The shift from office-only to remote-first has heightened the risks of cyberattacks. Dario Forte, Founder and CEO of DFLabs explains why the Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platform is a critical investment to secure remote workforce and simplify threat monitoring and detection.
In recent years the trend of remote workingOpens a new window has been following a constant upward trajectory, and why wouldn’t it? Working from the comfort of your home is a commodity many would opt for. That’s why more and more people are choosing remote work over the conventional office-based environment, and in the new work-from-home world prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend of switching to remote offices has grown exponentially, but so has the number of cyberattacksOpens a new window . And the question now remains, how to maintain security when employees work remotely?
The reality is, without the protection of office environments, remote offices have become a big liability. Having this in mind, companies are seeking ways to enhance the protection of their remote workers. This has led to many organizations looking at SOAR as a viable solution to their problems. And this begs the question, how does SOAR protect remote workers from cyber threats exactly?
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Dealing with the Increasing Risk of Cyber Attacks
Since the start of the pandemic, cyber attacks have grown fivefoldOpens a new window , and companies are doing their best to improve remote worker security. Passwords, email addresses, sensitive data are all opportunities for cybercriminals. And targeted phishing scams, insecure networks, and family members accessing company computers are just some of the factors that make companies more vulnerable to breachesOpens a new window .
With thousands of workers leaving their conventional offices and switching to a home-based working environment, companies are left with scattered employees and many loose endpoints which are left poorly protected, and more remote workers equal more insecure endpoints. This has left companies with the unfortunate task of devising a solution that protects a myriad of insecure endpoints.
All those remote employees working from their home networks become a prime target for cyber attackers, and now companies are obliged to think of creative ways to deal with the increasing number of sophisticated cyberattacksOpens a new window . Hackers and other malicious know very well that the remote workers’ reliance on poorly protected devices, such as personal computers and routers can easily be breached. In this regard, companies are first advised to:
- Encrypt sensitive data
- Protect endpoints
- Restrict usage of personal devices while working
- Specify which data is downloadable on personal computers
- Employ multi-factor authentication
Following these guidelines will significantly improve the security of remote workers, but is it enough to create a foolproof barrier against sophisticated cyber threats? The answer, of course, varies depending on the size of the company, employee preparedness to evade cyber scams, and the level of sensitive data the company is controlling.
For companies that aren’t usually targeted by high-profile cyber threatsOpens a new window , the transition to remote working probably won’t escalate to a degree of having to deploy drastic safety measures. However, for companies that are usually on the radar of cyber attackers and receive a big number of threats, establishing a proper strategy that revolves around state-of-the-art technologies is a must if they strive to preserve the integrity of their sensitive data. Enter SOAR.
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SOAR to the Rescue: 5 Ways SOAR Enhances Remote Worker Security
The SOAR acronym stands for Security Orchestration, Automation, and ResponseOpens a new window . The implementation of this technology in your cybersecurity repertoire offers a variety of benefits, some of which are directly related to helping make remote offices a more secure environment.
- Avoid alert overload: Alert overload or alert fatigue is a phenomenon that often takes place among busy cybersecurityOpens a new window teams. And with remote workers logging in from different locations and places, the number of alerts is expected to skyrocket. In this regard, SOAR uses automation and machine learning to improve security operation’s efficiency, allowing security teams to do more with fewer resources.
- Automate repetitive tasks: SOAR Opens a new window uses its machine learning engine to gradually learn repeatable patterns of recognizable incidents and uses the knowledge gained from previous encounters with similar incidents to tackle alerts with the same characteristics with no human intervention required whatsoever.
- Better overview of workflow processes: SOAR Opens a new window provides an enhanced visual approach to security operations by allowing users to set customizable KPIs with aggregated reports, dashboards, and immediate detailed incident reports. This vastly increases your response time and allows you to better analyze incidents as they arrive in real-time.
- Merge similar incidents into one: By relying on its “Deduplication†feature, SOAR merges incidents with similar characteristics into one, allowing analysts to concentrate their effort and tackle multiple incidents with one shot.
- Recognize false positives: SOAR uses machine learningOpens a new window to learn the characteristics of alerts and uses that knowledge to differentiate alerts that were previously labeled as false positives and determine the severity of the alert based on those proven principles.
With the increasing number of cyberattacks Opens a new window targeting remote workers, learning how to maintain security when employees work remotely by merely propagating regulations is not enough. Because of this, SOCs will definitely welcome a technology that drastically boosts the effectiveness of the entire team, allows analysts to focus on important problems rather than assessing the thousands of false positives, and provides a better perspective of the overall cybersecurity environment.
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Faster, More Efficient Incident Response
Even though companies need to set particular remote-working rules to prepare their employees and be as cautious as possible, cyber threats are taking a more sophisticated shape with each passing day. Given that cyber threatsOpens a new window are bound to happen, SOAR significantly reduces the response time to cyber-attacks and allows security professionals to be much quicker in minimizing the breach time of cyber attackers, thus minimizing the damage caused to the company.
Furthermore, SOAR is created with the goal of becoming easily integrated into every security system. So, SOAR allows you to integrate with the most popular cybersecurity tools without disrupting your workflow. All in all, SOAR acts as a force multiplier, improving every cybersecurity Opens a new window tool it interacts with, and with that, improving the overall security posture of the organization.
With SOAR, not only will you improve the security of your remote workers, but you will also enhance the effectiveness of your entire cybersecurity team.
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Conclusion
Every company deals with the current remote workingOpens a new window trend in its own way, but in order to adapt to the increasing number of cyber threats targeting remote workers, SOCs need to be quicker and more effective at nullifying potential attacks. And ultimately, by implementing a SOAR solution, SecOps teams will drastically improve their response time, be more efficient at threat hunting, and will be able to better protect the remote workersOpens a new window ‘ sensitive data.
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