What Is a SOC?

What a SOC Does

A SOC team has the following responsibilities to help prevent, respond to, and recover services from attacks.

• Asset and tool inventory

  To eliminate blind spots in protection, a SOC needs to know every asset that needs to be protected and all tools used to protect them in the organization. This means a SOC needs to cover all databases, cloud services, identities, applications, and clients across on-premises data centers and clouds. A SOC also needs to know all security solutions used in the organization, for example, firewalls, anti-malware, anti-ransomware, and monitoring software.

• Reducing attack surface

  A key responsibility of a SOC is to reduce the attack surface of the organization. To do this, SOC needs to maintain an exhaustive inventory of all workloads and assets, apply security patches to software and firewalls, identify misconfigurations, and discover and add new assets as they come online. SOC team members are also responsible for researching emerging threats and analyzing risks. This helps the SOC keep ahead of the latest threats.

• Continuous monitoring

  A SOC team uses a security analysis solution to monitor the entire environment, covering on-premises, cloud, applications, networks, and devices, all day to detect abnormal or suspicious behavior. The solution can be a security information enterprise management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and extended detection and response (XDR) solution. These tools collect telemetry data, aggregate the data, and, in some cases, automate incident responses.

• Threat intelligence

  A SOC also uses data analysis, external sources, and product threat reports to gain an in-depth insight into attacker behavior, infrastructure, and motives. This intelligence provides a comprehensive view of what is happening across the Internet and helps the team understand how groups work. With this information, the SOC can quickly detect threats and enhance the responses to emerging risks.

• Threat detection

  SOC teams use the data generated by the SIEM and XDR solutions to identify threats. This first step is to filter out false positives from real issues. They then prioritize threats by severity and potential impact on services.

• Log management

  A SOC also collects, maintains, and analyzes log data generated by each client, operating system, VM, local application, and network incident. SOC's analysis helps establish a baseline for normal activity and reveals anomalies that may indicate malware, ransomware, or viruses.

• Incident response

  Once an online attack is identified, the SOC quickly takes actions to limit the damage to the organization with as little impacts on services as possible. Those actions may include shutting down or isolating affected clients and applications, suspending compromised accounts, removing infected files, and running anti-virus and anti-malware software.

• Recovery and remediation

  After an attack, a SOC is responsible for restoring organization's services to its original state. The team will erase and reconnect the disk, identity, email, and clients, restart the application, switch to the backup system, and restore data.

• Root cause investigation

  To prevent similar attacks from happening again, the SOC conducts a thorough investigation to identify vulnerabilities, ineffective security processes, and other experiences that led to the incident.

• Security refinement

  A SOC uses any intelligence gathered during an incident to fix vulnerabilities, improve processes and policies, and update the security roadmap.

• Compliance management

  A key part of a SOC's responsibility is to ensure that applications, security tools, and processes comply with privacy regulations, such as PCI DSS Security Compliance Package, ISO 27701 Security Compliance Package, and ISO 27001 Security Compliance Package. The team regularly reviews the system to ensure compliance and to make sure that regulators, law enforcement, and customers are notified of data breaches.

Key Roles in a SOC

Based on the scale of an organization, a typical SOC includes the following roles:

• Incident response director

  This role, which is typically planned in very large organizations, is responsible for coordinating detection, analysis, containment, and recovery during a security incident. They also manage communication with corresponding stakeholders.

• SOC manager

  A SOC manager oversees the SOC. They are responsible for reporting to the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Their responsibilities include supervising personnel, running services, training new employees and managing finance.

• Security engineer

  Security engineers are responsible for operating of the organization's security system. This includes designing security architectures and researching, implementing, and maintaining security solutions.

• Security analyst

  A security analyst is the first responder in a security incident. They are responsible for identifying threats, prioritizing threats, and then taking actions to contain damage. During an online attack, they may need to isolate infected hosts, clients, or users. In some organizations, security analysts are graded based on the security severity of the threats they are responsible for addressing.

