Every industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and for some this has been accelerated by the global pandemic. But cyber threats are also growing in prevalence and sophistication, increasing the threat landscape and attack surface for organisations of all shapes and sizes.
Every industry has its own unique security requirements, but often lack the resource, processes and tools to defend themselves. Threat detection is a crucial line of defence when it comes to protecting your organisation from cyber attacks and improving your overall security posture.
A robust threat detection strategy should include:
- Security event threat detection that collects data from events across the network, such as network access, authentication and logs from critical systems.
- Network threat detection to help understand traffic patterns on the network and monitor traffic between trusted networks as well as the internet.
- Endpoint threat detection that provides detailed information about potentially malicious threats on users machines and uses behavioural and forensic information to assist with investigating threats.
There are some key elements of threat detection that every organisation should have to ensure they’re in the best position to identify potential threats.
Threat Intelligence
Using data from previously seen attacks and comparing it to enterprise data is essential for detecting known threats and can help quickly identify if your organisation has been compromised.
Organisations, big and small, can benefit from leveraging threat intelligence to gain a clear view of the threat landscape so actions can be taken to secure their defences. Threat intelligence is often broken into three subcategories: strategic, tactical and operational.
While threat intelligence isn’t effective in protecting against unknown threats, it’s an essential element of threat detection and one that can help keep all corners of your organisation protected from known threats.
Analysing Behaviour Analytics
Analysing user behaviour can help organisations gain a baseline for what is ‘normal’ behaviour for their users, such as the types of data they access, the times they log on and where they are physically located.
Having this baseline can help detect anomalous behaviour, such as a log-in from a different location or in the middle of the night. When a behaviour that is out of the norm occurs, this can be flagged for inspection by your security team to identify if there is a threat.
Threat actors can often go undetected for long periods of time, as they gain access and lay dormant until they are ready to attack, but analysing behaviour analytics can help spot anomalies and detect a compromise quicker.
Threat Hunting
Conducting threat hunts enables your security teams to search the organisation’s network, endpoints and security technology to detect malicious, suspicious or anomalous behaviour that has failed to be detected by existing cyber security measures.
Threat hunting helps organisations take a proactive approach to threat detection. It is not typically initiated from an alert or Indicators of Compromise; it is a strategy organisations use to remain vigilant against new and unknown attacks or breaches.
Threat hunting adds a multi-layered approach to your organisation’s cyber security. While you may implement good security practices and tools including antivirus protection, email and web scanning and firewalls, threat hunting can help your organisation remain vigilant and can be effective in stopping the majority of attacks.
Considering each of these elements of threat detection can help your organisation develop a robust threat detection strategy that mitigates the risk of a serious security incident.
Next Steps
Quickly identifying a breach is key to remediating and recovering from it and limiting the financial and reputational damage. MTI partner, Alien Vault bring people, processes and technology together to help organisations of any size to stay ahead of threats.
OTX Endpoint Security is a free threat-scanning service in OTX that scans your endpoints to detect the presence of IOCs catalogued in OTX to quickly identify malware and other threats.
Powered by the AlienVault® Agent, OTX Endpoint Security is free and easy to use. Get started today to discover if your endpoints have been compromised, gain visibility of threats and scan for IOCs using the world’s largest open threat intelligence community.