence. Such platforms allow threat hunters to connect the dots between different threat elements and effectively target threats hiding in their network through actionable and contextual intelligence thereby improving the efficiency of overall threat-hunting operations.
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Threat Response
Responding to threats as quickly as possible is one of the most significant concerns of security teams. An effective threat response requires collaboration between incident response teams, threat intelligence teams, DevOps personnel, senior executives, and others. Due to the complexity involved in this process, organizations need to overcome the challenges that increase their time to respond. In such situations, cyber fusion allows security teams to connect the dots using contextual intelligence gained from its incident correlation capability, and unlike traditional incident response platforms, cyber fusion solutions focus on all kinds of threats including malware, vulnerabilities, threat actors, and previous incidents. In addition, they provide a comprehensive incident management workflow to reduce noise, false alarms, and response time with relevant threat intelligence ingestion. Cyber fusion provides a holistic view of the threat environment and covers every dimension of threat response.
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What are the Benefits of Cyber Fusion Centers?
Often there is a gap between security operations, threat intelligence, and threat response teams due to a shortage of meaningful collaboration, the use of different security solutions, and substantially varying visions of teams. This leads to siloed teams and leads to the trapping of appropriate threat intelligence in security controls.
To eliminate these silos in response operations, organizations need to build cyber fusion centers, allowing security teams to work together through a shared platform, develop mutual learnings, and help each other with critical threat information for a holistic response.
In a cyber fusion center, threat response is coordinated with strategic, tactical, technical, and operational threat intelligence, making security teams aware of the changing scenarios in real-time. In essence, the cyber fusion approach allows the creation of common conscience, the synthesis of goals of various teams to build a common vision, and improved teamwork against threats impacting enterprises. The approach transfigures the unknown into the known and prepares organizations to better understand and examine the entire threat picture. This constant understanding of the threat environment in real-time empowers organizations to move beyond just knowledge and toward advancement by providing greater context and visibility into adversaries’ conduct and tactics.
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What is the Difference between a Cyber Fusion Center and a SOC?
A cyber fusion center is more advanced than traditional SOCs as it incorporates detection, threat hunting, response, security automation and threat intelligence operationalization into one single unit. Essentially, a cyber fusion center is built to develop collaboration between different teams within an organization such as IT operations, SecOps, DevOps, and others to boost overall readiness and response to threats.
With different teams working in liaison, information, and actions can be shared and exchanged between them in a multidirectional manner. Ergo, an organization can experience improved collaboration between its teams and quickly determine and address the loopholes in the existing processes.
Serving as a single source of truth for important stakeholders and decision-makers, cyber fusion enables them to monitor all the critical parameters and have a common goal with respect to security functions. Furthermore, cyber fusion combines and investigates all the threat data collected from different security tools in one place to determine high-confidence actionable threat intelligence.
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