Security Operations Centers (SOC) today are overwhelmed. Analysts handle thousands of alerts every day, spending much time chasing false positives and adjusting detection rules reactively. SOCs often lack the environmental context and relevant threat intelligence needed to quickly verify which alerts are truly malicious. As a result, analysts spend excessive time manually triaging alerts, the majority of which are classified as benign.
Addressing the root cause of these blind spots and alert fatigue isn’t as simple as implementing more accurate tools. Many of these traditional tools are very accurate, but their fatal flaw is a lack of context and a narrow focus – missing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, sophisticated attackers exploit exposures invisible to traditional reactive tools, often evading detection using widely-available bypass kits.
While all of these tools are effective in their own right, they often fail because of the reality that attackers don’t employ just one attack technique, exploit just one type of exposure or weaponize a single CVE when breaching an environment. Instead, attackers chain together multiple exposures, utilizing known CVEs where helpful, and employing evasion techniques to move laterally across an environment and accomplish their desired goals. Individually, traditional security tools may detect one or more of these exposures or IoCs, but without the context derived from a deeply integrated continuous exposure management program, it can be nearly impossible for security teams to effectively correlate otherwise seemingly disconnected signals.
SecOps Benefits at Every Stage of the Cybersecurity Lifecycle
Exposure management platforms can help transform SOC operations by weaving exposure intelligence directly into existing analyst workflows. Of course, having attack surface visibility and insight into interconnected exposures provides immense value, but that’s just scratching the surface. This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given the significant overlap in the high-level models each team is operating, albeit often in parallel as opposed to working in tandem.
To make the point further, I’ve included a comparison below between a typical SOC workflow and the CTEM lifecycle:
| Typical SOC Lifecycle | How Integrated Exposure Management Helps | CTEM Lifecycle |
|---|---|---|
|
Monitor Maintain continuous visibility into the entire attack surface, prioritizing critical assets that matter most to the business and attackers are most likely to go after. |
Shared Attack Surface Visibility Integration with CMDB and SOC tooling creates a unified view of the attack surface and critical assets, aligning security and IT teams on what matters most. |
Scope Outline the scope of the exposure management program, identifying critical assets that matter most to the business, maintaining continuous visibility across the attack surface. |
|
Detect Identify suspicious and malicious activity across the attack surface, ideally before access is gained or critical systems and data are compromised. |
Contextualize Threat Alerts When detections fire, analysts instantly see the asset’s risk posture and whether suspicious activity aligns with known attack paths, turning generic alerts into targeted investigations. |
Discover Uncover exposures across the attack surface, including attack paths, vulnerabilities, misconfigs, identity and permissions issues, etc. |
|
Triage Validate security alerts and correlate event logs to identify true security incidents and malicious activity vs benign anomalous activity. |
Improve Disposition Accuracy Make better-informed decisions with asset and business context to sift through the noise of security alerts while reducing the risk of false negatives. |
Prioritize Prioritize discovered exposures based on threat intelligence, environment and business context to focus remediation operations on the most impactful and imminent risk. |
|
Investigate Deep dive into threat intelligence, event logs and other findings to determine the blast radius, root cause, and impact of a security incident. |
Visualize Complex Attack Chains Transform abstract risk findings into validated potential attack scenarios. Analysts can visualize how threat actors would chain together specific exposures, identifying critical choke points. |
Validate Confirm that discovered exposures are actually present, are reachable by threat actors and can actually be exploited based on patch availability and compensating controls. |
|
Respond Take action to minimize breach impact and eliminate the threat within the environment. |
Targeted Incident Response Understanding exploitable paths enables precise containment and remediation, addressing specific exposures quickly without disruptive over-isolation or business impact. |
Mobilize Drive efficient and effective remediation of exposures by driving cross-functional alignment, automating notification and ticketing workflows, and where possible, implementing security mitigations and automating patching workflows. |
This natural alignment between proactive and reactive teams’ high-level workflows makes it easy to see where the targeted threat and attack surface intelligence derived from exposure management platforms can be of use to SOC teams prior to and in the midst of a threat investigation.
The magic really starts to happen when teams integrate their exposure management platforms with EDRs, SIEMs, and SOAR tools to deliver contextual threat intelligence precisely when and where SOC analysts need it most. This allows teams to automatically correlate discovered exposures with specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques, creating actionable threat intelligence that’s immediately relevant to each organization’s unique attack surface.
For exposures that can’t be immediately remediated, teams can leverage this intelligence to inform detection engineering and threat hunting activities. This creates a continuous feedback loop where exposure intelligence informs detection updates, improves alert triage and investigation, and supports automated response and prioritized remediation.
A Deeper Dive Into SOC Workflows Enriched with Exposure Intelligence
Traditional detection tools generate alerts based on signatures and behavioral patterns, but lack environmental context. Continuous exposure management transforms this by providing real-time context about the systems, configurations, and vulnerabilities involved in each alert.
- When an detection fires, SOC analysts immediately understand what exposures exist on the affected system, which attack techniques are viable given the current configuration, what the potential blast radius looks like and how this alert fits into known attack paths.
- Alert triage becomes dramatically more efficient when analysts can instantly assess the true risk potential of each alert. Instead of triaging based on generic severity scores, exposure management provides an environment-specific risk context.
- During investigation, continuous exposure management provides analysts with detailed attack path analysis showing exactly how an adversary could exploit the current alert as part of a broader campaign. This includes understanding all viable attack paths based on actual network topology, access relationships, and system configurations.
- It also includes digging into the root cause of a breach, helping analysts determine the most likely breach points and paths an attacker would take.
- Response activities become more precise when guided by exposure intelligence. Instead of broad containment measures that might disrupt business operations, SOC teams can implement surgical responses that address the specific exposures being exploited.
- The remediation phase extends beyond immediate incident response to systematic exposure reduction, automatically generating tickets that address not just the immediate incident, but the underlying conditions that made it possible. As remediation activities are completed, the same testing processes used to uncover security gaps can be used to validate that implemented changes actually worked and risk was reduced.
With continuous exposure management integrated into the SecOps workflow, each incident becomes a learning opportunity that strengthens future detection and response capabilities. Understanding which exposures led to successful attacks during red teaming and validation testing helps refine and implement compensating controls and/or tune detection rules to catch similar activity earlier in the attack chain.
The Future of SOC Operations
The future of SOC operations lies not in processing more alerts faster, but in preventing the conditions that generate unnecessary alerts while developing laser-focused capabilities against the threats that matter most. Continuous exposure management provides the environmental awareness that transforms generic security tools into precision instruments.
In an era where threat actors are increasingly sophisticated and persistent, SOCs need every advantage they can get. The ability to proactively shape the battlefield, eliminating exposures, tuning detections, and developing custom capabilities based on environmental reality may be the difference between staying ahead of threats and constantly playing catch-up.
Note: This article was written and contributed by Ryan Blanchard, currently a Director of Product Marketing at XM Cyber. He started his career analyzing IT and professional services markets and GTM strategies, now helping translate complex technology benefits into stories that connect innovation, business, and people.
Source: thehackernews.com…
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