When square-rigged sailing ships dominated the seas, a lookout was always sent up the mast to the crow’s nest where he could watch the horizon with a telescope for signs of trouble. The lookout was monitoring the sea, a threat landscape that stretched from horizon to horizon. This practice has been with us since the dawn of humanity and lives on in the security operations center (SOC), where modern lookouts operate a digital crow’s nest and keep any eye out for danger. This is known as cyber security monitoring.
This article explains what cyber security monitoring is, how it works, and why it’s important for maintaining a strong security posture in today’s escalating threat environment. Cyber security monitoring plays a critical role in detecting threats and attacks to enable rapid, effective response. It’s central to a comprehensive corporate IT security strategy.
The concept of cyber security monitoring is fairly straightforward. It involves using specialized tooling to ingest and interpret digital signals from a wide variety of devices, applications, and systems to maintain visibility into their activities. Cyber security monitoring solutions are designed to analyze and interpret these signals and flag situations that indicate the presence of a threat or an attack. This type of monitoring triggers cyber threat response workflows which are crucial for managing and mitigating potential cyber threats in a timely manner.
This is where things can get a little more complicated. Cyber threats are diverse and dangerous. They’re also often very stealthy, with the tiniest anomaly potentially signaling a serious threat. At the same time, false positives and “signal to noise” difficulties can overwhelm SOC teams. It’s impossible to monitor every attack surface at the same level of diligence. A better approach is to set a priority of monitoring, though that runs the risk of neglecting areas that are only revealed to be weak after an attack has taken place.
Cyber security monitoring is a process that starts with the collection of data. The cyber security monitoring solution monitors cloud and local infrastructure and collects data for analysis and sometimes response. The sources of data used in cyber security monitoring vary greatly. But generally, the security monitoring process ingests data from the following sources:
Device logs, e.g., as compiled and analyzed by a security incident and event management (SIEM) solution
Network traffic, which may feed into a network security monitoring solution
Intrusion detection (IDS) and intrusion prevention (IDP) systems
Firewalls
A cybersecurity monitoring solution analyzes the data feeds from these sources. If it detects a threat or an attack, it alerts the SOC. If it can quickly detect ransomware threats, it can prevent ransomware from spreading, among other benefits.
[Body] Cyber security monitoring is arguably a “must have” activity for defending a corporate IT environment. Why? It’s the first line of defense against cyber threats. Indeed, you can’t protect a digital asset if you’re not watching out for threats. Otherwise, you’re limited to reacting after the fact. We all do this often enough, anyway, so why make the problem worse?
What are the potential risks and consequences of inadequate security monitoring? Under-investing in cyber security monitoring heightens your risk exposure. The negative impacts of virtually all cyber attack vectors grow worse if efforts at detection are sub-optimal. You’re at greater risk of data breaches, eavesdropping, ransomware, malicious mischief, detecting a denial of service (DoS) attacks, and on and on.
There are multiple modes of cyber security monitoring. Three types are predominant:
Network Security Monitoring: The network is often where early signs of attack are the most obvious. For this reason, keeping an eye on network traffic and activities can be a good countermeasure.
Security Risk Monitoring: Assessing and managing the risk landscape is a different type of activity compared to active monitoring of network traffic and device logs. Rather, it involves a recurring or continuous process of determining where the IT environment is exposed to risk. For instance, is email a point of vulnerability? How exposed are data repositories to ransomware, and so forth. With security risk monitoring, you can gauge the severity of risk and prioritize risk mitigation practices.
Active Threat Monitoring: Often, cyber threats exist in the IT environment without emitting any kind of digital signal that could be detected by cyber security monitoring tools. For example, malware could be sitting in a corrupted file on a storage array, waiting for activation. By engaging in real-time detection of such threats, perhaps by searching for their “signatures” in stored code, it is possible to get out ahead of them and mitigate their impact.
An effective cybersecurity monitoring system is an essential component of any robust security posture. It should encompass a suite of features designed to detect, analyze, and respond to threats in real time. Here are some key features that distinguish a high-performing cybersecurity monitoring system:
Comprehensive Visibility: The system must provide end-to-end visibility across all network traffic, user activities, applications, and endpoints, including cloud environments and remote devices, to detect anomalies and potential threats effectively.
Real-time Detection and Alerts: It should identify and notify the security team of potential threats as they occur, allowing for immediate action. Alerting mechanisms need to be finely tuned to avoid alarm fatigue caused by false positives.
Threat Intelligence Integration: An effective system incorporates up-to-date threat intelligence to recognize known attack patterns and indicators of compromise (IoCs), facilitating a proactive defense against emerging threats.
Behavioral Analysis: Leveraging baseline profiles of normal activity, the system should detect deviations that may indicate a security incident, using behavioral analysis and machine learning techniques to discern subtle indicators of malicious activity.
