Leveraging the NIST Cybersecurity Framework for Improved Threat Detection and Response

Threat detection and response are critical components of a robust cybersecurity strategy. However, simply relying on automated detections is no longer enough to protect your organization from downtime.

To reduce the chances of business disruption from advanced and unknown threats, security teams must operationalize threat intelligence by conducting proactive, hypothesis-driven threat hunts. By actively searching for, investigating, and neutralizing threats early in the attack chain, you can improve your ability to withstand and recover from the most advanced cyber threats.

Aligning your cybersecurity strategy with a widely recognized risk management framework enables you to develop a systematic approach to managing cyber risks. NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) stands out as a particularly popular choice, as its comprehensive set of risk management practices is aligned with other cybersecurity regulations and standards, including HIPAA, PCI DSS, Systems and Organization Controls (SOC) 2, and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001.

In this blog, we share how implementing NIST CSF can improve your threat detection and response capabilities and demonstrate compliance to regulators, auditors, customers and other stakeholders.

Reducing Cyber Risk with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF)

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework equips organizations of all sizes and sectors with standards and best practices for managing and mitigating cyber risk. Established in 2014 to standardize risk management in sectors like energy, banking, and healthcare, the NIST CSF evolved to become a widely adopted cyber risk management tool.

While mandatory only for U.S. federal agencies and their contractors, the NIST CSF benefits any organization by offering a structured, proactive approach to cybersecurity. Therefore, alignment with NIST CSF allows you to have a multi-layered defensive cyber risk management strategy with comprehensive vulnerability coverage.

The framework is structured around the six functional areas: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, and Govern. Each function sets out recommended cybersecurity activities, outcomes and references.

• Identify: Develop an understanding of managing cybersecurity risk to systems, assets, data, and capabilities.
• Protect: Develop and implement the necessary safeguards to ensure the delivery of critical infrastructure services.
• Detect: Implement appropriate controls to identify malicious activity.
• Respond: Take action regarding a detected cybersecurity event.
• Recover: Maintain plans for resilience and restore impaired capabilities or services.
• Govern: Establish and maintain appropriate governance structures and risk management processes.

NIST CSF: Detect (DE) Function

The Detect function of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework focuses on establishing controls to identify malicious activity within your network. Your ability to detect threats early is central to a proactive cybersecurity posture, allowing you to initiate a rapid coordinated response.

Implementing the Detect function involves strategic use of security tools and capabilities mapped to the three primary categories: Anomalies and Events, Detection Processes, and Continuous Monitoring. This includes setting up anomaly detection tools, ensuring continuous monitoring of your environment, and integrating security information and event management (SIEM) platforms to aggregate and analyze data from multiple signals within your environment.

Effective threat detection requires 24/7 visibility and around-the-clock coverage across your attack surface, backed by the latest threat intelligence. By combining data about Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), malicious IPs, and attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) with multi-signal telemetry and visibility across your environment, you can detect unknown or emerging threats before they ever have a chance to disrupt your business.

NIST CSF: Respond (RE) Function

The Respond function of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework sets recommendations for immediate actions that should be taken following the detection of a cybersecurity event. Effective response protocols enable you to withstand and swiftly recover from cyber incidents, minimizing operational disruption and reducing your downtime costs. Moreover, a well-orchestrated threat response demonstrates a high level of preparedness and resilience.

To implement the Respond function, establish a comprehensive Incident Response Plan (IRP). This plan should include containment actions to prevent the lateral spread of threats, recovery protocols to restore affected systems and data, and communication strategies for handling the messaging during and after an incident. Response actions should be informed by data collected from operationalizing threat intelligence and threat hunting to ensure they are effective and tailored to the identified threats.

Additionally, incorporating a thorough post-incident recovery and analysis into your IRP is vital for proactive risk management. Your IRP should include procedures for post-incident digital forensics analysis to determine the attack's root cause, scope and attacker pathways. This analysis helps enhance your response capabilities and strengthen your security posture against future attacks.

