THREAT INVESTIGATION
Before making the decision on procedural means, the SOC analysts have to determine the nature and the tactic of the threat in order to respond to it in an appropriate manner. Threat investigation and digital forensics represent the procedure of collecting evidence connected to a flagged threat in order to confirm the warning and inform on the responses and the recovery activities. The goal of every investigative effort is to check, understand and react to events which are happening simultaneously within an environment, before they turn into major incidents. A quick and precise threat investigation can reduce the overall threat influence and save the company from bad reputation and money loss.
Switch from an event to an incident
SOC uses the detections solutions with the correlation ability to categorise, classify and set priorities in regard to millions of events. The analysts then investigate high-risk events in order to determine that the waning deserves the status of an incident. Security operations teams rely on further research and the analysis of the vector of threat, tactics, business influence, functional context and recovery ability in order to identify and set up the best response plan.
Main challenges:
1. Advanced threat actors
The next generation attacks, orchestrated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be executed from a system, turn off antivirus systems, increase privileges and even disable registry logs to interfere with forensics. The opponents are becoming smarter and stronger with every passing day, and they use the most advanced technologies which are required by security operation teams for defense.
2. Lack of visibility
One of the most common challenges of threat detection is the lack of high-quality removed data. Security operations need complete, contextual information about systems, people and data in order to conduct a holistic investigation on threats.
3. Analysis which requires time
Threat actors are becoming faster and faster and without the identically fast inquiries during threat investigation, security operations take chances by sacrificing problem solving time.
4. Exhaustion
Screening large volumes of warnings allows for only a limited amount of time for threat investigation, very often only minutes. This does not include the time and the energy wasted on the investigation of false positive results.
