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The Evolution of SOC Operations: How Continuous Exposure Management Transforms Cybersecurity Operations

The cybersecurity landscape is evolving at an unprecedented rate, and Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of threats and alerts they receive on a daily basis. Exposure management platforms have emerged as a solution to this problem, weaving exposure intelligence directly into existing analyst workflows and providing attack surface visibility and insight into interconnected exposures.




The world of cybersecurity is constantly evolving, with new threats and vulnerabilities emerging every day. The role of Security Operations Centers (SOCs) has become increasingly critical in detecting and responding to these threats. However, SOCs are facing a significant challenge in managing the sheer volume of alerts and threats they receive on a daily basis.

According to recent data, SOC analysts handle thousands of alerts every day, spending an excessive amount of time chasing false positives and adjusting detection rules reactively. This lack of context and relevant threat intelligence leads to analysts spending too much time manually triaging alerts, with the majority being classified as benign.

This situation is not unique to traditional security tools, which are often very accurate but fail due to their narrow focus and lack of environmental context. Sophisticated attackers exploit exposures invisible to these tools, using widely-available bypass kits to evade detection. The reality is that attackers do not employ just one attack technique or exploit a single type of exposure; they chain together multiple exposures, utilizing known CVEs where helpful, and employing evasion techniques to move laterally across an environment and accomplish their desired goals.

This highlights the need for more advanced security tools that can provide context and insights into the attack surface. Exposure management platforms have emerged as a solution to this problem, weaving exposure intelligence directly into existing analyst workflows. These platforms provide attack surface visibility and insight into interconnected exposures, providing immense value to SOC teams.

To make this point further, a comparison between a typical SOC workflow and the Continuous Threat Environment Management (CTEM) lifecycle is provided below:

Typical SOC Lifecycle:
* Monitor: Maintain continuous visibility into the entire attack surface, prioritizing critical assets that matter most to the business and attackers are most likely to go after.
* Share Attack Surface Visibility: Integration with CMDB and SOC tooling creates a unified view of the attack surface and critical assets, aligning security and IT teams on what matters most.
* Scope: Outline the scope of the exposure management program, identifying critical assets that matter most to the business, maintaining continuous visibility across the attack surface.

CTEM Lifecycle:
* Monitor: Maintain continuous visibility into the entire attack surface, prioritizing critical assets that matter most to the business and attackers are most likely to go after.
* Share Attack Surface Visibility: Integration with CMDB and SOC tooling creates a unified view of the attack surface and critical assets, aligning security and IT teams on what matters most.
* Scope: Outline the scope of the exposure management program, identifying critical assets that matter most to the business, maintaining continuous visibility across the attack surface.

Detect:
* Identify suspicious and malicious activity across the attack surface, ideally before access is gained or critical systems and data are compromised.

Contextualize Threat Alerts:
When detections fire, SOC analysts instantly see the asset's risk posture and whether suspicious activity aligns with known attack paths, turning generic alerts into targeted investigations.

Discover:
Uncover exposures across the attack surface, including attack paths, vulnerabilities, misconfigs, identity and permissions issues, etc.

Triage:
Validate security alerts and correlate event logs to identify true security incidents and malicious activity vs benign anomalous activity.

Improve Disposition Accuracy:
Make better-informed decisions with asset and business context to sift through the noise of security alerts while reducing the risk of false negatives.

Prioritize:
Prioritize discovered exposures based on threat intelligence, environment and business context to focus remediation operations on the most impactful and imminent risk.

Investigate:
Deep dive into threat intelligence, event logs and other findings to determine the blast radius, root cause, and impact of a security incident.

Visualize Complex Attack Chains:
Transform abstract risk findings into validated potential attack scenarios. Analysts can visualize how threat actors would chain together specific exposures, identifying critical choke points.

Validate:
Confirm that discovered exposures are actually present, are reachable by threat actors and can actually be exploited based on patch availability and compensating controls.

Respond:
Take action to minimize breach impact and eliminate the threat within the environment.

Targeted Incident Response:
Understanding exploitable paths enables precise containment and remediation, addressing specific exposures quickly without disruptive over-isolation or business impact.

Mobilize:
Drive efficient and effective remediation of exposures by driving cross-functional alignment, automating notification and ticketing workflows, and where possible, implementing security mitigations and automating patching workflows.

This natural alignment between proactive and reactive teams' high-level workflows makes it easy to see where the targeted threat and attack surface intelligence derived from exposure management platforms can be of use to SOC teams prior to and in the midst of a threat investigation.

The magic really starts to happen when teams integrate their exposure management platforms with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools to deliver contextual threat intelligence precisely when and where SOC analysts need it most.

This allows teams to automatically correlate discovered exposures with specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques, creating actionable threat intelligence that's immediately relevant to each organization's unique attack surface.

For exposures that can't be immediately remediated, teams can leverage this intelligence to inform detection engineering and threat hunting activities. This creates a continuous feedback loop where exposure intelligence informs detection updates, improves alert triage and investigation, and supports automated response and prioritized remediation.

In conclusion, the future of SOC operations lies not in processing more alerts faster, but in preventing the conditions that generate unnecessary alerts while developing laser-focused capabilities against the threats that matter most. Continuous exposure management provides the environmental awareness that transforms generic security tools into precision instruments.



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