Enabling Cybersecurity Incident Response

Tune into our webinar with Jesse Beauman, Deputy CIO, and Tim Burns, Interim CISO, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to discuss the importance of an XDR solution in the world of higher education: 

Building a secure future: Cybersecurity strategies for higher education
September 5^th at 2pm EST

Research universities require advanced security architectures that provides visibility and powerful incident response capabilities across a complex technology landscape. Universities recognize that cyber incidents occur, and proper preparation enhances their resilience, making them more likely to withstand and recover from an event that might impact their faculty, staff, or students. Security teams and the tools they use to operationalize incident response are the cornerstone of a robust defense.

The challenge?

Being able to see across multiple networks, endpoints and business processes – to find the one needle in a stack of needles that will help incident responders zero in on the telemetry needed to resolve things in a fast and efficient manner.

Complexity Amplifies Vulnerability

Cyber threats like malware, ransomware, and phishing specifically target universities. These threats have the power to cause significant damage, and use advanced and commodity tactics, the volume of which may overwhelm security teams. According to Security Intelligence, in 2022, 89 education sector organizations fell victim to ransomware attacks impacting 44 colleges and universities. Educause lists cybersecurity as the number one IT issue for 2024.

Universities have so many different technologies, it is impossible to enforce technology standards for endpoints, servers and other infrastructure.  This means security teams must have multiple security tools to understand what devices are active on their networks, how they are connected, and what software is being used. These tools are siloed, requiring analysts to jump between multiple tools and screens to manage a single incident. This adds cost and operational complexity and slows down the time to respond to cyber incidents.

Staffing a Security Operations Team

Universities are struggling to find the cybersecurity workforce they need. They are investing in student internships, on-the-job training and other creative solutions to fill the gap, including sometimes outsourcing operational support to a service provider. In all these cases, the new staff need to come up to speed quickly, which includes understanding the operational context of the organization they are defending.

The Growing Need for Extended Detection and Response

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) tools seek to address these problems, by abstracting the information from various detection tools and presenting them in a combined view, enriching the information with external telemetry.

XDR allows security teams to monitor north-south traffic across firewalls, and east-west traffic across different endpoints, tying together telemetry from disparate security solutions. This allows security teams to operate more efficiently and effectively, speeding time to detect and time to respond.

An XDR solution enables faster onboarding of security analysts, or an external provider, because it enables them to start addressing security incidents without needing to fully understand the underlying detection technologies, speeding training and time to effective response for analysts.

Conclusion

University security teams do amazing work to protect their institutions. Their jobs are made more difficult by the complex environments they support, and their comparative lack of financial support compared to other industries. A measure of effectiveness for a security operations team is how quickly they identify and respond to significant security incidents. To do this well, they need visibility across their entire technology stack, and the security tools to provide contextual intelligence and automated response. An XDR solution that is vendor-agnostic to the rest of the security architecture and integrates in a way that enables the security team to effectively protect the faculty, staff, and student activities of an institution is a key element of success.

Cisco XDR: Built for SecOps Professionals by SecOps Professionals

Cisco XDR is a unified threat detection, investigation, mitigation, and hunting solution that integrates the entire Cisco security portfolio and select third-party tools – endpoint, email, network, and cloud, along with superior threat intelligence. Teams can now remediate the highest priority incidents with greater speed, efficiency, and confidence.

Cisco XDR improves visibility and creates true context across multiple environments, while enabling unified detection from a single investigative viewpoint that supports fast accurate threat response. Cisco XDR elevates productivity even further through automation and orchestration, and includes other advanced user-friendly SOC necessities such as:

• Playbook driven automation
• Guided incident response
• Threat hunting
• Alert prioritization, and
• Breach pattern analysis.

Cisco XDR is an open extensible solution, with turnkey integrations with a variety of third-party vendors allowing security operation teams to quickly adopt a unified and simple approach to their security across their security stack.

An effective XDR solution requires multiple sources of telemetry and up-to-the-minute threat intelligence. Cisco Talos, the world-renowned threat intelligence research team provides this crucial data. By leveraging these sources, Cisco XDR helps security operations teams detect and prioritize threats more effectively.

Watch the following video to learn more about Cisco XDR:

Automation and orchestration are essential concepts in cybersecurity, particularly from a Security Operations Center (SOC) point of view. They help SOC teams streamline their processes, improve response times, and enhance overall security posture. Here’s a breakdown of what automation and orchestration mean in the context of a university environment:

Automation

Security Operations Automation refers to the use of technology and scripts to perform repetitive and predefined tasks without manual intervention. These tasks can include activities such as log analysis, threat detection, incident response, and vulnerability scanning. The goal of automation is to reduce the workload on security analysts and speed up the detection and response to security incidents. Automation can handle routine, well-defined tasks, allowing human analysts to focus on more complex and strategic aspects of security.

Examples of automated security tasks include automatically blocking IP addresses associated with malicious activity, generating alerts, and enriching security alerts with additional context (from additional security tools).

Orchestration

Orchestration goes a step further than automation by creating an integrated system of workflows and playbooks that define how different security tools and processes should respond to specific security incidents.  Orchestration aims to ensure that different security solutions communicate and collaborate effectively to improve response coordination, reduce the likelihood of errors, and enhance overall security incident management by providing a standardized, repeatable process for incident response.

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