In today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape, cybersecurity is a constant game of cat and mouse. The average security operations center (SOC) team receives 4,484 alerts every day and can spend up to 3 hours manually triaging to understand which signals represent a genuine threat and which are just noise.
However, this model traps SOCs in a continual loop of reacting to incoming high-priority alerts without leaving enough time to address lower-priority issues. As many as 62% of SOC alerts are ignored or go unaddressed due to ongoing challenges around alert fatigue. Because analysts’ bandwidth is constantly taken up by reacting to incidents, SOC teams also cannot proactively mitigate known vulnerabilities and posture weaknesses before they manifest into an attack.
If SOC teams are to flip the script on incident response and embrace a more proactive security approach, they need a cloud-native extended detection and response (XDR) solution that integrates as part of a unified SOC. This model helps reduce the cognitive load on analysts and delivers enhanced visibility for more holistic threat detection, investigation, and response.
View your attack surface like threat actors do
Today’s cyber defenders often think in silos. They resolve one incident at a time and focus on protecting against individual threats. By contrast, attackers think in graphs—looking for the most expedient path to their end goal by leveraging the cloud’s interconnected nature to move laterally and compromise critical systems or resources.
Also known as attack paths, these connections represent a pervasive challenge for the cloud security community. Microsoft research found that the average organization contains 351 exploitable attack paths that threat actors can leverage to access high-value assets. Eighty-four percent of attack paths originate from internet exposure, and 66% involve insecure credentials.
When organizations deploy a best-of-breed security approach with tooling from multiple vendors, it’s difficult for SOC teams to identify attack paths because their siloed tools cannot share all signaling data or offer a holistic view of their cloud environment. Instead, analysts must manually correlate insights across disparate tools. This adds to the already heavy load on SOC teams and can lead to false correlations since analysts don’t have the visibility or multi-domain expertise needed to understand how a vulnerability in one area could lead to a breach in another part of their environment.
A unified SOC can offload this work by integrating insights across endpoints, identities, applications, and more to quickly and accurately identify potential attack paths. It can also help SOC teams understand which attack paths should be remediated first based on their potential impact on the business. This prioritized view is crucial for enabling proactive security.
Connected security incidents demand a connected response
Another benefit of deploying cloud-native XDR through a unified SOC is that it can help analysts quickly connect the dots during an attack for faster response.
Consider the example of a user who clicks on a malicious email link and compromises their identity. Rather than have an analyst manually crawl through logs to understand where the attack originated and what actions the compromised identity has taken, XDR can immediately flag the suspicious activity and coordinate with other solutions under the unified SOC for a more connected incident response. Not only does this allow analysts to quickly understand the scope of the incident across data, applications, endpoints, and more, but analysts can also go beyond XDR and raise the risk profile for the compromised user to proactively prevent similar incidents with conditional access policies.
Some unified XDR solutions can even leverage AI to further accelerate incident response by automatically disrupting attacks. If human intervention is needed, AI can also provide guided remediation next steps and automated incident summaries to help SOC teams get up to speed on the incident more quickly. As cloud environments continue to scale, and attacks grow increasingly complex, AI-enabled security will be critical for reasoning over large datasets and helping SOC analysts understand all the potential security implications of an attack.
While the sheer volume of alerts that SOC teams field isn’t likely to diminish anytime soon, organizations can use tooling to investigate and respond more efficiently and effectively, thus reducing the burden on human defenders. When deployed as part of a unified SOC, cloud-native XDR helps teams proactively mitigate incidents before they happen and accelerates incident response to the speed of attack.
To learn more about the next-generation capabilities of cloud-native XDR and a unified SOC approach, check out our latest Microsoft Defender XDR announcements from Ignite.
