As the threat landscape evolves and multiplies with more advanced attacks than ever,
defending against these modern cyber threats is a monumental challenge for almost any
organization.
Threat detection is about an organization’s ability to accurately identify threats, be it to
the network, an endpoint, another asset or application – including cloud infrastructure
and assets. At scale, threat detection analyzes the entire security infrastructure to
identify malicious activity that could compromise the ecosystem.
Countless solutions support threat detection, but the key is to have as much data as
possible available to bolster your security visibility. If you don’t know what is happening
on your systems, threat detection is impossible.
Deploying the right security software is critical for protecting you from threats.
What do we mean by threat detection software?
In the early days of threat detection, software was deployed to protect against different
forms of malware. However, threat detection has evolved into a much more
comprehensive category.
Modern threat detection software addresses the challenges of identifying threats, finding
the legitimate alerts out of all the noise, and locating bad actors by using Indicators of
Compromise (IoCs).
Today’s threat detection software works across the entire security stack to give security
teams the visibility they need to take appropriate steps and actions.
What capabilities should threat detection software
include?
To meet the demands of a rapidly-changing workplace, good threat detection software
should be the cornerstone of a robust threat detection program that includes detection
technology for security events, network events and endpoint events.
For security events, data should be aggregated from activity across the network,
including access, authentication, and critical system logs. For network events, it’s about
identifying traffic patterns and monitoring traffic between and within both trusted
networks and the internet. For endpoints, threat detection technology should provide
details regarding potentially malicious events on user machines and gather any forensic
information to assist in threat investigation.
Ultimately, robust threat detection solutions give security teams the ability to write
detections to look for events and patterns of activity that could be indicative of malicious
behavior. Security teams often include detection engineers responsible for creating,
testing and tuning detections to alert the team of malicious activity, and minimize false
positives.
Detection engineering has been evolving to adopt workflows and best practices from
software development to help security teams build scalable processes for writing and
hardening detections. The term “Detection as Code” has emerged to describe this
practice. By treating detections as well-written code that can be tested, checked into
source control, and code-reviewed by peers, teams get higher-quality alerts – reducing
fatigue and quickly flagging suspicious activity.
Whether it’s an XDR platform, a next-gen SIEM or an IDS, the platform should provide
security teams with the ability to craft highly customizable detections, a built-in testing
framework, and the ability to adopt a standardized CI/CD workflow
The traditional software vs SaaS debate for threat detection
While traditional software and SaaS may both provide the same “software”, the approach
is drastically different.
The traditional approach would be to install a piece of software and run it locally.
However, this has several drawbacks — including high maintenance costs, lack of
scalability, and security risks.
By contrast, many SaaS services will automatically update themselves when new
versions become available. Plus, you typically get more reliable performance and service
levels from vendors.
The threat detection benefits of cloud-native SaaS
Traditional security teams may have been slower to embrace cloud native SaaS
solutions, as they are typically more understaffed than their general IT counterparts.
Often, the focus on on-prem infrastructure & applications is the result of business
leaders operating under the false assumption that their SaaS vendors are responsible for
security.
But as their infrastructure becomes even more cloud-based, deploying a SaaS solution is
the more practical strategy today and into the future.
We discussed benefits like lower costs and enhanced business agility above, but for
security teams, the most crucial advantage is faster detection and remediation.
When new threats and bad actors seem to surface every day, an organization’s security
environment needs room for rapid innovation. With serverless technology, security
teams can take advantage of scalability, performance and the ability to analyze massive
amounts of data quickly.
Most importantly, cloud-native SaaS allows organizations to be proactive about threat
detection and management. Modern SaaS security solutions typically include well-honed
processes, tracking, and a single pane of glass visibility in a centralized hub for
proactive and responsive threat management.
With a swelling tide of security-relevant data that security teams need to collect and
analyze to detect threats, traditional tools are not cut out to handle these workloads.
These solutions take threat detection software to new heights with well-honed
processes, tracking, and a single pane of glass visibility in a centralized hub for
proactive and responsive threat management.
Panther’s cloud-native threat detection software
With Panther’s serverless approach to threat detection and response, your security team
can detect threats in real-time by analyzing logs as they are ingested, giving you the
fastest possible time to detection. You’ll also gain the ability to craft high-fidelity
detections in Python and leverage standard CI/CD workflows for creating, testing, and
updating detections.
It’s easy to write detection rules in Panther. But if you want to get an even better
understanding of how you can improve detection efficacy with Panther, book a demo
today.