Automated Response: When a threat is detected, the system should initiate predefined response protocols, which may include isolation of affected systems, blocking suspicious traffic, or executing scripts to contain the threat.
Data Retention and Forensic Capability: Retaining logs and data over time is crucial for conducting post-incident investigations and compliance with data governance policies. This feature assists in analyzing the sequence of events leading up to a breach.
Customization and Scalability: The system must be customizable to align with an organization's specific security policies and scalable to accommodate growth or changes in the IT infrastructure.
Compliance and Reporting: It should streamline compliance with regulatory standards by generating reports that detail adherence to required controls and procedures.
User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): By profiling and monitoring user behavior, the system can detect insider threats or compromised accounts, which are often difficult to spot with traditional security measures.
Incorporating these features into a cybersecurity monitoring system equips an organization with the tools to detect and respond to threats swiftly, mitigating risks and minimizing potential damage from cyber incidents. And the monitoring system should be integrated with incident response platforms and plans like security orchestration and automation (SOAR) platforms or SOC incident response workflows.
Cyber security monitoring is a three-stage process.
Data collection
Data analysis
Response
The analysis stage is where things can get a little challenging. For one thing, there’s simply a lot of highly varied data to study. Also, what are you looking for? In some cases, it might be clear. For example, a DoS attack might involve tracking service requests. If requests exceed a defined threshold, that suggests the start of a DoS attack.
Other times, it can be difficult to detect a threat. Advanced persistent threats (APTs), for instance, are designed to elude active threat monitoring. The signs of attack could be very hard to distinguish from regular IT operations.
This is where advanced analytics and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play. A seemingly minor anomaly, such as a high level of CPU activity in a device during off hours, could mean an attack is imminent. The trick is to notice it.
Human expertise, usually in the form of a SOC analyst, is often critical in making the judgment call. A security risk monitoring solution could flag a problem and alert the SOC. Several challenges emerge at this point. One is simple burnout. A SOC analyst might be dealing with hundreds of alerts a day. Serious threats can simply escape detection. Also, as most experienced security professionals will tell you, not all threats create anomalies and not all anomalies represent threats.
Automation is thus quite helpful in the response phase of cyber security monitoring. If the human being cannot figure it out, a machine might. And, a machine might work by rules that automatically isolate or shut down devices that are suspected of being compromised. This process may take place on a SOAR platform.
Incident response is almost always separate from cyber threat monitoring. Monitoring pulls the trigger, though. If a monitoring solution issues an alert, that initiates the incident response process.
That process can take a lot of forms. It could be as minimal as a SOC analyst reviewing the alert and choosing to ignore it. Incident response can get a lot more elaborate, however. Often, the initial discovery of a threat or attack needs enrichment before analysts can evaluate its seriousness.
For instance, if the monitoring solution detects a threat signature, someone (or some software) can quickly look up the threat in a threat intelligence database and determine if it needs immediate action or if it’s less of a priority. The monitoring solution and incident response workflow/solution can interact in an escalating cycle, with enrichment leading to new workflows, leading to more monitoring of the resulting response, and so forth.
Monitoring can deliver much-needed early detection. With ransomware, for instance, every second counts. The goal is to detect an attack and act on it before the malware starts to encrypt your data. A good monitoring tool can help with this objective.
Cyber security monitoring is a first line defense against data breaches and other serious security incidents. With monitoring, you can pick up signals of a breach that’s about to occur or is in progress. Or, if you’re monitoring threats, you can spot the attack vector before it goes into action. Examples include monitoring firewall traffic to notice data being exfiltrated without authorization or even monitoring cloud repositories or sites on the dark web for company information that shouldn’t be there.
Everyone does some cyber security monitoring. The function is literally built into many tools, such as firewalls or network management systems. The best practices for getting cyber security monitoring to work right, however, start before you even switch anything on.
Deciding what to monitor is an essential first step. The best practice is to think carefully about where you face the greatest risk exposure and what digital assets require the most protection. You might discover that your CRM solution is the most valuable asset you have, and that you need to focus your monitoring on threats that affect it. It’s a good idea to revisit the monitoring setup regularly, too, seeking continuous improvement and staying up to date with cyber security trends.
Cyber security monitoring comes with its share of challenges. Selecting the right data feeds to analyze is one of the most common. Getting the signal-to-noise ratio settled is another. Excessive reliance on people to interpret alerts vexes many security teams through burnout and inefficiency. Automation is essential. The best solutions offer a high degree of automation and customization, along with integration with systems like SOAR for incident response.
Chances are, you’re already doing some cyber security monitoring. It’s also likely that you could be doing it better. You can do this in small increments. If you haven’t refreshed your monitoring setup, perhaps take a new look at what you’re monitoring and how you’re handling alerts. Look at your highest areas of risk and plan accordingly. Better monitoring almost always means a better security posture, so get to work!