Importance of the Detect and Respond Functions to Build Cyber Resilience

Modern malware and ransomware attacks are highly customizable and hard to detect. The rise of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) models enable unskilled threat actors to easily purchase malware toolkits, customize them for each victim, and carry out attacks with increasing frequency.

Given the large volume and variation of these threats, traditional signature-based security controls are often unable to detect and effectively prevent attacks.

Effective threat detection and response capabilities are critical to quickly identify and mitigate cyber threats early in the attack chain which significantly improves the recovery time and minimizes downtime costs to an organization. Rapid detection is key to enabling timely response and preventing minor incidents from escalating into major breaches. Once a threat is detected, robust response mechanisms allow you to promptly contain and neutralize the threat, minimizing its impact on business operations.

Proactive Threat Hunting Explained

As cyber threats become more complex and elusive, integrating proactive, hypothesis-driven threat hunting is essential for robust threat detection and response.

Proactive threat hunting is the practice of actively searching for signs of malicious activities or IOCs that are not yet detected by existing security solutions. It employs manual or automated techniques to proactively look for new and unknown threats within your environment.

In practice, proactive threat hunting minimizes your Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR). By actively seeking out IOCs and anomalous behaviors, you can preemptively address vulnerabilities, reducing your overall cyber risk.

Differences Between Proactive Threat Hunting and Traditional Security Measures

According to Forrester, threat hunting is “A practitioner-led, hypothesis-driven exercise,” emphasizing the critical role of human expertise and judgment, supplemented by technology, to identify sophisticated or unknown threats.

Compared to traditional, alert-based security measures (e.g., firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms), proactive threat hunting enables security teams to:

• Limit vulnerability exploitation and system compromise: Unlike traditional security measures, which wait for alerts generated by security tools, proactive threat hunting actively seeks out threats before they trigger alerts. This approach accelerates the threat detection timeframe and reduces the window of opportunity for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities and compromise systems.
• Identify novel threats that evade standard detection: While traditional methods excel in addressing known threats with established signatures or patterns, they struggle with novel or sophisticated threats that require a nuanced understanding of evolving tactics. Proactive threat hunters can use their expertise, backed by the latest threat intelligence, to identify and mitigate new types of threats that automated tools might overlook.
• Augment automated threat disruption with a human-led approach: Traditional security measures are powered by automated threat detection systems, which have limitations. For example, automated tools may lack the ability to understand the broader context of network behavior and business operations, leading to a high degree of false positive alerts. Plus, automated detection systems may have difficulty correlating individual events into a comprehensive attack narrative, especially if the attack occurs over an extended period of time and spans multiple systems and networks. In contrast, human-driven proactive threat hunts combine a deep understanding of the organizational environment and multi-signal telemetry to assess alert relevance and determine the root cause of security incidents.

The Role of Operationalizing Threat Intelligence in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

“Every organization should have threat detection engineers or content developers, either in-house or through a partnership with a managed detection and response (MDR) provider. When you have a successful threat hunt, you have to go the last mile and then convert those into detections.”

Chas Clawson

Field CTO, Sumo Logic

Integrating real-time, actionable information about emerging or existing threats into your detection and response capabilities enables you to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and tailor response strategies to the specific characteristics of the threat landscape.

While proactive threat hunting can greatly enhance your cybersecurity posture, few organizations have the resources to operationalize threat intelligence and conduct global threat hunts in-house. In fact, a recent CyberRisk Alliance survey indicates that only 39% of organizations currently use threat intelligence to mitigate cyberattacks.

Building an in-house threat hunting program requires significant investment in expertise, tooling and access to industry-leading threat intelligence. For a proactive security posture, your team should be able to detect and respond to a sophisticated threat in minutes before it spreads laterally through your environment and attackers are able to exfiltrate critical data or deploy ransomware.

