Visibility and Network Security: Using Dynamic Data to Prevent Cyberthreats

To a threat actor, an enterprise network is an attractive target, and consequently, the potential for damaging, large-scale breaches is increasing daily. With the new levels of digitalization being implemented by businesses worldwide and the increasing sophistication of cybercrime, cyberattacks can come in many forms. Threat actors are easily able to take advantage of blind spots and move laterally across the network or abuse access rights without detection.

According to McKinsey’s report,  ‘The COVID-19 recovery will be digital: A plan for the first 90 days,' it’s estimated that in just eight weeks, the pandemic ushered in the equivalent of a five-year leap in digital adoption. New technology has increased the network security challenge for organizations across all verticals as they face an advancing, expanding threat landscape.

To ensure organizations can concentrate on seamless, uninterrupted business growth, implementing a comprehensive network security foundation that can support their future success is imperative.

Full visibility across the entire network is critical to an effective cybersecurity strategy, and a single pane of glass view is the only way to rapidly detect and respond to advanced persistent threats (APTs). Without this, threats can spread quickly and evade detection by existing security tools, causing substantial, sometimes irreparable damage.   

The Visibility Challenge

Time is crucial when it comes to detecting and responding to malicious activity on an organization's network. Cyberattacks and threats, both internal and external, must be detected as quickly as possible to limit or avoid damage and ensure businesses can capture new value from recent digitalization efforts.

This lack of visibility enables threats to originate inside an organization's security perimeter with broad access across the network. For example, a rogue privileged user can abuse their access, or an attacker with legitimate access credentials can move laterally across the network without raising any suspicion or alerts. However, the problem extends beyond the network perimeter. Organisations face challenges with insufficient visibility into network security threats that require monitoring beyond the perimeter, such as in the cloud.

Having the ability to detect is no longer sufficient by itself. Organizations need to prevent, detect, respond and contain threats to safeguard their company’s critical data, continue business growth and protect their reputation.

The Power of Network Data

Network data is often the earliest indicator of compromise, but without insight into the relevant data, organizations are unable to see the threat and implement the steps to remediate it. Advances in centralized, machine-based analytics make it possible to more efficiently and effectively detect network-borne threats, empowering companies to better detect the presence of malicious threat actors within a network.

A holistic view can be achieved through hybrid machine learning (ML) and rules-based detection analytics, providing a reliable network detection and response (NDR) solution. An NDR solution is a focused network security solution that detects advanced network-borne threats in real-time and features integrated security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities.

An NDR solution provides a comprehensive set of modules, dashboards, and workflows that enable organizations to prevent, detect, respond and contain APTs with fewer resources.

Prevent – An NDR solution empowers security teams to introduce and support a security operations maturity model across their organization's internal and external systems. They gain the tools needed to become more vigilant against threats across remote and hybrid work environments, with security compliance ensured across vulnerable touchpoints.

Detect – An NDR solution rapidly eliminates blind spots by improving threat detection with advanced models and ML that reduces false positives. Organizations can observe anomalies across their entire data footprint, gaining real-time visibility into threats.

Respond – An NDR solution allows organizations to receive more meaningful alerts with context for investigators, allowing them to make faster, more effective decisions. Security teams gain the ability to quarantine endpoints, shut down network access, suspend users, and kill processes with the click of a button.

Contain – With an NDR solution, security teams can limit threat damage and disruption by gaining the insight and support needed to identify the type of attack so they can take fast action. This allows teams to quickly determine which (if any) critical business systems have been compromised, what data has been affected, and whether any unauthorized entry points remain.

A Network-Centric Solution

With the right security operations platform in place, organizations can gain a better understanding of their weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and subsequent exposure to network-borne threats with the aim of strengthening their overall security posture and threat resiliency.

Securing against threats to the network becomes possible once an organization is armed with the right data to see the threat and has the right solution to remediate it. NDR makes it possible to detect lateral movement, exfiltration, malware compromise, ransomware, and other threats – all in real time.

Kev Eley is VP of Sales, Europe at LogRhythm.

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