Strengthening Security Operations: How to Make Analysts More Productive

Security analysts are all too familiar with the problems of alert fatigue, spinning chair-type analysis, and “ghost tracking” caused by false positives. Faced with massive amounts of data from an expanding digital footprint and attack surfaces across hybrid multi-cloud environments, you need to quickly identify real threats amidst all the noise without being derailed by outdated intelligence.

Many organizations must juggle dozens of security tools that generate distributed, context-free information that undermines the fundamental triad of cybersecurity: tools, processes, and people. To manage these inefficiencies that can delay critical threat response, security operations teams must look to embrace AI and automation.

A day at SOC

A SOC analyst’s job often involves dealing with limited visibility due to an expanding attack surface and responding to context-free alerts that are difficult to decipher. As a result, they often spend up to a third of their day investigating false positives.^One Not only does this impact your productivity, but it also hinders your ability to process about half of your daily notifications.^One This may be an indicator of a real attack.

The biggest challenges facing SOC analysts today are:

• Low Visibility: Two out of three organizations increased their attack surface in 2022, according to the 2022 State of Attack Management report.
• Alert Fatigue and Disconnected Tools: According to the same Attack Surface Management report, 80% of organizations have 10 or more tools (e.g. EDR, EPP, NDR, SIEM, threat intelligence, web traffic, email filtering, systems, network and application logs, cloud) ) is used. logs, IAM tools, etc.).
• Responding to Cyberattacks: IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report found that 51% of organizations struggle to detect and respond to advanced threats.
• Outdated tools and manual methods: According to the same data breach report, 32% of organizations lack security automation and orchestration.
• Lack of standardization to combat organized cybercrime globally: The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index shows signs of increased collaboration between cybercrime groups.

In addition to these major challenges, there are other common issues such as increasing complexity, resource constraints due to rising costs, and talent shortages (also known as skills gaps).

As first responders, how SOC analysts prioritize, classify, and investigate warnings and signs of suspicious activity will determine the fate of the attack and its impact on the organization. When these challenges slow SOC analysts down, they can increase defense deficits and breach windows, exposing the organization to higher risk.

Threats thrive in complexity and noise, unable to keep up with the acceleration of attacks. An attack can occur in minutes or seconds, while analysts doing manual work do it in hours or days. This speed difference is a real risk in itself.

Without comprehensive visibility, intelligent risk prioritization, effective detection, proactive threat detection, and skill deployment, SOC analysts cannot improve their workflows and evolve with the threat landscape, and the vicious cycle continues.

Increasing the productivity of security analysts is essential to scaling cybersecurity in a rapidly evolving threat environment. After customers and security experts spoke about their key challenges, these efficiencies became the goal, and IBM designed a purpose-built solution to give analysts what they need to be more productive.

Rapid investigation and response

QRadar Log Insights is a simplified integration that enables security operations teams to discover and perform analytics, automatically investigate incidents, and take recommended actions using all security-related data, regardless of the location or type of data source. We provide analytics experience (UAX).

UAX in QRadar Log Insights allows you to:

• AI-powered risk prioritization: As data comes in, logs and alerts are automatically checked against security rules and indicators of compromise (IoC) from threat intelligence sources. The business context is enriched and then processed by a self-learning engine informed by the work of past analysts. This engine identifies high-fidelity results and filters out false positives. AI-based risk scoring is then applied. Analysts didn’t have to do anything, but all steps and information about events, threat intelligence, and enforcement scores were available for analysis.

• Automated Investigations: Cases are automatically created for incidents that exceed calculated risk thresholds using a combined score of correlated events. Events in a case are arranged in a timeline so you can quickly see the stages of an attack. All identified artifacts are collected as evidence such as IoC, IP and DNS addresses, hostnames, user IDs, vulnerability CVEs, etc. Additionally, findings are continuously correlated with artifacts collected over a sliding time window, providing continuous monitoring into the future.

• Recommended Action: Based on the artifacts and techniques identified in the attack, Log Insights proposes clear mitigation actions to ensure rapid response and rapid containment.

• Case Management: Integrated case management streamlines collaboration and tracks progress to resolution. All evidence is collected, appropriate actions are recommended and actions taken by colleagues are recorded.

• Insightful Attack Visualization: Comprehensive graphical visualization shows the attack path, highlighting the sequence and mapping the attack stages to the affected resources (blast radius). This visualization helps SOC analysts measure impact, understand potential sustainability technologies, and identify the most critical areas to address first.

Attack phases are also mapped to MITER TTP, providing detailed insight into enemy behavior and progress.

• Unified Search: High-performance search engine helps hunt threats across all data sources. Search data from security tools EDR, SIEM, NDR, log management, cloud, email security, and more from a single screen with a single query. This feature enables expanded investigation of third-party sources, both on-premises and in other clouds. Accepts data not yet collected in Log Insights. You can query data within Log Insights and multiple external data sources simultaneously at no additional cost.

• Integrated Threat Intelligence: X-Force and community sourced threat intelligence is continuously updated to automatically track threat activity. This dynamic system enhances detection capabilities in response to previously unseen threats.

Powered by AI and automation, the UAX suite of integrated capabilities simplifies risk prioritization, threat investigation and visualization, integrated discovery, and case management, enabling analysts to process incidents with incredible speed and efficiency.

Maximize analyst productivity with QRadar Log Insights

Disconnected information and fragmented workflows can significantly increase the time it takes security analysts to investigate and take action on security events. In cybersecurity, how your security team spends their time can mean the difference between simply analyzing a security event and dealing with a full-blown data breach. Every second counts.

To keep up with the explosion of data and alerts, organizations must go beyond the limitations of manual processes. By integrating artificial intelligence and automation into their workflows, analysts will be better equipped to keep pace with and respond to the rapidly growing cyber threat landscape.

Increase analyst productivity with a modern log management and security observability platform.

To learn more, visit the QRadar Log Insights page and get the opportunity to learn more about the IBM Security QRadar Suite, a comprehensive threat detection and response solution powered by UAX.

Learn more about IBM Security® QRadar® Suite, a comprehensive threat detection and response solution powered by UAX.

Explore QRadar Log Insights