Breaking Down Silos with Cyber Fusion

Cyber Fusion

Posted on: September 03, 2021

What is the most fundamental thing that an organization must have? An astute understanding of its entire attack surface. Having the cognizance of risks, threats, opportunities, and impact relevant to an organization and its industry is crucial, which is not possible when different teams deal with discrete security functions such as threat detection, threat intelligence, incident response, and vulnerability management. There’s little or no communication between them because each security team uses disparate tools and processes, which leads to the siloization of entire security operations. A higher-level understanding of the threat landscape is only possible when all the teams, tools, and processes within an organization work together. The siloization of teams working independently can be eliminated with the adoption of cyber fusion that plays a significant role in bringing together entire security operations (SecOps) to work under one roof.

Why Cyber Fusion?

Cyber fusion ensures that the lessons learned by each team are communicated in real-time to everyone—humans or machines—in other teams for decision-making and prioritizing necessary actions. It focuses on breaking down silos with the implementation of an automatic, organized, and collaborative information-sharing process among teams. As each team manages different processes and operations, cyber fusion allows cross-functional sharing of those insights to enhance overall security effectiveness. The threat intelligence generated by tools employed by an organization internally to refine external threat data provides a context in terms of prioritizing intelligence and focusing on important security operations. Such actionable and enriched intel is disseminated to all security teams in real-time to make their security operations contextual, relevant, and more effective.

The threat landscape has witnessed the rise of state-sponsored threat actors causing severe damage to both government and private organizations. While the conventional approach to cybersecurity proves to be insufficient in terms of proactively countering such advanced threats, collective defense is the need of the hour. Collective defense is an approach that promotes collaboration between organizations through bidirectional threat intelligence sharing and coordinated threat response.

Cyber fusion solutions allow organizations to collaborate via real-time strategic and technical threat intelligence sharing and facilitate a collaboration-driven response to common threats. Such solutions are sector-agnostic and deliver closer cooperation between CERTs, information sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs), private organizations, and government agencies. This empowers organizations to combine their strengths and display collective defense against advanced threat actors.

The ability to break down silos with cyber fusion allows security teams to gain unparalleled visibility into the threats with information on different types of threats in a single place. Consequently, a cyber fusion-driven platform becomes the single source of truth for decision-makers within an organization, helping them monitor all the necessary metrics and create a shared vision of their security functions.

Breaking Down Silos within Teams

Incident Response

By automating incident response, cyber fusion allows security teams to utilize their time in more meaningful and productive tasks. The amount of time spent on collecting routine data increases the mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) to threats, taking longer to differentiate between the real threats and the noise. Incident response teams can manage multiple threats and incidents on a single platform by leveraging case and triage management capabilities to prevent complex attacks while reducing overall MTTR, false alarms, and noise. Cyber fusion also makes the most out of SOAR capabilities that reduce analyst fatigue with efficient post-detection and incident triage systems powered by data enhancement, intel enrichment, and advanced correlation.

Cyber fusion plays a significant role in automating incident response. It empowers security teams to focus on key processes and expedite data aggregation, providing them with appropriate information required for analysis. This results in improved productivity of the SecOps, reduced security talent turnover rate, and better KPIs in security teams. From identifying and responding to threats to gathering malware intelligence and implementing security processes, cyber fusion efficiently helps in resolving threats in real-time. In addition to security teams, the cyber fusion-driven incident response proves handy for SOC managers and CISOs.

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management teams can remain updated on current vulnerabilities and take appropriate risk mitigation measures by leveraging cyber fusion. When the vulnerability management tool warns of a potential threat, the cyber fusion platform leverages its threat intelligence management capabilities to enrich the data from trusted enrichment databases as well from internally generated threat intelligence and historical incident data. This enables vulnerability management teams to respond to vulnerabilities quickly and effectively. The SOAR capabilities of cyber fusion platforms can query the vulnerability management tool for further diagnosis and calculate the vulnerability risk level based on the insights.

Threat Intelligence

With the threat intelligence management capabilities of cyber fusion platforms, threat intelligence teams can easily and quickly perform threat intelligence ingestion, normalization, enrichment, analysis, and actioning. Cyber fusion platforms can automatically ingest, normalize, and enrich IOCs from a wide range of trusted threat databases, and connect the dots between different threat elements to identify hidden threat patterns. Furthermore, threat intelligence teams can leverage cyber fusion platforms to perform automated confidence scoring, actioning, and intelligence sharing to complete the threat intelligence lifecycle loop and assist incident response teams for effective triage and containment of threats.

Summing it Up

In addition to the burgeoning number of security tools deployed, the isolation of security operations, threat detection, incident response, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management from each other is one of the major challenges in creating a centralized security operations setup. However, organizations can build more collaborative processes and fully leverage their security tools by embracing cyber fusion.