The security operations center (SOC) plays a critical role in an enterprise organization’s efforts to protect their data from rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats. However, for a variety of reasons revealed in this report by the Ponemon Institute—based on a survey sponsored by Devo of more than 500 IT and security practitioners—organizations are frustrated with their SOC’s lack of effectiveness in performing its vital work.

Hello, security enthusiasts! This is part seven (can you believe it?) of the Elastic SIEM for home and small business blog series. If you haven’t read the first six blogs in the series, you may want to before going any further. In the prerequisite blogs we created our Elasticsearch Service deployment (part 1), secured access to our cluster by restricting privileges for users and Beats (part 2), then we created an ingest pipeline for GeoIP data and reviewed our Beats configurations (part 3).

As someone who began working in security operations centers (SOC) more than 30 years ago, back when we were known as computer incident response teams (CIRT), I am acutely aware of just how challenging it is to make a living as a SOC analyst. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about the new Devo Security Operations Platform we launched recently.

Another RSA Conference is in the books and despite a few vendors pulling out due to public health concerns, the show went on and offered attendees a glimpse of what lies ahead in the world of cybersecurity. The main theme for this year’s RSA event focused on the human element in addressing the behaviors and activities of users and analysts.

Phishing attacks aren’t going away anytime soon. The numbers from Verizon’s 2019 DBIR Report and SANS Institute prove only one thing: When you’ve done all you can to protect against phishing attacks, that means it’s time to do more.

As the cloud continues to expand with no end in sight, it’s only wise to invest in it. Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service bring significant cost savings (personnel and ownership), improved performance, better reliability, freedom to scale and - above all - significant security benefits. It’s no wonder that so many businesses have already adopted all three of these models.

When thinking about many of the worst data breaches we’ve seen so far (Equifax, CapitalOne, Target, Home Depot, and more), there was one common element: The attacks were not detected while they were active on the internal networks. It’s easy to think of the internal network as what’s onsite and directly in control. However, an organizations internal network also includes what extends beyond what’s on-premises, like instances within the public cloud and off-site hosted data centers.

Given the complexity of large enterprise environments, coupled with the diversity of the vendor landscape, there is no single, agreed-upon “best” way to buy security. The battles continue between CAPEX or OPEX, net-30 or net-90, annual or multi-year, perpetual or subscription. One thing we do know, however, is that all too often the consumer pays for something he or she does not use.

In advance of the RSA Conference 2020, we wanted to get a pulse of attendees’ perceptions on a few topics, specifically challenges facing modern SOCs (security operations centers) and the value they are getting from technologies such as analytics, automation, and their SIEM tools. To get this, we fielded a series of questions to the Twitter-verse and received nearly 17,000 votes! After going through the results, we found a few interesting things…

The tongue-in-cheek named malware detection tool, Yet Another Recursive Acronym (YARA) is described as “the pattern-matching Swiss Army knife for malware researchers (and everyone else)”. The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Enterprise platform is one of the first SIEM solutions to incorporate it as a built-in feature. This gives blue teamers an additional layer of detection built into the SIEM.