Outsourcing threat hunting to an MDR provider offers several advantages:

• Cost-efficiency: MDR services can be more cost-effective than maintaining an in-house threat hunting team, reducing the need for continuous investment in technology and training.
• Expertise: Outsourcing your security operations to an MDR provider offers access to specialized security experts and experienced threat hunters.
• Industry-leading Threat Intelligence: Partnering with an MDR provider like eSentire gives you access to high-fidelity IOCs that are regularly updated to inform your threat hunts.
• Multi-Signal Visibility: By ingesting and analyzing endpoint, log, network, and cloud data, an MDR provider can help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your attack surface, enhancing the quality of threat hunts.
• 24/7 Monitoring and Detection: Continuous monitoring ensures that threats are identified s in real-time, reducing the potential impact of a security breach.
• Compliance Support: Outsourcing your security operations to an MDR provider specializing in NIST compliance can help you meet compliance requirements and build a comprehensive cyber risk management program.

How eSentire Helps You Improve Threat Detection and Response

Given the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyber attacks, having a structured framework for managing cyber risk is critical for any business. Among various cybersecurity standards, NIST CSF stands out as one of the most trusted cyber risk management frameworks due to its flexibility, comprehensiveness, and holistic approach to cybersecurity.

Aligning your cybersecurity strategy with a recognized framework like the NIST CSF enhances your organization’s ability to identify, protect against, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats. Rather than outlining a fixed set of cybersecurity controls, the Framework emphasizes the importance of continuously evaluating and improving your cybersecurity posture to keep up with the threat landscape.

However, building a proactive security program mapped to NIST CSF while being tasked with streamlining your budget may be challenging for many security leaders. Outsourcing your security operations to an MDR provider can equip you with the expertise, knowledge of compliance mandates, tools, and multi-signal visibility at a lower cost compared to in-house approaches.

At eSentire, we are mission-driven to ensure you have the cybersecurity systems, processes, and controls to effectively mitigate your cyber risks:

• Our multi-signal Managed Detection and Response (MDR) combines cutting-edge open XDR technology, multi-signal threat intelligence, and the industry’s only 24/7 Elite Threat Hunters to help you build a more resilient security operation. Our all-in-one MDR service ingests high-fidelity data sources from endpoint, network, log, cloud, identity, assets, and vulnerability data to enable complete attack surface visibility. The eSentire Open XDR Platform correlates indicators of compromise to detect, respond and automatically disrupt threats in minutes - with a Mean Time to Contain of less than 15 minutes.
• Our on-demand 24/7 Incident Response service guarantees you’re prepared to withstand and recover from the most advanced attacks. Through a combination of best-in-class digital forensics technology and the expertise of our elite incident responders, we provide the fastest threat suppression in the industry so you can get back to normal operations in less than 4-hours. Our Incident Response (IR) experts can also help you develop a comprehensive Incident Response (IR) plan.
• Our CISO and Advisory Services begin with a NIST-based organization-wide Security Program Maturity Assessment (SPMA) to identify your strengths, weaknesses and greatest areas of cyber risk. Based on the insights from the assessment, our experts work with you to develop a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy and guide your team through the complexities of governance and compliance, helping you meet regulatory requirements.
• Our Managed Vulnerability Service accurately identifies vulnerabilities across your on-premises and cloud environments by scanning for zero-day vulnerabilities and CVEs, providing full visibility, prioritization, and contextual awareness across your attack surface. We partner with leaders in vulnerability management to deliver scanning precision and minimize vulnerability discovery to remediation timeframe. Our best-of-breed technology is supported by the expertise of our 24/7 SOC Analysts and Elite Threat Hunters, who act as an extension of your team to execute scans, provide analysis, and support remediation plans.

To learn more about how eSentire can help you mitigate cyber risk and achieve cybersecurity regulatory compliance with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, connect with an eSentire cybersecurity specialist.