• Threat hunter

  In some organizations, the most experienced security analysts are called threat hunters. They identify and respond to advanced threats that are not detected by automated tools. This role is proactive and designed to deepen the organization's understanding of known threats and reveal unknown threats before attacks actually occur.

• Forensics analyst

  Large organizations may also hire forensic analysts who are responsible for collecting intelligence to determine the root causes of violations. They search for system vulnerabilities, violations against security policies, and cyber attack patterns that may be useful in preventing similar intrusions in the future.

Types of SOCs

There are several ways for organizations to set up their SOCs. Some organizations choose to build dedicated SOCs with full-time employees. This type of SOC can be internal, with a physical local location, or can be virtual, with employees coordinating their work remotely using digital tools. Many virtual SOCs have both contract workers and full-time employees. An outsourced SOC, also called "managed SOC" or "SOC as a service", is run by a managed security service provider who is responsible for preventing, detecting, investigating, and responding to threats. An organization may also use a combination of internal employees and a managed security service provider. This way is called a co-managed or hybrid SOC. Organizations use this approach to increase the influence of their employees. For example, if they do not have threat investigators, it may be easier to hire third parties than to equip them internally.

Importance of a SOC Team

A strong SOC can help enterprises, governments, and other organizations stay ahead of an evolving online threat landscape. It is not an easy task. Both attacks and defense communities often develop new technologies and strategies, and it takes time and efforts to manage all changes. A SOC can leverage its understanding of the broader cybersecurity environment and of internal weaknesses and service priorities to help organizations develop a security roadmap that meets long-term business needs. SOCs can also limit the impact of attacks on services. Since they are continuously monitoring the network and analyzing alert data, they are more likely to detect threats earlier than other teams scattered among other priorities. Through regular training and well-documented processes, SOCs can quickly handle current incidents, even under great pressure. This can be difficult for teams that do not have a round-the-clock focus on secure operations.

Benefits of a SOC

By unifying the personnel, tools, and processes to protect an organization from threats, a SOC helps the organization defend against attacks and breaches more effectively and efficiently.

• Strong security situation

  Improving the security of an organization is a job that has no ends. It requires continuous monitoring, analysis, and planning to discover vulnerabilities and master changing technologies. If several tasks have the same priority, it is more likely to ignore security and focus on tasks that seem more urgent.

  A centralized SOC helps make sure that processes and technologies are improved continuously, reducing the risk of successful attacks.

• Compliance with privacy laws and regulations

  In different industries, countries, and regions, there are many regulations that govern the collection, storage, and use of data. Many regulations require organizations to report data breaches and detect personal data upon user requests. Developing appropriate processes and procedures is as important as having the right technology. SOC members help organizations comply with these regulations by taking responsibility for keeping technology and data processes up to date.

• Swift incident responses

  How quickly cyber attacks can be detected and prevented is critical. With appropriate tools, personnel, and intelligence, vulnerabilities can be curbed before they cause any damage. But bad actors are also smart, they may hide in the system to steal massive amount of data and escalate their permissions before anyone notices. A security incident is also a very stressful thing, especially for those who lack experience in incident response.

  With unified threat intelligence and well-documented procedures, a SOC team can quickly detect, respond to, and recover from attacks.

• Reduced breach costs

  A successful intrusion can be very expensive for organizations. It may lead to a long downtime before service recovery. Some organizations may lose customers or find it difficult to win new customers shortly after an incident. By acting ahead of attackers and responding quickly, a SOC helps organizations save time and money when they return to normal operations.

Best Practices for SOC Teams

With so many things to be responsible for, a SOC must effectively manage to achieve expected results. Organizations with strong SOCs implement the following security practices:

• Service-aligned strategy

  Even the most well-funded SOC has to decide where to spend its time and money. Organizations usually conduct risk assessments first to identify the aspects that are most vulnerable to risks and the greatest business opportunities. This helps to determine what needs to be protected. A SOC also needs to know the environment where the assets are located. Many enterprises have complex environments, with some data and applications on-premises and some distributed across clouds. A strategy helps determine whether security professionals need to be available at all hours every day and whether it is better to set up an in-house SOC or to use professional services.

