Do you aspire to become a standout in the SOC world? To excel, you must consistently cultivate both your technical hard skills and non-technical soft skills. No specific career path is the golden ticket; each individual’s journey to SOC stardom is a blend of conventional education and hands-on training, seasoned with vital real-world experience. A purpose-built SOC analyst home lab is one proven self-guided learning tool to sharpen your technical know-how.

Threat hunting is proactively identifying and thwarting unusual network activity that could indicate an attempted security breach. It’s a historically manual activity, making it time-intensive and arduous. It’s no wonder, then, why most organizations don’t have the time, budget, or resources to undertake it effectively…if at all.

The threat landscape today is complex and constantly changing. Organizations require robust cybersecurity solutions to protect their networks and systems. SIEM and SOAR are two technologies that are pivotal in strengthening security operations. In this article, I’ll look at both technologies, SIEM and SOAR, to help you understand the importance of strengthening your organization’s SecOps.

For folks who are responsible for threat detection of any kind for their organizations, the cloud can often be a difficult area to approach. At the time of writing, Amazon Web Services contains over two hundred services, while the Azure cloud offers six hundred. Each of these services can generate unique telemetry and each surface can present defenders with a unique attack path to handle. Adding to this complexity is the diversity of cloud workload configurations, as well as varying architecture models.

In the dynamic realm of data processing, Amazon EMR takes center stage as an AWS-provided big data service, offering a cost-effective conduit for running Apache Spark and a plethora of other open-source applications. While the capabilities of EMR are impressive, the art of vigilant monitoring holds the key to unlocking its full potential. This blog post explains the pivotal role of monitoring Amazon EMR clusters, accentuating the transformative integration with Elastic®.

Let's face it: Managing cybersecurity for multiple clients as an MSP can feel like navigating a maze, full of pitfalls and traps. Just when you think you have one security issue managed, another one pops up.

One of the security features available in Elasticsearch® Service (Elastic® Cloud) is traffic filtering. Traffic filtering enables network layer security by limiting access to the deployment from configured networks only. In addition to the security policies consisting of role based access control (RBAC) employing principle of least privilege, using traffic filtering in conjunction provides greater security.

Sitting at your desk, coding away with another cup of your favorite caffeine-infused beverage, you might be thinking to yourself, “it’s true what they say about no rest for the weary.” If you’re developing an app or architecting a cloud-native system, you can actually get the REST you need with the right Application Programming Interface (API). REST APIs provide a scalable, flexible, easy-to-use interface that makes developing and connecting web apps easier.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is essential for enterprise organizations because it provides the tools and capabilities needed to effectively monitor, detect, respond to, and mitigate cybersecurity threats, while also supporting compliance and overall security strategy enhancement.

Cloud SIEM solutions can help to address these challenges, but successful deployment, management and monitoring of cloud SIEM can present its own challenges. In this blog post, we outline key approaches and tips to help maximise the performance of your cloud SIEM platform.

In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has the responsibility of upholding information rights in the public interest. The ICO work with businesses and public sector organisations to offer guidance and best practices for using data and information responsibly, as well as regulating and enforcing relevant laws.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) act as bridges between applications so they can share data. APIs are fundamental to the complex, interconnected systems, enabling organizations to streamline business processes and reduce redundancies. REST APIs are easy to use and understand because they use the same noun- and verb-based format as HTTP. Simultaneously, attackers know how to manipulate this language, making REST APIs a common attack target.

For many years, hackers and cybercriminals have used social engineering techniques to gain unauthorized access to confidential information. It is easy to predict that these attacks will continue to advance in sophistication and frequency. Whether they are using AI to create better lures or cyber criminals are just getting more adept at exploiting human nature, the success of these attacks proves the tactics are winning.

Did you know that you can assign roles to users to implement fine-grained control for your Elastic® Cloud organization and deployments? Role-based access control (RBAC) is a cloud security best practice that is considered a standard feature in enterprise software, as it provides a structured way to manage access to cloud resources. Within an RBAC framework, roles are a vital construct for grouping, organizing, and delegating permissions to different users.

The Security Operations Center (SOC) plays a critical role in reducing cyber risk. Successful management of a SOC, however, is a team effort that requires the combined expertise of entry-level (tier 1), mid-level (tier 2), and senior-level (tier 3) analysts. In this piece, we break down the key differences of the three analyst tiers, offer tips for each tier, and provide universal advice to help you succeed in your SOC career.

In the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, the need for a comprehensive security data lake (SDL) has become important to some enterprises. Organizations face multi-vector threats that demand extensive data analysis to effectively counter them.

Datadog Cloud SIEM helps customers protect their cloud environment and SaaS applications against threats with built-in threat detection rules, interactive dashboards, workflow blueprints, and in-depth support resources. These capabilities provide valuable insights into your security posture, so you can respond promptly to emerging threats. In order to generate these insights, Cloud SIEM analyzes log data, which users can start sending to Datadog by enabling one of our out-of-the-box integrations.

Anyone tracking the evolution of the IT industry is probably familiar with the concept of Industry 4.0. Essentially, it describes the process by which traditional industrial tasks become both digitized and continually managed in an IT-like fashion via modern technologies like cloud computing, digital twins, Internet of Things (IoT) sensorization, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.

Cloud infrastructures can comprise thousands of interconnected and dynamic resources. This complexity introduces unique challenges to monitoring and securing these architectures. Understanding where user activity originates—and what actions constitute security threats—is a complex task when you’re dealing with the huge volume of logs, metrics, and other telemetry that highly distributed cloud environments generate each day.

Richer alert contextualization, generative AI in GA, ATT&CK® coverage view, cloud security posture management (CSPM) for Google Cloud, and automated CSPM onboarding for AWS accounts Elastic Security brings a MITRE ATT&CK®-aligned detection coverage view, richer alert contextualization, and extended cloud security posture management (CSPM) to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Playbooks — and automated processes in general — used to be associated primarily with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms, but that has changed recently. Many modern security information and event management (SIEM) solutions have started incorporating SOAR-like functionality, enabling you to automate security workflows and improve your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).

If you want to visualize how data flows across your connected applications, you can think back to that childhood game of Chutes and Ladders (also called Snakes and Ladders). As a kid, the board felt like a confusing grid that had the weirdest, seemingly arbitrary connections between blocks. In your modern digital environment, your Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) fulfill the same role that the ladders and chutes/snakes fulfilled, connecting disparate blocks across a larger whole.

Take control of your own security operations center with the help of this comprehensive guide on Google Chronicle SIEM – get answers to all your questions here!

The fastest adversary can “break out” — or move laterally — in only seven minutes after compromising an endpoint. Yes, you heard that right. Seven minutes. In the relentless race against adversaries, every second counts. To avoid breaches, you need to detect and stop adversaries before they can break out and expand their realm of control.

From cybersecurity to AI to legacy IT, agencies are united by similar obstacles So far the twenty-first century has unleashed a torrent of technological innovations, becoming a double-edged sword for governments worldwide. The growing burden of legacy IT systems, cybersecurity threats, AI incorporation, data privacy concerns, budgetary constraints, and shifting geopolitical landscapes puts governments at the forefront of a rapidly evolving environment.

Keeping up to date in any field can be challenging, but this ethos might not ring more true than in cybersecurity. The dynamic nature of the industry requires SOC analysts to always be on their toes with new and emerging threats across a constantly expanding attack surface. New threats and vulnerabilities can pop up on a nearly daily basis. Don’t let this discourage you because this is also what can make the role so satisfying!