Vulnerability management is the continuous process of identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in an organization’s IT infrastructure, while patch management is the process of accessing, testing, and installing patches that fix bugs or address known security vulnerabilities in software applications. Vulnerability management and patch management are crucial SecOps processes that protect IT assets against cyber threats and prevent unauthorized access to secure systems.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services occupy an important niche in the cybersecurity industry, supporting SMBs and enterprise organizations with managed security monitoring and threat detection, proactive threat hunting, and incident response capabilities.

As cybersecurity attack vectors evolve, security logging and monitoring are becoming even more important. Effective logging and monitoring enables organizations to detect and investigate security incidents quickly. Cloud-based attackers are getting more sophisticated, and often rely on stolen credentials to escalate privileges and move laterally within corporate IT networks.

MITRE ATT&CK is an invaluable resource for IT security teams, who can leverage the framework to enhance their cyber threat intelligence, improve threat detection capabilities, plan penetration testing scenarios, and assess cyber threat defenses for gaps in coverage.

In cybersecurity, it’s a big challenge to handle diverse data formats across various platforms. The Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) aims to address this by standardizing data security formats and simplifying the process of threat hunting. Major players like IBM, AWS and others are working together to standardize data with this open-source project, emphasizing its importance.

Establishing a proactive security posture involves a data-driven approach to threat detection, investigation, and response. In the past, this was challenging because there wasn’t a centralized way to collect and analyze security data across sources, but with Amazon Security Lake it is much simpler.

Developing a proactive security strategy can potentially save an organization millions of dollars per year. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 added up to a staggering $4.45 million, up 15% over the last three years. This is especially true for cloud-native environments, which face unique security challenges due to their dynamic nature.

Establishing an effective cyber threat hunting program is among the top priorities of enterprise security leaders seeking a proactive approach to detecting and counteracting potential threats. Furthermore, implementing a proactive threat hunting program, security teams that leverage formalized frameworks or threat hunting methodologies are far more likely to detect vulnerabilities or in-process malicious activities in their environments than those that do not.