Security operations centers (SOCs) are currently overwhelmed. Analysts process thousands of alerts every day and spend much of their time tracking down 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 a significant amount of time manually prioritizing alerts, and the majority of alerts are classified as benign.
Addressing the root causes of these blind spots and alert fatigue is not as simple as implementing more accurate tools. Many of these traditional tools are highly accurate, but their fatal flaw is a lack of context and narrow focus: missing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, sophisticated attackers often exploit risks that are invisible to traditional reactive tools and use widely available bypass kits to evade detection.
While all of these tools are effective in their own right, they often fail due to the reality that attackers do not use only one attack method, exploit only one type of exposure, or weaponize a single CVE when entering an environment. Instead, attackers chain multiple exposures together, take advantage of known CVEs where they are useful, and use evasion techniques to move laterally through the environment to achieve their goals. Traditional security tools may individually detect one or more of these exposures or IoCs, but without the context provided by a deeply integrated continuous exposure management program, it can be nearly impossible for security teams to effectively correlate seemingly disconnected signals.
Benefits of SecOps at every stage of the cybersecurity lifecycle
Exposure management platforms help transform SOC operations by embedding exposure intelligence directly into existing analyst workflows. Of course, the ability to gain visibility into attack surfaces and insight into interconnected exposures provides immense value, but that only scratches the surface. Although they often work in parallel rather than in tandem, this is not too surprising given the large overlap in the high-level models each team operates on.
To further emphasize this point, below is a comparison of a typical SOC workflow and the CTEM lifecycle.
Typical SOC Lifecycle How Integrated Exposure Management Helps CTEM Lifecycle Monitors
Maintain continuous visibility of your entire attack surface and prioritize critical assets that are most critical to your business and most likely to be targeted by attackers. Shared attack surface visibility
Integration with CMDB and SOC tools creates a unified view of the attack surface and critical assets, aligning security and IT teams on what matters most. range
Outline the scope of your exposure management program, identify critical assets that are most critical to your business, and maintain continuous visibility across your attack surface. detect
Ideally, identify suspicious malicious activity across the attack surface before it gains access or compromises critical systems or data. Contextualize threat alerts
When a detection occurs, analysts instantly review the asset’s risk posture and whether suspicious activity matches known attack vectors, turning general alerts into targeted investigations. discover
Uncover risks across the attack surface, including attack paths, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity and permission issues.
Validate security alerts and correlate event logs to identify true security incidents and malicious activity versus benign anomalous activity. Improving placement accuracy
Make better-informed decisions based on asset and business context to sift through the noise of security alerts while reducing the risk of false positives. prioritize
Prioritize discovered exposures based on threat intelligence, environment, and business context to focus remediation efforts on the most impactful and pressing risks. investigate
Dig into threat intelligence, event logs, and other findings to determine the scope, root cause, and impact of security incidents. Visualize complex attack chains
Translate abstract risk findings into validated potential attack scenarios. Analysts can visualize how threat actors chain together specific exposures to identify critical pain points. Verify
Confirm that discovered exposures actually exist, are reachable by threat actors, and can actually be exploited based on patch availability and compensation controls. respond
Take steps to minimize the impact of a breach and eliminate threats in your environment. Targeted incident response
Understanding exploitable vectors enables precise containment and remediation, allowing you to quickly address specific exposures without destructive over-isolation or business impact. mobilize
Efficiently and effectively drive exposure remediation by driving cross-functional collaboration, automating notification and ticketing workflows, implementing security mitigations where possible, and automating patching workflows.
This natural alignment between the high-level workflows of proactive and reactive teams makes it easy to see where targeted threat and attack surface intelligence from an exposure management platform can be useful to SOC teams before and during threat investigation.
The magic really starts to happen when teams integrate exposure management platforms with EDR, SIEM, and SOAR tools to deliver contextual threat intelligence to SOC analysts precisely when and where they need it most. This allows teams to automatically correlate discovered exposures with specific MITER ATT&CK techniques, creating actionable threat intelligence that is immediately relevant to each organization’s unique attack surface.
For exposures that cannot be immediately remediated, teams can leverage this intelligence to inform detection engineering and threat hunting efforts. This creates a continuous feedback loop where exposure intelligence informs detection updates, improves alert triage and investigation, and supports automated response and prioritized remediation.
Learn more about SOC workflows with enhanced exposure intelligence
Traditional detection tools generate alerts based on signatures and behavioral patterns, but lack environmental context. Continuous exposure management changes this by providing real-time context about the systems, configurations, and vulnerabilities involved in each alert.
When a detection occurs, SOC analysts instantly understand what risks exist to the affected systems, what attack methods are viable given the current configuration, what the potential blast radius is, 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 a general severity score, exposure management provides environment-specific risk context. During an investigation, continuous exposure management provides analysts with detailed attack vector analysis that shows exactly how attackers will exploit current alerts as part of a broader campaign. This includes understanding all possible attack paths based on the actual network topology, access relationships, and system configuration. It also includes digging into the root cause of a breach, helping analysts identify the most likely points of compromise and the paths taken by attackers. Response activities are more accurate when they are based on exposure intelligence. SOC teams can implement surgical responses to address specific exposures being exploited instead of broad containment measures that can disrupt business operations. The remediation phase extends beyond immediate incident response to systematic exposure reduction, automatically generating tickets that address not just the incident at hand, but the underlying conditions that enabled it. Once remediation activities are complete, the same testing process used to uncover security gaps can be used to verify that the implemented changes actually work and reduce risk.
Continuous exposure management is integrated into SecOps workflows, so each incident becomes a learning opportunity to strengthen future detection and response capabilities. Understanding which exposures led to successful attacks during red teaming and validation testing can help you refine and implement compensatory controls 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 developing focused capabilities against the most important threats while preventing situations that generate unnecessary alerts. Continuous exposure control provides environmental awareness that turns common security tools into precision instruments.
In an era where threat actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and persistent, SOCs need every advantage they can get. The ability to proactively shape the battlefield, eliminate exposure, adjust detection, and develop custom capabilities based on the realities of the environment can be the difference between staying ahead of threats and always keeping up.
Note: This article was written and contributed by Ryan Blanchard, currently Director of Product Marketing at XM Cyber. He started his career analyzing IT and professional services markets and GTM strategies, and now helps translate the benefits of complex technology into stories that connect innovation, business, and people.
Source link
