Missing Critical Threats in Your Network? Here’s How to Quickly Detect Active Infections

Within today’s threat landscape, the regularity of data breaches comes as no surprise. And their impact continues to be far reaching and extremely costly. According to the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a breach is now $3.86 million and the average time to contain the breach is 280 days. With more than 15 billion records exposed annually, data breaches have significant consequences that can impact organizations negatively for the short- and long-term.

Perhaps more alarming, even in the midst of the current COVID-19 environment, healthcare and public health organizations have been placed on high alert for a dramatic increase by threat actors seeking financial gain through the use of powerful ransomware strains like Ryuk and Conti. A joint statement by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has advised that the healthcare sector take necessary precautions to avoid data theft and business disruption.

Having the ability to adequately and quickly respond to breaches is vital in dealing with active threats. And that starts with visibility into your network. In this blog, we will explore three specific ways that you may be missing critical threats in your network. And we’ll examine a security solution that enables organizations to rapidly detect active infections other solutions miss.

What Confidence Do You Have In Your Security Posture?

The rising number of breaches is nothing new—seeing another successful attack in the headlines has become an almost daily occurrence. According to a recent study by Cybersecurity Insiders, only 56 percent of security professionals feel, at best, only somewhat confident in their overall security stance. This means nearly half of all security professionals recognize there are gaps in their security posture where they can—and should—improve.

Realistically, the challenge is not simply a matter of keeping threat actors out, but also quickly finding and removing those that have made their way in. Critical threats are lurking in organizational networks long before they cause the type of destruction that we see in the press, but security professionals simply can’t detect them fast enough. Understanding that your current security strategy may not be enough to detect critical threats in your network is the first step in tackling these infections.

Three Ways You Are Missing Critical Threats In Your Network

To understand where organizations may be missing active threats, let’s take a look at three potential gaps or pitfalls that reduce the visibility of infections within the business.  

#1: The bulk of time is spent sifting through meaningless alerts

One of the first ways critical threats can be missed is when large numbers of alerts are generated across a number of security devices. How do you know which devices are best to respond to? How do you differentiate between a true positive or false positive? And how fast can you identify an active threat by cutting through all the noise? This type of effort requires skill and experience that many security analysts may not yet have.

Time is extremely valuable and being able to focus your efforts during a breach is crucial. The average SOC receives 10,000 alerts per day and each alert can require up to 30 minutes. You need security products that can help with this level of orchestration. Plus the resources required to access these alerts is daunting. With only so much time to deal with all these alerts throughout the day, you either have to buy more tools or throw more resources at the issue.

Even worse, alert fatigue can set in and can directly impact the time to resolve and remediate the active threat. Even the best security analysts can miss critical threats in this type of environment and wasting resources on false positives rather than tackling real infections creates an even higher mean time to resolution. Ultimately, what is needed is less alerts with higher confidence levels that include detailed information about the threat for swift remediation.  

#2: Relying on a baseline is the primary strategy

The second reason you may be missing critical threats in your environment is you are relying solely on a baseline. When you have a baseline, it’s a great starting point to do anything. But creating a baseline is reliant upon data integrity. If you put bad data in, you will get bad data out. Say for example you set your baseline too high. If you are depending on the baseline on its own, you will likely miss many active threats in your environment because they will be baked into your environment already.

What is needed instead is multiple detection engines that dramatically increase the visibility of critical threats. This means combining human threat research with machine learning. These detection engines focus on analyzing behavior, content, payload, and threat intelligence. It relies on multiple years of evidence and not just a snapshot in time. And it eliminates meaningless alerts, while ensuring definitive proof of infection.

#3: Every connected device is not monitored

We live in a modern world with many devices. And unfortunately, most security products only protect a fraction of all endpoints or require an agent to be installed in order to monitor them. Far too many high-end IoT devices, medical devices, SCADA devices, and even older devices are unwatched. So how can you monitor devices when they come into your environment and remediate if they are infected? What is needed is a way to increase the visibility of all interconnected devices in your environment and then monitor them using agentless technology to quickly reveal any blind spots.

It’s Possible to Detect Critical Threats Other Solutions Miss with Network Insight

Network Insight provides network traffic analysis to reveal critical threats in real time on any device within your infrastructure. Multiple detection engines provide definitive evidence and pinpoint the specific location of an infection, enabling security teams to respond efficiently, rapidly reduce dwell time, and prevent loss.

With Network Insight, organizations can raise the visibility of critical threats in their environment and address the challenges mentioned throughout this blog. As a network traffic analysis solution, Network Insight enables security teams to:   

• Achieve real-time actionable detection: Quickly pinpoint the specific location of every threat in your organization for an unmatched level of confidence in alerts to avoid alert fatigue. No intelligence expertise required.
   
• Leverage multi-faceted intelligence: Utilize machine learning and multiple detection engines from day one. No baseline required. With an extensive threat intelligence database that observes billions of DNS requests a day, monitors thousands of malware samples daily, and tracks 100 billion domains, you can significantly increase the visibility of your entire environment.
   
• Leave no device behind: Quickly reveal any blind spots in your organization by using agentless technology to monitor every connected device. Network Insight provides a prioritized list of confirmed infections from every type of device in your network, including laptops, mobile phones, security cameras, video conference units, MRIs, CT machines, SCADA systems, smart coffee makers, and many other devices.

What Security Challenges Are You Trying to Solve? 

When looking at different security solutions, you need to evaluate how they help you increase visibility into the critical threats that exist within your environment. The three challenges and pitfalls described in this blog can be addressed with the right technology that immediately detects active infections other solutions miss. Start detecting every active threat with Network Insight and get ahead of malicious threats in your organization.