SOC Monitoring: Key Processes Checklist

The cyber landscape is constantly evolving, with new threats emerging and old ones becoming more sophisticated. The stakes are high for governments, businesses, and individuals. Governments need to invest in cyber defence to protect their critical infrastructure and citizens from attacks. Businesses meanwhile need to take steps to protect their networks and data from malicious actors. And individuals need to be aware of the potential risks of using the internet and take appropriate steps to safeguard their personal information. It is a complex issue and an industry – because there’s no doubt about it, cybercrime is a very lucrative industry – that’s constantly evolving. That’s why SOC monitoring is critical for most organizations — a SOC monitoring checklist will allow you to detect emerging threats, stay on top of trends, and determine their scope and impact. It will also allow you to respond effectively and quickly. 

What is SOC monitoring? 

SOC stands for Security Operations Center. It is basically a team of professionals that leverage their experiences, their know-how, and some of today’s biggest tech innovations to monitor, prevent, investigate, mitigate, detect, and report cyber threats around the clock. 

SOC monitoring, meanwhile, is a security tool/checklist that works on the premise of continuous monitoring, rather than periodic. It is a way to detect and prevent cyber breaches before they happen.

There are many ways in which SOC monitoring can be used. For example, it can be used for identifying current bad actors and attacks, detecting vulnerabilities, and finding out about new threats or vulnerabilities. It can also be used to detect suspicious user behavior and monitor network traffic for potential attacks.

The goal of SOC monitoring is to provide security teams with the necessary information and protocol to identify threats before they become a problem. This helps them take appropriate action to protect the organization from cyber-attacks and data loss.

The main purposes of SOC monitoring are to ensure that the company is secure and can deal with any issue. Teams are dispatched to continually measure your mainframe against a carefully selected, highly dynamic, SOC monitoring checklist — their main function is to protect all your business assets, this includes your personnel data, your business systems, your dark data, your brand integrity, your supply chain, and your intellectual property. 

What the SOC monitoring process includes

The SOC monitoring process is a comprehensive and systematic approach to monitoring the state of security of an organization. It comprises a set of activities that are performed periodically, to identify the changes in the security posture and find potential vulnerabilities.

The SOC monitoring process includes:

Event Classification & Triage

SOC monitoring tools provide alerts by continually scanning your system. It’s up to the team and the software to examine each one closely. During this classification, they will edit out false positives, determine the risk level of each threat and what they are targeting, and perform careful risk management. The team is responsible for prioritizing alerts, quarantining parts of your system, and responding to the threat. 

Prioritization & Analysis

Most organizations are targeted by a cyber threat once every minute. There’s a difference between a poke and an attack. SOC monitoring determines what may be classified as each — what is liable to upset your business and quite possibly handicap it, and what is merely a nuisance. Risks have to be prioritized to properly channel resources — including personal, tech, and capital. 

Remediation & Recovery

Did you know that the biggest loss of an attack isn’t the attack itself, or – in the case of ransomware – what you might end up paying the culprit? Nope. The biggest hit to a business’s bottom line comes from the loss of revenue. Most attacks can actually fracture your ability to lend out your services or sell your goods. They may in fact – according to studies – hamper your ability to operate properly for up to 21 days. The SOC monitoring process takes into account how to react to the aftermath of an attack — how to get your back on your feet as soon as possible. This means having updated and tested out backups and platforms as well as remediation strategies. 

Assessment & Audit

73% of all data in your system is dark. What is dark data? Dark data includes all information or bits of information you didn’t know you were collecting. In some cases, it is extremely sensitive, uncatalogued, and unprotected data. Not only that, but a whopping 93% of organizations are ignorant of their actual digital size — their probable attack surface. SOC monitoring analyzes and makes a blueprint of who you really are as a business, not who you think you are. It scopes out every nook you were unaware of and fortifies it so no bad actor can exploit it. 

The benefits of effective SOC monitoring

Effective SOC monitoring is the key to cybersecurity. It can help to prevent attacks, detect them early, and mitigate their impact. It helps in identifying the gaps in an organization’s security posture and taking corrective actions before it becomes a major concern.

The benefits of effective SOC monitoring are:

-It can help to prevent attacks by detecting them early.

-It can help mitigate the impact of an attack by identifying gaps in the organization’s security posturing.

-It can shorten your downtime, if an attack occurs, allowing you to get your business back online in the blink of an eye.