Securing your Attack Surface

The rapid and widespread adoption of information technology has enabled incredible business innovation, efficiency, and value. However, it has also magnified the set of attack surfaces that must be defended. And unfortunately, malicious actors are taking advantage of this. Secureworks Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU™) found that dwell times between initial access and ransomware payload delivery often fall just under 24 hours. This means that security teams typically have less than one day to detect and respond.

Although information security teams work hard to meet this challenge, too often they approach it by deploying yet another security tool. According to an InfoSecurity magazine survey, on average enterprises utilize 76 security vendor products. Given the unforgiving threat landscape, the skillsets and operational effort required to effectively manage these complex environments can be daunting.

By taking a step back and reassessing their technology, processes, and partnerships, however, security leaders can choose a faster, easier, and more effective approach. To explore this, let's break down and analyze our premise - that you must first understand your attack surface, in order to defend it - and then we'll show how to significantly improve security effectiveness.

Open Systems Drive Understanding

Filtering signal from noise makes your job easier

Let's first define understanding an environment. Understanding requires clear visibility into the enterprise's attack surface - its collection of network, endpoint, cloud, email, application, and identity systems that are inviting targets, However, this isn't easy - enterprise environments are notoriously complex and heterogeneous, with a wide variety of on-premises and cloud-based systems. To solve this, many companies utilize SIEM solutions or other platforms that purport to be "open" but typically only import and archive log data for future searches. True understanding requires an open platform so that these diverse log sources can be actively ingested, thoroughly correlated, and proactively analyzed. This important capability allows enterprises to contextualize a seemingly benign alert and recognize it as an artifact of an otherwise under-the-radar attack.

Broad and Deep Visibility into Your Attack Surface

A platform with pre-built integrations and augmented by AI will amplify your SOC team's reach and effectiveness

Next, let's examine the term attack surface. This isn't just about being able to monitor and analyze logs from your environment, but also the ability to incorporate your unique attributes, systems, and processes into a holistic defense model. From a security perspective, you need to work with a seasoned team, and best of breed technology solutions.

To do this well, organizations need the ability to obtain telemetry and have highly effective enforcement tools and processes for the entire IT ecosystem. Enterprises must recognize that one control point isn't enough - 60% of threats come from outside the endpoint, highlighting the need for coverage across all attack vectors. Effective security monitoring and response therefore requires the use of an open XDR (Extended Detection and Response) platform with the ability to combine and analyze this wide variety of data sources.

Rapid and Informed Response Delivers Stronger Defense

An expert response team will defend your business from current and emerging threats

Finally, let's look at the term defense. An effective cyber defense combines prevention, detection, prioritization, and response, building on the foundation of understanding. In addition, effective responses go beyond simple containment - they require the ability to remediate and recover.

This is where you need a skilled security team to triage, investigate, and respond, with knowledge of your specific environment and attack surface. This team should also be guided by playbooks and enhanced by AI. Proven playbooks capture best practices for combatting both known and unknown threat actors, and modern AI capabilities allow teams to operate with clarity and decisiveness in even the largest or most complex environments.

Secureworks Closes Your Cybersecurity Skills Gaps and Improves Results

Securing your business is a complex challenge, and it's difficult to achieve on your own. Fortunately, Secureworks has the experience and skills to understand your attack surface, and help you defend it. Our open approach maximizes your existing investments, and our scalability ensures a future-proof outcome. Our global SecOps team, backed by world-class Incident Responders and Threat Hunters, keeps you secure with 24x7 security monitoring, detection, and response. Our threat intelligence gives you insights on the latest threats and trends. And when you need help, we're there immediately - Secureworks® customers get access to a SOC analyst in 90 seconds or less, and our median time to detect, investigate and respond to threats is 36 minutes. You also benefit from unlimited incident response for monitored assets, so you can be confident that you're continually protected.

In addition to our rapid response, we also proactively invest in your success. We deliver quarterly cybersecurity maturity and performance updates, ensuring that you continuously improve, apply best practices and benchmarks, and benefit from our experience.

And no matter how complex your environment, Secureworks platform and team embraces technology diversity, rather than fighting it. Over 30% of our customers have a mixed-vendor endpoint environment, so our platform and team are experienced and capable of delivering simplicity and performance for you.

Not only do our security teams triage, investigate, and respond for thousands of customers each year, we've also developed AI tools and automated playbooks to augment and enhance their capabilities. Our detection algorithms are powered by more than 40 billion unique threats and knowledge nodes, which are continuously updated by our team of dedicated threat researchers, Secureworks CTU. This ensures that your business' defense is informed by the latest threat types, research, and approaches, leveraging our collective security experience across a global customer base.

In an ever-evolving threat landscape, the security of your business relies on a proactive approach with holistic visibility to defend your attack surface. To learn more, read our White Paper on how Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions have evolved to solve your organizations' top security challenges, and what to look for in an MDR partner.

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