• Talented, well-trained employees

  The key to an effective SOC lies in highly skilled and progressive employees. The first step is to find the best talent. However, this can be tricky as the market for security personnel is really competitive. To avoid skill gaps, many organizations try to find people with a variety of expertise, including systems and intelligence monitoring, alert management, incident detection and analysis, threat hunting, ethical hacking, cyber forensics, and reverse engineering. They also deploy technologies that automate tasks to make smaller teams more efficient and improve the output of junior analysts. Investing in regular training helps organizations keep key employees, fill skills gaps, and develop employees' careers.

• End-to-end visibility

  An attack may start with a single client, so it is critical for the SOC to understand the entire environment of the organization, including anything managed by a third party.

• Right tools

  There are so many security incidents that teams can be easily overwhelmed. Effective SOCs invest in excellent security tools that work well together and use AI and automation to report major risks. Interoperability is the key to avoiding coverage gaps.

SOC Tools and Technologies

• Security information and event management (SIEM)

  One of the most important tools in a SOC is a cloud-based SIEM solution, which aggregates data from multiple security solutions and log files. With threat intelligence and AI, these tools help SOCs detect evolving threats, accelerate incident response, and act before attackers.

• Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR)

  A SOAR automates periodic and predictable actions, response, and remediation tasks, freeing up time and resources for more in-depth investigations and hunting.

• Extended detection and response (XDR)

  XDR is a service-oriented software tool that provides comprehensive and better security by integrating security products and data into simplified solutions. Organizations use these solutions to proactively and effectively address an evolving threat landscape and complex security challenges across clouds. Compared with systems such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), XDR expands the security scope to integrate protection across a wider range of products, including organization's endpoints, servers, cloud applications, and emails. On this basis, XDR combines prevention, detection, investigation, and response to provide visibility, analysis, correlated incident alerts, and automated response to enhance data security and combat threats.

• Firewall

  A firewall monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and allows or blocks the traffic based on the security rules defined by the SOC.

• Log management

  A log management solution is usually part of a SIEM. It logs all alerts from each software, hardware, and client running in the organization. These logs provide information about network activities.

• Vulnerability management

  Vulnerability management tools scan the network to help identify any weaknesses that attackers may exploit.

• User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA)

  User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) is built in many modern security tools. UEBA uses AI to analyze data collected from varied devices to establish a baseline of normal activity for each user and entity. When an event deviates from the baseline, it will be marked for further analysis.

FAQs

1. What does a SOC team need to do?

   A SOC team monitors servers, devices, databases, network applications, websites, and other systems to detect potential threats in real time. The team performs proactive security efforts. They keep abreast of the latest threats and discover and resolve system or process vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them. If an organization is being attacked, the SOC team is responsible for eradicating the threat and restoring the system and backup as needed.

2. What are the key components in a SOC?

   A SOC consists of people, tools, and processes that help protect the organization from cyber attacks. To achieve its objectives, an SOC performs the following functions: inventory of all assets and security techniques, routine maintenance and preparation, continuous monitoring, threat detection, threat intelligence, log management, incident response, recovery and remediation, root cause investigation, security optimization, and compliance management.

3. Why do organizations need strong SOCs?

   A strong SOC helps organizations manage security more efficiently and effectively through unified defense, threat detection tools, and security processes. Organizations with SOCs can improve their security processes, respond to threats faster, and better manage compliance than those without SOCs.

4. What are the differences between a SIEM and a SOC?

   A SOC consists of the personnel, processes, and tools responsible for protecting organizations from cyber attacks. A SIEM is one of the many tools used by a SOC to maintain visibility and respond to attacks. A SIEM aggregates logs and uses analytics and automation to reveal credible threats to SOC members who decide how to respond.