security analytics

Based on the 2024 WEF’s Global Risks Report published in January, cyberattacks serve as “an increasingly low-risk and low-cost revenue stream for organized crime”, and are amongst the top risks in 2024.

This is a testimony to the ever-growing criticality of cybersecurity, which puts pressure on IT Operations and security teams, who often find themselves in the never-ending cycle of grappling with the threats as and when they occur, impacting efficiency. Organizations are increasingly working towards the goal of increasing resilience in IT, which often necessitates the execution of a proactive approach in cybersecurity by preparing for cyber threats and preventing them at their dawn before they can cause major disruptions. This calls for prioritization of continuous monitoring of the network and investments in threat intelligence to stay ahead of the threats.

This is where security analytics comes to the foreground.

Why Security Analytics?

Security analytics provide real-time insights into emerging threats and vulnerabilities, thus empowering teams to identify and mitigate potential risks before they escalate. This helps gain deeper insights into the security posture and enables them to protect their infrastructure more effectively. 

It collects data from multiple sources such as logs, network traffic, and threat intelligence feeds to view the organization’s security landscape comprehensively and analyzes the same to uncover patterns. This helps identify emerging vulnerabilities and threats. 

Significance of Security Analytics

There are several key factors driving the expansion and importance of security analytics, including:

  • Shifting from Protection to Detection: The traditional approach to security is reactive and focuses on protecting organizations against known threats, leaving the scope for long durations of exposure to undetected vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity analytics tools enhance this approach by continuously monitoring for known threat patterns and promptly alerting IT teams to anomalies.  
  • Unified Enterprise Overview: Security analytics provides a centralized view of security data, offering real-time and historical perspectives on events. This unified overview helps IT operations teams better understand threats and breaches from a single console, facilitating more informed planning, faster issue resolution, and enhanced decision-making processes. 
  • Demonstrating ROI and Results: IT operations teams are under constant pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their security investments. Security analytics aids in this by improving time-to-resolution metrics and reducing inaccurate results. These improvements serve as an analysis of IT operational efficiency, providing quantifiable results and enabling strategy improvisation based on them.

How Does Security Analytics Impact IT Operational Efficiency?

Security analytics is critical for helping organizations detect risks, keeping ahead of potential threats, and responding quickly to incidents. It plays a critical role in improving the efficiency of IT Operations teams in the following ways:

Enhanced Threat Detection and Response Times

Security analytics empowers organizations to enhance their threat detection and response by analyzing diverse data sources and correlating incident information for real-time insights. By utilizing cybersecurity analytics, organizations can proactively identify anomalies and suspicious activities early in the attack chain, allowing for swift intervention and effective action plans. This approach helps recognize insider threats and potential breaches before they escalate, improving response times and security posture. 

Prioritized Patching Efforts

Driven by digital transformation, IT operations teams perform under immense pressure from the ever-increasing workload. Security analytics helps teams adopt a risk-based approach to patching prioritizations by providing actionable intelligence enabling informed decision-making. This allows teams to manage their efforts and resources, helping them focus on the greatest threats first, streamlining their workload, and improving efficiency.

Proactive Risk Management and Mitigation

Security analytics enables proactive risk management by providing real-time insights and automated threat detection. Incident response driven through rapid detection and correlation,  reduces the time needed to address security issues. Data-driven insights support better decision-making by prioritizing critical vulnerabilities, while automation minimizes manual monitoring tasks. IT operations teams are able to mitigate risks efficiently, leading to a secure IT environment. 

Measuring the Impact of Security Analytics on IT Operations

Quantitative Metrics for Evaluating Security Analytics

Incident response times are measurably reduced due to security analytics improving the speed at which security incidents are detected and resolved, yielding in faster threat mitigation. For instance, endpoint security analytics helps monitor and analyze endpoint data to respond quickly to vulnerabilities and threats.

Qualitative Improvements in IT Operations

By automating routine and repetitive processes, like threat monitoring and data analysis, it frees IT teams’ time for more strategic and complex work. This shift in focus boosts overall team productivity by freeing up resources, minimizing manual burden, and improving overall work efficiency. By offering complete threat intelligence and actionable insights, security analytics methods enable IT teams to make informed decisions. 

Key Performance Indicators to Track the Effectiveness of Security Analytics

KPIs gauge the success of business goals and provide actionable insights for decision-making. In security operations, KPIs are crucial for analyzing data, spotting attack patterns, and identifying program gaps. They guide strategic responses to immediate threats and strategic decisions for long-term improvements in your cybersecurity strategy. 

