3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response: Gartner® Report

Last updated at Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:57:32 GMT

In an ongoing effort to help security organizations gain greater visibility into risk, we’re pleased to offer this complimentary Gartner® report, 3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response. This insightful research can help a security organization realize what its exposure to risk could be at a given time.

Have you measured risk recently?

This is a critical question, but there may be an even more important one: How would you go about implementing a security program to mitigate risk? A tech stack opens itself to all kinds of ongoing vulnerabilities as it expands in more directions, so hopefully its also innovating and driving profits on behalf of the business.

Therefore, a security operations center (SOC) must constantly contort itself to keep that growing attack surface secure via a threat detection, investigation, and response program. According to Gartner, a SOC should:

• Break through silos and open dialogue by establishing a quorum of business leaders to openly discuss cybersecurity and its requirements.
• Reduce unnecessary delays in investigation by ensuring threat detection use cases are fully enriched with internal business context at the point which alerts are generated.
• Enable incident responders to make effective prioritization and response decisions by centrally recording asset-based and business-level risk information.

A binding factor for risk

Technology: It’s the solution to and cause of business risk and the many issues that follow. Relying on the internet means operations and deployments move faster while the attack surface is simultaneously expanding. As the speed of business increases, so does the “noise” security analysts must sift through to get to the real issue. Gartner says:

“Business-dependent technologies are a focal point for criminals moving into cyberspace, as anonymity is now a commodity, making the dash for profits an exceedingly easy gain. Therefore, SecOps must consider and understand business risk and the impact cyber elements have on these risks. However, the question remains: How do these inundated security technologists reduce the noise and achieve their objectives in an environment where time is a limiting factor?”

Faster risk-based prioritization

If time is indeed a limiting factor, then faster risk-based prioritization is a key step on the road to faster incident response, especially as organizations across all industries are migrating to the cloud at an unprecedented pace to support innovation, scale, and digital transformation. Uniting cloud risk and threat detection has been at the forefront of Rapid7’s effort to prioritize and respond to an incident faster.

Integrating multiple threat feeds and sources of telemetry while correlating that intelligence back to assets in your environment provides the visibility needed to target higher-risk areas. It also lends business context, depending on where those higher risk levels are, empowering security practitioners to quickly prioritize and mitigate risk. Gartner posits that, “risk is the sum of your assets, active threats, resident vulnerabilities, and potential organizational impact.”

In the report, Gartner highlights and dives deep into three key areas for enabling risk-based threat detection, investigation, and response:

• Use risk-based prioritization for faster incident response: Once the incident responders receive the escalation from the SOC (L3s), they’re typically charged with establishing or validating infection boundaries, identifying the root cause of the infection and offering containment and remediation actions.
• Enrich risk information into threat detection processes: Cyber risk varies in its measurement; to be effective, organizations must define at least four core areas to measure and collect data: sums of assets, resident vulnerabilities, active threats and organizational impact.
• Break through silos and open the dialogue: To help executives make the most informed decisions, security risk management (SRM) leaders should cultivate relationships with key stakeholders and report effective risk-based metrics, promoting a business-integrated security capability.

For much more context on each of these areas, read the report linked below. Incident response teams need all the help they can get when attempting to work nearly round-the-clock, always-on, multiple incidents at a time.

A perpetual effort

This is also the fun of the job; attackers constantly evolve, which forces security practitioners to innovate, evolve, and outpace bad actors. When it comes to threat detection, investigation, and response, it is essential to pump up visibility and stay several steps ahead of attackers by unifying and transforming multiple telemetry sources.

We’re pleased to continually offer leading research to help you gain clarity into that risk and supercharge security efforts. Read the complimentary Gartner report to better understand how risk applies to your critical assets and how to mitigate the impact of a potential threat.

Gartner, “3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response” Jonathan Nunez, Andrew Davies, Pete Shoard, Al Price. 16 November 2022.

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