Demystifying the SOC Visibility Triad: The Key to Strengthening Cyber Defences

By Andy Younie, Managing Consultant at Adarma and Eduard Doroskevic, Principal Consultant at Adarma 

As businesses expand their digital estates, ensuring the visibility of cybersecurity events within an evolving risk environment becomes even more important. The SOC visibility triad can add an additional layer of protection to your organisation.

To stay ahead of the threat-curve, businesses must answer several essential questions for a comprehensive picture of their business and to stay protected:

• What is the state of the current threat landscape?
• What are the business’s assets and how critical are they?
• Does the business apply proportional controls to manage the risk?
• Does the business comply with all legislative, regulatory, and contractual cybersecurity requirements?

What is the threat landscape?

The threat landscape refers to the potential online risks and dangers that organisations may encounter. It is constantly changing, with new potential dangers to organisations emerging all the time. Various factors, such as an organisation’s industry, sector, and size, can make it a target for malicious actors.

These threats can take many forms, and security teams must be aware of the methods that threat actors are likely to use and any known vulnerabilities they can exploit.

For instance, currently ransomware is a very prevalent threat, so security teams must be aware of active ransomware gangs, the various strains of ransomware circulating, and the attack tactics threat actors may use. This knowledge and oversight of the threat landscape will empower them to better defend their organisation against attack.

Identifying the business assets

All businesses rely on their assets to enable operations. Security operation centres (SOCs) often consider their assets to include only the technology that supports their business: the servers, network equipment, and workstations. However, assets also include all the company data, customer databases, people, and physical assets that keep the business running. Every asset has a value and level of criticality. Recognising and keeping track of these assets and their significance to the business is essential to enable adequate and proportional protection.

Why the SOC visibility triad adds protection

A lack of visibility means a business will be limited in its ability to protect its assets from risks which make up the threat landscape. This can lead to business disruptions, including statutory, regulatory, and contractual non-compliance, resulting in litigations and penalty enforcement.

Without appropriate protection, it’s much easier for threat actors to disrupt services, commit data theft, or extract eye-watering ransoms.

Where does security operations fit into the equation? A SOC can serve as your digital estate’s ‘single pane of glass’.

The SOC Visibility Triad consists of:

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
• Network Detection and Response (NDR)

This combination of tools ensures visibility across the estate. The SIEM collates events in a single location where they can be analysed for signs of problems, prioritised, and alerts sent to response teams. EDR enables visibility of events on endpoints and so allows actions to be taken in response to findings. NDR monitors activity on the network and alerts to potential problems.

Inventory is key

An accurate and complete asset inventory is an essential element of the SOC visibility triad; without knowing what assets are on the network, it is impossible to protect them, and without knowing the business criticality of the assets, it is impossible to know where to focus protective measures. Appropriate vulnerability and compliance scans are essential to have visibility of weaknesses which may be exploited.

Attack Path Mapping can further improve visibility by identifying routes an adversary may take from a breach point to the valuable assets they want to steal or damage. It also highlights new paths introduced by changes to the infrastructure. Each of these components amplifies the capabilities of the others, optimising strengths and mitigating weaknesses.

Ultimately, enhanced SOC visibility offers a multi-faceted and holistic approach for network security and developing cyber resilience.

Let’s Talk

If you would like to learn more about how Adarma can support your organisation’s cyber resilience, please get in touch with us at hello@adarma.com.

To hear more from us, check out the latest issue of ‘Cyber Insiders,’ our c-suite publication that explores the state of the threat landscape, emerging cyber threats, and most effective cybersecurity best practices.

You can also listen to our new podcast, which explores what it’s really like to work in cybersecurity in today’s threat landscape.

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