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How Are SOC Teams Making Sure They Stay Attentive to New Threats and Skilling Up? 

SOC leaders have a lot on their plate. Besides being responsible for implementing a company’s cybersecurity posture, they also have to manage team members and tools, assure compliance, and communicate effectively with stakeholders. In many cases, they oversee multiple business units or regions and may even coordinate multiple SecOps teams.

It can be especially challenging amid shortages of skilled team members. In the most recent ISACA State of Cybersecurity Report, 69% of cybersecurity professionals surveyed reported their organization was understaffed.

At the same time, cyber threats continue to escalate. Global cyberattacks hit record levels in 2022, up by as much as 38%. Ransomware, malware, and other sophisticated threats are evolving, including Ransomware-as-a-Service tools and new AI tools that are working autonomously and self-replicating malicious code.

Helping SOC teams stay attentive to new threats is a never-ending challenge. It seems like there’s rarely time to rest between incidents and alert fatigue can take a toll on even the best SecOps teams. They can easily become overwhelmed by data, especially when you consider that 80% of organizations use more than 10 data sources.

So, how do you keep your team on the cutting edge of what’s happening in cybersecurity and ensure your tools are doing the job? Consider the following:

Risk Analysis

You can’t afford to wait until an event occurs. You need to ensure you are proactive in protecting your organization. SOC teams need a way to find defensive gaps, quantify risk exposure, and create a roadmap for performance improvement. Yet, understanding risk and quantifying it with hard data may be the biggest challenge SOC leaders face.

This requires consistent monitoring that evolves to encompass emerging threats and compliance regulations. At the same time, you need to evaluate the likelihood of successful breaches and prioritize security gaps for remediation.

Security risk analysis software like SightGain uses hard data based on emerging threats to identify gaps in your attack surface and quantify your risk.

Threat Exposure Monitoring

You need to assure stakeholders that your security tech is working as expected. Most security platforms only highlight what they catch but have no visibility into what they missed. This can easily let incursions and malicious activity fall through the cracks unknown. Often, it’s the activity you don’t see that is the most dangerous.

SightGain’s threat exposure management platform provides continuous security validation by constantly evaluating your SecOps program based on real-world attacks to test your systems for what you are missing, so you can be prepared for emerging threats you have yet to face.

While you may think you already have the tools in place to do this, you might be surprised by what you would see. Our tools have shown that even Fortune 50 companies routinely miss about half of the malicious attacks in testing.

Upskilling SOC Teams

Another key to improving your security posture is constantly upskilling your SOC team. This has become even more important with the shortage of skilled workers. Even if you have specialists in each area of your security team, you need to make sure your team has the skills to handle any threat that emerges, regardless of their specialty.

SightGain offers live-fire training modules to help keep your SecOps analysts at the top of their game. By putting your team to the test by safely executing current malicious attacks on your production system, you can find gaps in your analysts’ skills and then assign customized training based on each analyst’s test results. This creates rapid improvement in skills, improves readiness, and keeps teams aware of the latest threats.

Stay Ahead of Threat Actors and Emerging Threats

Staying ahead of emerging breaches and attacks is a constant battle. You need the right cybersecurity tools in place, a SecOps team that is up-to-date on new threats, and a proactive approach to risk management.

SightGain combines telemetry about your technology and team performance so you can evaluate how everything works together. This allows you to continuously improve your security posture, rapidly increase your maturity, and help SOC teams to stay attentive to emerging threats.

In today’s environment, it’s not enough to monitor and analyze what’s happening to detect and respond to threats. You must detect security gaps and knowledge gaps before attacks occur while remaining vigilant for the latest tactics from threat actors.

For more information about our Threat Exposure Management platform, request a demo and see SightGain in action.