With the recent boom in the digitalization of systems, cyber-attacks are becoming more and more common, much to the annoyance of organisations that need to protect themselves against them. Indeed, according to Cisco CEO John Chambers, a company has already been hacked, or it doesn’t know it yet. Fortunately, SOCs (Security Operations Centers) and CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Teams) are working together to keep the information systems infrastructure under control 24/7.
Despite their efficiency, many SOCs face a large volume of data. And sometimes, analysts can be forced to pause all their activities to deal with the detection of a cyber-attack manually, which takes time. This is where technology can be highly beneficial: what are the most effective tools on the market to automatically detect malware?
A Security Operations Centre, or SOC, ensures information security through technical risk prevention, monitoring and analysis. In other words, in the event of a system intrusion (or any other cybersecurity incident), the SOC can identify the level of risk and anticipate possible incidents to clean up the threat. Typically, a SOC consists of specialised analysts and engineers.
As a complement to a SOC, a CERT brings together a team of information security experts who intervene in the event of an IT emergency. The CERT thus ensures the protection, detection, and response to cybersecurity incidents to resolve them as quickly as possible. CERTs also conduct ongoing public awareness campaigns and research to improve security systems.
Therefore, the role of a SOC is to anticipate and identify the threat, and that of a CERT is to react. Both centres work together to prevent, detect, and react to cyber-attacks.
As a first step, organizations (companies or regional centres) need to assemble a competent team of experts adapted to their business and risk level and equip themselves with the adequate technological tools to identify, analyze, and understand threats and incidents.
Then, in the event of a detected anomaly or proven cyber-attack, the procedure is generally as follows: the SOC may identify an ongoing incident by monitoring security-related events or any other technical or organizational means, collect all the relevant data and forward the information to the CERT, which does an in-depth technical investigation to assess the nature, root cause and extent of the problem and elaborate guidelines to resolve it. Internal or external data forensics and incident response teams may follow up the handling of the incident, and the SOC performs continued targeted monitoring.
In this context, systematic and continuous training of the teams on the use of tools and methodologies is essential to build and maintain an effective cybersecurity capability in the organization.
To prevent and detect cyber-attacks, various technological tools are available to organisations. Among the most used are:
Additionally, companies can have ad-hoc software and systems developed to address security threats specific to their business or market segment. These systems collect, analyze, and manage information in real-time. Intuitively, it is clear that the use of technological solutions can boost the data analysis capacity of a team. On the other hand, the following points should be kept in mind:
To limit the errors linked to the automation of malware detection, the SOC must be aware of the overall performance of the system and able to re-configure it and fine tune individual components to meet its specific needs and operational environment. It could, for example, adapt the overall detection threshold according to the perceived level of risk or a quantitative performance indicator.
When selecting a tool for detecting malware and other threats, consider the following:
Using an efficient, scalable, and flexible solution is crucial to strengthen defense against malware and streamline the operations of a SOC/CERT. QFlow allows for in-depth analysis of each file to track down malware automatically. And in the event of a cyber-attack, it analyzes a substantial volume of suspicious data.
QFlow offers the following benefits:
QFlow enables your SOC/CERT teams to reprioritize threats and alerts, optimize the level of malware detection and protect against a wide range of cyber-attacks.
