Cyber risk and advisory programs that identify security gaps and build strategies to address them.
MDR that provides improved detection, 24/7 threat hunting, end-to-end coverage and most of all, complete Response.
Our team delivers the fastest response time in the industry. Threat suppression within just 4 hours of being engaged.
Be protected by the best from Day 1.
24/7 Threat Investigation and Response.
Expert hunting, research and content.
Defend brute force attacks, active intrusions and unauthorized scans.
Safeguard endpoints 24/7 by isolating and remediating threats to prevent lateral spread.
Investigation and enhanced threat detection across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
Configuration escalations, policy and posture management.
Detects malicious insider behavior leveraging Machine Learning models.
Customer testimonials and case studies.
Stories on cyberattacks, customers, employees, and more.
Cyber incident, analyst, and thought leadership reports.
Demonstrations, seminars and presentations on cybersecurity topics.
Information and solution briefs for our services.
MITRE ATT&CK Framework, Cybersecurity Assessment, SOC Calculator & more
Originally posted in Security Magazine November 27, 2019
There’s a great story on survivorship bias from World War II about a statistician named Abraham Wald. Bombers were getting hit by enemy fire on a regular basis, and losses of bombers were high. Researchers in the center for naval analyses were tasked with figuring out how to increase the survivability of the planes, and they initially recommended that armor be added to all the areas of the plane that showed the most damage when they returned to base. They reasoned that if these were the areas where planes were being hit the most, then armor there would stop the most hits:
But when Wald looked at the study, he recommended something different – that armor instead to be added to the areas of the planes where no damage was detected. This is because the only planes that the team could study were those that made it back to base. Planes that didn’t make it back to base were probably being damaged differently – in ways that were not survivable – than those that did.
In cybersecurity, we can think about how to apply this same type of reasoning to breach data, like what we find in Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). In this study, when we look at successful breaches, (those that survive their encounters with a defender), we can see a pattern of defender action that is typical in a breach situation:
If we think about this from the perspective of a defender who wants to know what they can do differently to not suffer from a breach, the more interesting thing is what we don’t see. There are simply no reported breach situations where a defender discovered and started containment within seconds to minutes of the initial attack.
If the defenders manage to become aware soon enough and start containment, they generally win, or the attackers give up and move on. From the DBIR, we can see the magic line for discovery that kills attacks in progress is measured in seconds to minutes. If you can become aware of it that fast, chances are your defenders can stop the incident from becoming a breach.
That’s generally far easier said than done, however, and for many smaller companies, almost impossible. How can you afford to bring discovery time to seconds or minutes when that means staffing security experts to review all the signals coming in – even in the middle of the night – and those signals are almost never real incidents anyway?
This is one of the main reasons why mid-sized organizations are increasingly putting their hope in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) providers who focus on real-time triage and investigation into new signals as they happen. By having the staff on hand to support the pace of alerts from security devices coming in, and leaving them tuned up as sensitive as they can go, MDR providers work on the assumption that everything reported by those devices is a potential breach unless they have direct evidence to the contrary. Working from that approach means they can set much more aggressive targets on timelines for discovering and stopping potential attacks.
Organizations must take seriously the implication raised by the Verizon’s DBIR that containment needs to happen fast, too. To be successful, the cybersecurity industry needs to empower security analysts with the ability to contain an incident within seconds of detection.
And as the Verizon data shows, most incidents just don’t seem to survive long enough to turn into a serious breach when they encounter defenders who respond quickly and efficiently to each event, right after the initial compromise.