The cyber threat landscape is continuously evolving, and the increasing complexity of cybercriminal attacks shows no sign of slowing down.
We have all seen noteworthy data breaches in the news recently. With all the new technologies emerging, attackers will develop creative new ways to exploit them. Although there is no such thing as a 100% impenetrable network, poor breach detection by organizations is an indicator that their IT security is not working. According to incident stats from the Verizon Data Breach Report 2018, on average it takes over 200 days to detect a breach.
Barriers to effective threat detection
Any organization, no matter its size, can become a target. Hackers are targeting confidential data, looking for ways to compromise security every day. In general, hackers are interested in stealing high-value corporate data that should be protected by multiple layers of security but very often isn’t.
Regardless of whether your IT environment is in the cloud, on-premise or hybrid, organizations need advanced IT security and protection to fight these attackers. Given all the different types of web threats, organizations would profit most by prioritizing risks across the network. CISOs need complete visibility of the who, what, when, where and why to have multi-layered security defences that correctly mitigate these threats.
Vulnerability assessment
Organizations can't protect against threats that they don't know exist. Companies must assess their network and fix any possible security vulnerabilities and loopholes before any possible cyber-attack.
Research shows many of the cyber-attacks that exposed companies and resulted in damage, were known vulnerabilities for which a patch already existed. An effective vulnerability assessment and patch management strategy would have prevented them.
Many attacks are deployed in stages across different systems and services in ways that often don’t appear malicious. There is a place for analytics in security, and machine learning is seen as an important part to analyse the large volume of information and identify potential threats organizations didn’t even know to exist. Because attackers can use any layers of the application stack to gain access, build footholds, and move laterally within your systems, applications are a prime target.
Data collected by Alert Logic in 2017 shows web application attacks were 75% of all customer incidents. The most prevalent attack methods were SQL Injection and remote code execution, sophisticated attack methods which likely would have been missed by the average SIEM implementation.
Traditional SIEM versus MDR
Some threat detection and cloud security tools are better than others. A tool like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) has the potential to address many of the issues that need to be identified and resolved. Yet, a SIEM solution is often expensive on its own and requires security expertise to properly tune and monitor it.
A Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service is a simpler, and cost-effective solution that provides the skills and expertise that any organization needs. Alert Logic Cloud Defender delivers managed threat detection and response monitoring service, to help organizations save time, money and frustration.
Instead of getting caught up in a painful implementation, reporting processes and feeding a SIEM platform, customers get accurate, actionable threat insights and remediation advice. The cost and effort of this approach is a fraction of that required by a SIEM and brings immediate value.
If you are looking to improve the effectiveness of your threat detection program, have look at our partner Alert Logic five top recommendations for effective threat detection.
