Accelerating SOC Response with Splunk Mission Control Plugins
Executive Summary
Nowadays, Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face a huge volume of alerts, many of which are false positives that overwhelm analysts and make it impossible for them to properly triage incidents. This sheer volume makes teams spend most of their time sifting through noise instead of exploring actual threats. Although a critical alert is detected, the process of investigation is still lengthy and burdensome, and the analyst has to manually switch between tools and go through large volumes of log files to obtain the threat intelligence and context needed to determine the full extent of a breach.
Crest Data overcame these obstacles by creating a collection of closed and open-source Mission Control Plugins that create instant contextual enrichment and correlated threat intelligence directly embedded within the incident management workflow. These plugins empower analysts to swiftly triage incidents and gain vital insights, eliminating the need to switch tools, greatly lowering the Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) of the SOC team. Crest Data was also instrumental in enhancing the platform’s capabilities and providing intuitive, demonstrative functions that would help security teams prevent disastrous breaches of the environment.
About the Customer
The customers for this initiative include a wide range of organizations from the CASB, Threat Intelligence, EDR, VAPT, and Cloud security sectors. These organizations primarily operate within a Security Operations Center (SOC) environment, where they handle high traffic of security alerts and require streamlined workflows for incident triage.
Customer Challenge
The main issue with the Security Operations Center (SOC) is that analysts are bombarded with an enormous number of alerts, most of which turn out to be false positives. Such a high noise level causes a high level of stress and significantly diminishes the overall effectiveness of the response as security teams spend most of their time analyzing irrelevant alerts instead of investigating real threats.
In cases where an alert is identified as critical, the investigation process is time-consuming and cumbersome. To extract the threat intelligence (TI) and enrichment data required to understand the extent of a breach, analysts have to constantly look into various tools and navigate through a large amount of log files, such as network and endpoint logs. In the absence of an efficient system to correlate this information, organizations are vulnerable to devastating environmental failures as a result of slow reactionary time.
Customer Solution
Crest Data created a set of closed and open-source Mission Control Plugins to implement using the Splunk Mission Control Plug-in Framework to manage the inefficiencies in the incident response process. As a strategic partner of Splunk, Crest Data played a vital role from the beta phase, helping to groom and harden platform capabilities and develop plugins for various early access partners.
The solution has major features and components, which include:
- Integrated Incident Context and Enrichment: The plugins offer real-time contextual enrichment and threat intelligence data that is correlated directly with incidents. This enables analysts to rapidly triage alerts in one workflow, without having to alternate between multiple tools or navigate log files manually.
- Targeted Search and Vital Insights: The solution provides special capabilities to search for relevant events related to an incident, offering vital insights required to undertake in-depth security investigations.
- Broad Security Domain Coverage: Crest Data created these plugins targeting a broad range of security solutions, such as CASB, Threat Intel, EDR, VAPT, and Cloud security, providing holistic coverage of the technology stack of the SOC.
Outcomes
The Mission Control Plugins were developed and implemented, leading to important operational enhancements of Security Operations Centers (SOCs):
- Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR): The main outcome of the integration was a significant reduction in the mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to respond (MTTR) of security incidents.
- Instant Contextual Enrichment: Analysts now have access to instant contextual and threat intelligence (TI) information, which is directly associated with incidents and which makes the triage process far faster.
- Accurate Investigative Insights: The solution offers specialized capabilities to search for incident events and delivers pinpoint insights to conduct thorough security investigations without manual efforts.
- Reduced Analyst Workflow: The plugins have removed the tedious and time-intensive process of having to alternate between various tools and manually go through large log files to find useful data.
About Crest Data
Crest Data is a data and AI-driven technology solutions provider for enterprises and technology innovators across cybersecurity, observability, and cloud security, helping them to move faster and more securely. Being a specialist in SIEM and SOAR optimization, we assist companies in attaining maximum visibility, provide speedy response, and extract value from security investments. With customized threat intelligence and security telemetry, we enable teams to identify targeted attacks and shorten the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) by a large margin.
