A day in the life of a security operations center (SOC) analyst likely involves sifting through mountains of data and alerts, searching for clues that may indicate a potential security incident or breach. Among the effects of this daily barrage of logs and alerts is that SOC analysts face frustrating challenges that prevent them from focusing on high-quality strategic security work.
Let’s delve deeper into some of these challenges.
Alert Fatigue and False Positives
SOC teams receive 4,484 alerts each day but can only deal with a third of them, leaving a majority of security notifications unexamined. There are just too many alerts for SOC analysts to triage effectively.
Among those they do triage, several end up being false positives. In fact, SOC teams spend 32% of their workday investigating incidents that are not real threats.
Too many alerts and false positives can be a recipe for disaster, potentially leading to missing serious alerts. The Target data breach is a classic example of that. The retailer’s security team overlooked internal alerts generated by security monitoring software. These alerts ended up turning into a multimillion-dollar data breach.
Poor Visibility into IT Environments
Continuous visibility into digital environments and assets is crucial if SOC analysts are to protect their organizations effectively. However, getting the complete picture of an organization’s attack surface can be difficult since the digital landscape is becoming more complex and attacks more sophisticated. Many factors contribute to this challenge, such as:
- Shadow IT: Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of employees will use shadow IT or unsanctioned technologies, up from 41% in 2022. These hidden applications can result in critical vulnerabilities that SOC teams are unaware of and, therefore, cannot protect from exploitation.
- Software-as-a-service (SaaS) sprawl: The explosion of cloud-based applications creates another layer of complexity. These applications often reside outside traditional security control, making it difficult for SOC teams to monitor and identify potential threats.
- Cloud adoption: Cloud migration is a double-edged sword. While offering agility and scalability, it also introduces new attack vectors. SOC teams must adapt their security strategies to gain visibility into cloud workloads and ensure they are adequately secured.
- Supply chain digitization: Business and supplier or partner interconnectedness can expand attack surfaces even further. Threat actors can exploit vulnerabilities within a third-party network to gain access to a connected organization’s core systems.
All these factors contribute to an organization’s digital footprint, inevitably creating assets that threat actors can exploit. These assets must be seen and cataloged for protection.
Manual Tasks Leading to Burnout
SOC analysts often find themselves spending more than half their time doing manual tasks like:
- Incident detection: Sifting through logs and alerts to identify potential security incidents.
- Incident analysis: Manually investigating each potential incident to determine its legitimacy, severity, and impact.
- Incident monitoring: Continuously tracking ongoing security incidents to ensure their resolution and prevent further damage.
While these activities are essential, a staggering 66% of SOC analysts believe that half of them can be automated. Continually performing these repetitive and tedious tasks manually can result in overworked and burnt-out analysts. Even worse, the mental fatigue that results from doing repetitive tasks can increase the risk of human error.
Moreover, the time spent on manual tasks detract from higher-level security activities like threat hunting, vulnerability management, and security process improvement.
Compliance Risks
SOC analysts also face the additional burden of demonstrating compliance with various regulatory frameworks that mandate specific security controls and reporting requirements. It does not help that failure to comply can result in hefty fines. But the actual costs extend far beyond the financial, encompassing adverse security, business, and legal consequences.
The challenge lies in striking a balance between security and compliance while working with limited budgets and personnel shortages. Security teams also need to stay updated with new and existing regulations since new compliance requirements emerge all the time.
What Can You Do?
The escalating volume of security alerts and expanding attack surfaces may overwhelm even the most skilled SOC analysts. To overcome the most common challenges, analysts may tap into comprehensive and automated discovery and inventory capabilities to map out their entire external attack surface. A holistic view allows them to identify, prioritize, and address potential vulnerabilities before they can get exploited.
More specifically, leveraging external attack surface management (EASM) solutions powered by security automation and machine learning (ML) can significantly filter out noise, enabling SOC teams to prioritize high-risk events as they rely on trusted capabilities like:
- Automated asset discovery using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), DNS, port scanning, web crawling, and other advanced discovery methods covering various Internet-facing assets and technologies, including cloud, and SaaS apps
- Automated vulnerability scanning of public-facing assets, including domains, subdomains, IP addresses, ports, SSL certificates, email addresses, and cloud assets
- Efficient asset verification to minimize the number of false positives and ensure all issues detected are relevant to the organization
- Automated severity rating for effective triaging, helping SOC teams focus on the most critical security issues first
- Automated and real-time visual representation of the overall attack surface for easy reporting
- In-depth and automated asset-to-asset mapping that enables SOC teams to investigate and analyze dependencies and associations in one glance
Conclusion
The expanding attack surface and relentless cybercrime tactics constantly present new challenges for SOC analysts. However, the security industry is also innovating continuously, developing new tools and strategies to help analysts become more effective.
SOC teams can enhance their capabilities by leveraging automation and advanced security solutions like EASM. While these advancements are not silver bullets, they can be powerful tools that can free analysts from the burden of manual and repetitive activities, helping them prioritize high-risk security events, focus on strategic security work, and provide a comprehensive view of their attack surface.
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