Some of the KPIs that track the effectiveness of security analytics:

  • Incident Response Time: It helps assess the speed with which security incidents are identified and resolved. Shorter response times indicate effective security analytics, suggesting that the technologies successfully speed up the incident management process.
  • Cost of Incidents: This KPI measures the financial impact of security breaches, covering direct (fines, legal fees) and indirect costs (reputational damage). Monitoring this KPI allows you to measure how successfully security analytics technologies reduce financial losses caused by security incidents.
  • False Positive Rate: This KPI assesses threat detection accuracy by counting the number of false alerts generated. A lower false positive rate indicates that security analytics systems generate more specific and relevant threat warnings, improving incident management effectiveness.
  • Incident Recovery Time: This metric measures the time required to restore regular operations following a security incident. Faster recovery times suggest that security analytics technologies effectively assist the incident response process while minimizing business disruptions.

Elevate Your IT Operations with HCL BigFix CyberFOCUS Analytics

HCL BigFix CyberFOCUS Security Analytics is a powerful feature that helps IT Operations teams to:

  • Improve Endpoint Security: BigFix can help IT and Security Ops discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities fast, effectively reducing the attack surface using cutting-edge endpoint security analytics.
  • Speed Remediation: Remediating vulnerabilities quickly is of paramount importance, especially when confronted with zero-day vulnerabilities, supported by cyber security analytics to ensure swift action.
  • Integrate with Leading Vulnerability Scanners: By integrating with Tenable and Qualys, HCL BigFix compresses the time between vulnerability discovery and remediation, enhancing your security analytics capabilities.
  • Leverage Threat Information: By leveraging the ATT&CK knowledge base and known exploited vulnerabilities published by CISA, organizations can use security analytics to aggressively reduce vectors of attack.
  • Simulate the Impact of Remediations: Simulate the impact of remediating specific vulnerabilities on the enterprise attack surface using endpoint security analytics to minimize associated business disruptions and mitigate the greatest security threats.
  • Measure Performance Against Goals: Use Protection Level Agreements and security analytics to measure remediation and patching efforts against agreed-to targets defined by business stakeholders and IT Operations.

By utilizing the latest threat intelligence from sources like MITRE, NSA, and CISA, BigFix CyberFOCUS Analytics facilitates comprehensive asset risk analysis, allowing organizations to prioritize mitigation efforts effectively. The dashboard offers the following reports:

  • MITRE APTs: Focuses on vulnerabilities linked to advanced persistent threats.
  • CISA KEV: Highlights known exploited vulnerabilities identified by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
  • PLA: Assesses adherence to protection level agreements.
  • Initiative: Tracks progress on specific vulnerability management initiatives.

MITRE APTs Report

Upon opening, the dashboard defaults to displaying the MITRE APTs report.

CISA KEV Report

To view the CISA KEV report, from BigFix CyberFOCUS Analytics web report, click the CISA KEV tab.

  • The bubbles on the chart indicate CVE’s and the size of the bubble indicates the total number of exposures to that CVE.
  • The color of the bubble indicates CVSS3-Severity. The darker the color, the higher the severity.
  • The X-axis denotes the timeline selected as per the View By drop-down.
  • The Y-axis denotes the number of unique machines.

PLA Report

PLA chart allows you to identify and prioritize all important patches (Fixlets) that are required to protect the device from possible vulnerabilities in the BigFix environment.

This analysis shows the current state of your environment against several sample Protection Level Agreements (PLA).

A typical PLA chart shows the timeline to patch the vulnerability in an environment.

The color on the bar represents the following:

  • Agreed PLA: The timeline defined to patch the vulnerabilities.
  • Within PLA: The green portion of the bar represents the number of vulnerabilities that are patched within the agreed PLA timeline.
  • Beyond PLA: The red portion of the bar represents the number of vulnerabilities that are yet to be patched. These vulnerabilities are way past the agreed PLA timeline and pose a greater risk to the devices.

Initiative Report

The Initiative Report provides an overview of CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) categorized by different computer groups found in the user’s environment. Its purpose is to display the number of vulnerabilities across machines, giving insights into the distribution of vulnerabilities.

  • The X-axis indicates CVEs broken down to the initiative group set
  • The Y-axis indicates the number of machines vulnerable to the relevant CVE
  • The color indicates a unique Computer Group

Conclusion

Security analytics is a critical tool for modern IT operations. It empowers teams to detect threats, respond swiftly, manage risks proactively, and achieve cost savings. By leveraging solutions like HCL BigFix CyberFOCUS Analytics, organizations can gain a comprehensive view of their security landscape, prioritize vulnerabilities, and patch issues in real time, ultimately bolstering their overall cybersecurity posture. Avail of the HCL BigFix trial today.