The Challenges of Cyber Security in an Ever-Evolving Threat Landscape

As if the chronic shortage of skilled and experienced staff and the rising complexity and number of tools and technologies they have to use and monitor on a daily basis didn’t make life difficult enough for cybersecurity professionals, the fact that the threat landscape continues to evolve at a seemingly unrestrainable rate makes things that much worse, leading to more successful attacks with increasingly severe consequences. An evolving threat means that attackers are constantly changing their tactics and techniques, becoming more sophisticated and using more advanced tools that allow them to breach computer systems and networks virtually undetected and inflict damages that are oftentimes irreparable.

The Number and Complexity of Environments You Have to Manage Rises, Giving More Room for the Threat Landscape to Grow and Evolve

One of the main factors allowing threat actors to successfully apply their skills and be more effective in their attempts to gain access to organizations’ systems is the rising number of environments that security teams are in charge of monitoring and controlling, thus expanding the attack surface and potentially uncovering more weak spots for attackers to exploit.

Nowadays, Security Operations Centers (SOCs) have to keep many more environments under control than they used to in the past. This includes the cloud, virtual environments, data centers and container environments, to name a few. This, paired with the fact that teams are already short-staffed as it is, gives attackers the upper hand and allows them to perform their exploits much more easily.

Increased Volumes of Information Without the Proper Context

Another challenge for SOCs is the fact that the enormous amounts of information that security professionals have to sort through and analyze on a daily basis, is coming their way from a multitude of sources without the proper context. That puts them under additional strain and takes up much of their time, which they could otherwise use more productively, rather than for analyzing large volumes of data, much of which often turns out to be false alerts.

One of the ways to tackle this challenge is utilizing the power of threat intelligence. By adding threat intelligence to your security strategy, you give your team the tool that can reduce that alert noise dramatically. Threat intelligence operations can provide the security team in your organization with information from current and past threat actor activities, after it has already been processed and analyzed by cyber security experts. This way, the information is being given context and is properly parsed and filtered, so that your team only receives the relevant and actionable information, saving them a lot of valuable time and allowing them to focus on other tasks. On top of that, armed with this finished intelligence that is tailor-made to a specific organization’s needs and security environment, SOCs have a better understanding of the threat landscape and can adjust their strategy accordingly, so that they can be prepared to detect and respond to future threats more effectively and reduce the risk of suffering a data breach and minimize the impact of a potentially successful attack.

If you want to learn more about how threat intelligence can help protect your organization in this evolving threat landscape, please contact us at sales@quoscient.io.