3 Ways High-Priority Malware Detection Can Fill SOC Gaps

Given today’s threat landscape, operating an enterprise Security Operations Center (SOC) presents a high-stakes challenges. With modern IT infrastructures comprised of a labyrinth of assets, endpoints, and third-party dependencies, threat actors continue to succeed in infiltrating vulnerable systems with inherently sophisticated, difficult-to-detect malware. As complexity of infrastructures grow, SOCs across all industries strive to keep up with the changes, while facing significant technology, process, and staffing gaps in implementing effective security measures across the enterprise.

A crux actor in the battlefield of the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape — high priority malware. High priority malware is malicious software with a high-risk score, which is calculated by addressing a variety of relevant areas, including business and operational risk, along with other metrics such as availability/downtime, systems performance, data breaches and severity of impact. When successful, high priority malware can have detrimental consequences on your enterprise, partners and customers.

Sophisticated threat actors engineer malware around existing gaps within enterprise infrastructure and security systems and apply deception and evasion tactics to ensure their attacks succeed. That’s why it’s vital to investigate potential SOC gaps, including the security ecosystem tools and integrations most vulnerable to high priority malware before establishing a defensive strategy.

SOC Gap #1 No Comprehensive, Real-Time Visibility

When malware strikes, every second counts. A malicious attack can surface from anywhere in an organization’s vast IT infrastructure. Detecting and containing the attack is a time-critical matter. The SOC’s actions to speed a proper response against the malware can make the difference between successful containment and remediation, and detrimental damage to high-value infrastructure and data loss that places the entire enterprise and clients at risk.

Real-time visibility is vital for swift and effective security efforts. While most SOCs are equipped with the necessary tools to prevent or cease an identified malicious attack, quickly and accurately detecting malware and promptly applying appropriate action continues to be an issue. The lack of actionable insights within the SOC can stem from various issues within the organization: insufficient resources to quickly classify and dispose malicious files, no comprehensive inventory of existing IT assets or endpoints, and limited visibility into the associated IT dependencies that define the business services. This lack of visibility and intelligence precludes the ability to automate successfully, leads to manual actions, and overloads staff’s capacity to respond. By obtaining full, real-time visibility into the entire security profile of the enterprise’s networks and systems, the SOC can gain actionable insight on the company’s exposure to an attack.