Hey everyone! We’re going to be focusing on building out the core competent of your SOC! This post is going to be pretty high level, not too in the weeds as I want to cover the hot items that go into the average SOC these days. There is a more technical blog along side this one, SIEM and Detection Engineering Essentials that digs into the weeds of SIEM & Detection Engineering. We’re going to keep this post pretty straight forward and to the point again.

1. The SIEM as the Cornerstone of Security Operations

A SIEM forms the backbone of any SecOps program by providing real-time visibility into the organization’s security posture. Through comprehensive log aggregation, correlation, and reporting, the SIEM enables quick detection and response to security incidents. Here’s why the SIEM is critical and how it shapes the detect-and-respond approach:

• Logging and Data Collection:Collect Everything (but with Focus), while it’s tempting to log “all the things,” a targeted approach can help avoid data overload. Prioritize high-value log sources that provide critical insights.
• Building Detections and Reports: By analyzing log data, SOC teams can build custom detections to identify suspicious behaviors, such as abnormal login patterns or unauthorized file access.
• Dashboards and Reporting: Effective dashboards visualize key metrics, highlighting areas of concern and helping teams track metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) for improved incident response times.

2. Essential Data Sources for SIEM and Key Detections

To maximize visibility, it’s critical to pull in key data sources that provide insight across your environment:

• Network Logs (firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS): These logs reveal potential intrusions and lateral movement.
• Endpoint Logs: EDR and workstation logs give insight into user behavior and are crucial for detecting malware or suspicious activities.
• Authentication and Access Logs: Data from Active Directory, VPNs, and cloud apps reveal unauthorized access attempts and account misuse.
• Cloud and Application Logs: SaaS and IaaS logs track access, modifications, and user behavior on critical applications.

Important Detections to Consider:

• Suspicious login attempts (e.g., impossible travel times, logins from unusual IPs)
• File integrity changes on critical systems
• Malware detections on endpoints
• Privileged account use and abuse
• Unexpected changes to critical configurations (e.g., firewall rules)

3. MTTD and MTTR: Key Metrics for SecOps Success

Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) are essential KPIs that measure the effectiveness of a SecOps team. MTTD gauges how quickly the team can identify incidents, while MTTR tracks how fast they can contain and remediate threats. Tracking these metrics over time allows SOCs to continually refine detection and response processes, improving their resilience against evolving threats.

4. EDR: The SOC’s Eyes and Ears on Endpoints

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is vital for SOC and Incident Response (IR) teams, providing detailed visibility into endpoint activities. EDR tools continuously monitor and collect data on endpoint behaviors, alerting teams to abnormal patterns, malicious processes, and files.

• Why EDR Matters for SOC and IR: Since most attacks begin on endpoints, EDR offers rapid response capabilities, allowing SOC teams to isolate, investigate, and mitigate threats at their source.
• Integration with Detection Engineering: EDR provides deep visibility and data that detection engineers can use to craft custom alerts, improving the accuracy and relevance of SOC detections.

5. Detection Engineering: Crafting Accurate and Actionable Alerts

Detection engineering is the process of designing and fine-tuning detections to catch the right incidents without overwhelming analysts with noise. This process involves:

• Understanding Attack Patterns: Using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, detection engineers model detections around known attack techniques, tactics, and procedures.
• Rule Development and Testing: Engineers write custom detection rules and test them rigorously to ensure accuracy and reliability, often based on threat intelligence.
• Reducing False Positives: A major challenge in detection engineering is finding the balance between alerting on real threats and minimizing false positives to avoid alert fatigue.

6. Threat Hunting: Taking a Proactive Approach to Security

Threat hunting is a proactive practice where analysts actively search for hidden threats that bypass existing defenses. Unlike traditional reactive approaches, threat hunting is about finding potential compromises before they escalate.

• Building Hypotheses and Investigations: Threat hunters develop hypotheses based on threat intelligence, recent incidents, and suspicious patterns, then use SIEM data, EDR telemetry, and network logs to search for anomalies.
• Identifying Indicators of Compromise (IoCs): Threat hunters look for IoCs and TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) that indicate potential breaches.
• Iterative Learning and Improvement: Threat hunting results feed back into the SOC’s detection mechanisms, helping teams develop better detections and expand their knowledge base.

7. Threat Intelligence: Enhancing Detection with Contextual Data

Threat intelligence enriches SecOps by providing critical context on emerging threats, allowing SOC teams to prepare and respond more effectively. Integrating threat intelligence into detection and response efforts has several benefits:

• Improving Detection Accuracy: By incorporating IoCs and threat actor profiles, SOC teams can create more targeted detections.
• Contextualizing Incidents: Threat intelligence helps analysts understand the larger threat landscape, enabling more informed decisions during incident response.
• Supporting Threat Hunting: Intelligence on current threats can help hunters prioritize activities and focus on the most relevant TTPs.

Conclusion:

Like I said, we kept this post pretty straightforward to continue the theme that I’m pushing right now. The previous post around Threat Detection Strategy set the stage for this post and it’s counter part focusing on the SIEM and Detection Strategies for SecOps. The threat land scape is constantly changing and SOC’s need to be prepared for as many attacks as they can. I’m hoping these posts help SOCs who are maybe a bit on the less mature side of things find areas to focus on and bolster their detection abilites.

Thank you again so much for reading this. If you have any questions, feedback, etc please find me on LinkedIn or Twitter (X) and have a chat!

We have many more posts to come around a lot of fun and interesting security topics over the coming weeks so stay tuned!