How to eliminate the noise in your cyber security monitoring

Cyber secuirty monitoring: A full-time job for businesses

Everyone knows the volume and severity of security threats is increasing. An average of 164 cybercrime reports are made by Australians every day, according to the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC)¹. That’s one every ten minutes.

For business owners, the threat is both real and overwhelming. Failure to effectively prevent a cyber-attack can have all kinds of far-reaching consequences.  

According to a study by Deloitte Australia, the true impacts of cyber-attack lie both above and beneath the surface. The direct costs, which lie above, include things like paying fines, attorney fees and litigation, executing customer breach notifications and running technical investigations. The ‘hidden’ costs, which lie beneath, are things like insurance premium increases, operational disruption, the lost value of customer relationships, value of lost contract revenue and loss of intellectual property. The study suggests that these hidden costs are actually far more significant, and can equate to up to 95% of the overall impact². 

Cyber-security monitoring systems are now able to detect all kinds of suspect activity around the clock. However, this has also resulted in a situation where IT teams need to sort through thousands of ‘false positives’ which can obscure the genuine threats that need urgent attention. With so much benign activity now being detected, and IT teams overwhelmed by their workload, it can be very easy for cyber-criminals to lurk in the shadows – then strike when the time is right.  

So, what’s the solution? 

Effective cyber-security requires a fresh and highly customised approach – one that takes the specific nuances of your business into account.  

For instance, a typical cyber-security solution will automatically provide you with an alert if there is any activity across your business after hours – say, between midnight and 4 am. However, if your business has a team that regularly works a night shift between these hours, you could be receiving thousands of unnecessary alerts on a daily basis. These alerts simply create ‘noise’ that can obscure a genuine threat from a dangerous source.  

Similarly, a blanket defence strategy could also give low-value archival material on your network the same protection priority as highly confidential transactional data.  

To provide truly effective security, you need to be able to go beyond out-of-the-box settings, and ensure your solution is fully customised to your business on an ongoing basis.  

How can Interactive and Azure Sentinel help?  

At Interactive, our philosophy is to design a security strategy around what’s most important to your business and then to allocate defensive resources accordingly.  

This approach is backed by Australia’s 2020 Cyber Security Strategy, released last year by the Home Affairs Department, which suggests “business owners need clear and succinct explanations of the threats that apply to them, the vulnerabilities they need to address, and the associated business risks. The most value comes from industry-specific examples and responses.”³  

We take the time to understand your business’s unique risks, likely threats and the appropriate responses, and then build a full cyber-security detection and response plan that uses Azure Sentinel as its foundation.  

Azure Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native solution that helps you manage security events and orchestrate a response. It delivers intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence right across an organisation, and acts as a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting and threat response. Essentially, it gives you a birds-eye view across your business and by automatically categorising and prioritising information, alleviates the stress of increasingly sophisticated attacks and the growing volume of alerts.  

Importantly, Azure Sentinel can be completely customised to your organisation. The expert team at Interactive can take care of these processes, and manage the solution on your behalf, from start to finish. 

A clear pathway to better risk management  

While there is no ‘silver bullet’ that will improve your organisation’s security, a well-managed project shouldn’t require endless rounds of consultations, workshops and technical meetings.  

Based on years of experience helping companies from all industries improve the efficiency and efficacy of their cyber-security approach, we have developed a clear set of steps that ensure your defences are matched to your business’s digital assets. 

When implementing and managing a security solution, our key steps include:  

• Risk Assessment – we establish your risk profile and identify critical assets, strategically aligned to business value.  
• Monitoring Set Up – we work with you to install and connect monitoring tools with each piece of your infrastructure landscape. 
• Sentinel Alerts and Playbooks – we establish a custom set of alerts for your business, and attach operational playbooks for each alert level. 
• SOAR Integration  – Security Orchestration and Automated Response connected to allow low-level security event management without human assistance 
• Attack Simulations and Validation – we then stress-test your solution in a simulated threat environment, allowing for staff familiarisation and validation of the approach. 
• Incident Response – we provide live monitoring and response to active threat events and incidents, including containment strategies and measures. 
• Optimisation and Management – we keep a continuous loop of feedback and improvement, to ensure security measures keep pace with evolving threats.

While each business – and the infrastructure it runs on – is unique, we maintain that a risk-based assessment is always the correct approach to optimising your defences. If you’d like to explore the advantages of a risk-based security approach, or would like to get started with Azure Sentinel, get in touch with our team today.