5 Common Threat Management Myths

In my last blog, I shared the most common cybersecurity threats faced by businesses in 2023. But how do you combat these threats? Can any threat management tools help prevent hacks and breaches? In this blog, I’ll give you a brief outline of different threat management tools along with some of the more common myths associated with them.

Threat Management Tools

The names of threat management tools are awash with acronyms so you might be confused about their actual functions. Let’s look at their full names and features: 

EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response)
EDR is an integrated endpoint security solution that detects and responds to suspicious activities on multiple endpoints such as desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

XDR (Extended Detection and Response)
XDR is an evolution of EDR that extends the scope of threat detection and monitoring to networks, the cloud, applications and third-party data. It adds functionalities such as third-party integrations, automated enrichment & root-cause analysis, internal & external threat intel feed and one-click automatic response.

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
SIEM collects, aggregates and analyses event log data across various sources, including networks, host systems, infrastructure, applications, endpoints and users in real-time. Your Security Operation Centre Team (SOC Team) can make use of this tool to detect and block attacks.

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response)
SOAR is an extension of SIEM, with orchestration, automation and response capabilities. It enables your SOC Team to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow.

Misunderstandings about threat management

Before you choose any threat management tools to help with your cyber security, let’s debunk some myths here:

#1: Threat management tools prevent all hacks and breaches.
Be cautious about using the word ‘all’ – No threat management tool can 100% prevent hacks and breaches. Instead ‘assume breach’ is the safest approach for companies to take in threat management. This is one of the guiding principles of the Zero Trust Model, meaning the system denies all access by default unless every user, device, application workload and data flow is authenticated. Your SOC Team need to be more proactive in setting some rules and policies to block attacks in advance.

#2: The more event log data you collect, the more secure your system is.
Overflow of data without relevant tooling to sift through the noise can drown your SOC team. If your team views too much irrelevant threat detection data, they may tune out key entries that might be an Indicator of Compromise (IOC). This makes threat detection like looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore, you should only collect data that is relevant to analysing suspicious activities in your system.

#3: Threat hunting is a one-off exercise.
Threat hunting should be a continuous process and an essential part of your cybersecurity strategy. Even if you deploy the best-fit threat management tool, your SOC team should regularly monitor the changes in data and refine your policies.

#4: Threat management tools are our panacea for cybersecurity. We don’t need to hire cybersecurity experts.
Threat hunting is an ongoing battle and we know most companies have a knowledge gap in cybersecurity. To turn your data into intelligence, your SOC team should be fully staffed to collect and analyse the data. If you need help with your SOC team, you may decide to partner with external cybersecurity experts.

#5: Threat hunting can be fully automated by artificial intelligence (AI).
AI tooling can help identify cyber threats by doing robotic and time-consuming tasks such as big data sifting and pattern matching in a mass-consistent way. Your team can then focus on data analysis, contextual interpretation, information reasoning and risk assessment. However, AI cannot decipher the ever-changing threat landscape as humans do. Humans can perform much better on new threat discovery and predictions so threat hunting can’t be fully automated.

Conclusion

Each threat management tool has unique features that perform different functions and analyses. There is no single solution that applies to everything and threat hunting is not a one-off investment but requires continuous effort to stay ahead of cyber threats. We advise you work with a cybersecurity expert to develop best practice for threat management and I’ll suggest some ideas on how to do this in my final blog.

How CACI can help

We have cybersecurity experts who can improve the protection levels of your business. Capabilities include Zero Trust Network Architecture, Threat Analytics, Systems Hardening and Network Analytics. We can also perform a risk assessment to advise you on your cybersecurity needs. Find out more about our cybersecurity capabilities.