SOC

Security Operations Center is a team of cyber security professionals that monitors the network and its systems to detect malicious cyber security events. Some of the main areas of interest for a SOC are:

• Vulnerabilities: Whenever a system vulnerability (weakness) is discovered, it is essential to fix it by installing a proper update or patch. When a fix is unavailable, the necessary measures should be taken to prevent an attacker from exploiting it. Although remediating vulnerabilities is vital to a SOC, it is not necessarily assigned to them.
• Policy violations: A security policy is a set of rules required to protect the network and systems. For example, it might be a policy violation if users upload confidential company data to an online storage service.
• Unauthorized activity: Consider the case where a user’s login name and password are stolen, and the attacker uses them to log into the network. A SOC must detect and block such an event as soon as possible before further damage is done.
• Network intrusions: No matter how good your security is, there is always a chance for an intrusion. An intrusion can occur when a user clicks on a malicious link or when an attacker exploits a public server. Either way, when an intrusion occurs, we must detect it as soon as possible to prevent further damage. source: tryhackme - defensive security intro

Threat Intelligence

In this context, intelligence refers to information you gather about actual and potential enemies. A threat is any action that can disrupt or adversely affect a system. Threat intelligence collects information to help the company better prepare against potential adversaries. The purpose would be to achieve a threat-informed defence. Different companies have different adversaries. Some adversaries might seek to steal customer data from a mobile operator; however, other adversaries are interested in halting the production in a petroleum refinery. Example adversaries include a nation-state cyber army working for political reasons and a ransomware group acting for financial purposes. Based on the company (target), we can expect adversaries. source:tryhackme - defensive security intro

DFIR - Digital Forensics & Incident Response

Digital Forensics

Forensics is the application of science to investigate crimes and establish facts. With the use and spread of digital systems, such as computers and smartphones, a new branch of forensics was born to investigate related crimes: computer forensics, which later evolved into digital forensics.

In defensive security, the focus of digital forensics shifts to analyzing evidence of an attack and its perpetrators and other areas such as intellectual property theft, cyber espionage, and possession of unauthorized content. Consequently, digital forensics will focus on different areas, such as:

• File System: Analyzing a digital forensics image (low-level copy) of a system’s storage reveals much information, such as installed programs, created files, partially overwritten files, and deleted files.
• System memory: If the attacker runs their malicious program in memory without saving it to the disk, taking a forensic image (low-level copy) of the system memory is the best way to analyze its contents and learn about the attack.
• System logs: Each client and server computer maintains different log files about what is happening. Log files provide plenty of information about what happened on a system. Even if the attacker tries to clear their traces, some traces will remain.
• Network logs: Logs of the network packets that have traversed a network would help answer more questions about whether an attack is occurring and what it entails.

Incident Response

An incident usually refers to a data breach or cyber attack; however, in some cases, it can be something less critical, such as a misconfiguration, an intrusion attempt, or a policy violation. Examples of a cyber attack include an attacker making our network or systems inaccessible, defacing (changing) the public website, and data breach (stealing company data). How would you respond to a cyber attack? Incident response specifies the methodology that should be followed to handle such a case. The aim is to reduce damage and recover in the shortest time possible. Ideally, you would develop a plan that is ready for incident response.

The four major phases of the incident response process are:

1. Preparation: This requires a team trained and ready to handle incidents. Ideally, various measures are put in place to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.
2. Detection and Analysis: The team has the necessary resources to detect any incident; moreover, it is essential to analyze any detected incident further to learn about its severity.
3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery: Once an incident is detected, it is crucial to stop it from affecting other systems, eliminate it, and recover the affected systems. For instance, when we notice that a system is infected with a computer virus, we would like to stop (contain) the virus from spreading to other systems, clean (eradicate) the virus, and ensure proper system recovery.
4. Post-Incident Activity: After a successful recovery, a report is produced, and the lesson learned is shared to prevent similar future incidents. source: tryhackme - defensive scecurity intro

SIEM

Security Information and Event Management system that is used to aggregate security information in the form of logs, alerts, artifacts and events into a centralized platform that would allow security analysts to perform near real-time analysis during security monitoring. source: tryhackme