White Paper: Operation-Centric Security - Leveraging Indicators of Behavior for Early Detection

Today’s security model produces an endless stream of uncorrelated alerts for individual events on the network. The majority of these alerts are either false positives that need to be disqualified, or are simply glimpses of a larger attack sequence that will require an analyst to manually triage, investigate, and then correlate against other alerts—a process that simply cannot scale effectively to keep organizations and their clients secure. 

There is a better way, but it requires a fundamental change in how we approach security by moving away from the labor intensive, inefficient and ineffective alert-centric model we continue to cling to in favor of a more effective, highly efficient Operation-Centric approach. 

An Operation-Centric model focuses on disrupting the entire attack operation versus responding to uncorrelated alerts that fail to identify root cause, interrupt command and control (C2), prevent data exfiltration, eliminate persistence mechanisms, and more.

An Operation-Centric approach can deliver detection and response automation at scale by leveraging Indicators of Behavior (IOBs), the more subtle signs of an attack that can surface the entire malicious operation at its earliest stages, allowing for earlier detections that inform a predictive response capability for comprehensive remediation that our current reliance on retrospective Indicators of Compromise can never deliver.

This paper details the Operation-Centric approach and how it can foster earlier detections based on Indicators of Behavior that empowers security operations to dynamically adapt and predictively respond more swiftly than attackers can modify their tactics to circumvent defenses, which is key to finally reversing the adversary advantage and returning the high ground to the Defenders.

Cybereason is dedicated to teaming with defenders to end attacks on the endpoint, across the enterprise, to everywhere the battle is taking place. Learn more about Cybereason AI-driven XDR here or schedule a demo today to learn how your organization can benefit from an operation-centric approach to security.