Are you an organisation trying to secure your networks through security monitoring? Or do you want to understand cyber security monitoring better? Most organisations incur a lot of losses in case of a data breach. Still, with the knowledge of cyber security monitoring, you can identify threats on your network in real time and stop malicious activity.
Cyber security monitoring helps your IT team take precautions and implement preventive measures before an attack occurs. Our article discusses everything you must know about cyber security monitoring and its importance in an organisation.
What Is Cyber Security Monitoring?
Cyber security monitoring is the process of continuously assessing a company’s network to spot potential security risks and ensure secure data transfers. Being aware of dangers enables you to take action before they occur.
You can safeguard your company apps, users’ data, and the general network by quickly identifying and managing possible threats. In this case, an organisation may train employees or hire IT experts to detect cyber threats by monitoring the traffic of an organisation’s network intended to harm its data.
When you practice cyber security monitoring, you can stay updated on threats before they occur. You can detect potential threats in time, thus protecting your organisation’s user data from malice. The process may involve:
- Gathering and evaluating data to spot network shifts or unusual activity
- Utilising automated threat detection with MITRE ATT&CK to identify the most recent hazards
- Deciding which particular behaviours need to be addressed
- Preventing dangers from developing into security incidents
- Creating thorough network security records for regulatory compliance
How Does Cyber Security Monitoring Work?
Cyber monitoring gives you immediate access to illegal updates or suspicious activity on your network. Most companies hire IT pros to anticipate potential security risks and a wide range of data breaches.
A company can take security measures by observing and verifying foreign data through cyber monitoring. If there are any potential network risks, the company creates a physical data centre or a cloud database to keep the data safe.
The IT gurus then gather and evaluate these suspicious alerts and implement the required security controls. The IT specialists may use either of the major types of cyber security monitoring to get the job done. These types include endpoint and network cyber security monitoring.
1. Endpoint Monitoring
Endpoint monitoring is the process of controlling and tracking the endpoints of a network. Endpoints are physical devices such as PCs, servers, smartphones, or software-defined entities like virtual machines or gateways to cloud-based storage services.
Your IT team can use endpoint monitoring to keep track of all the network locations. They monitor information regarding the location of the endpoints, the software running them, and the network ports they are exposed to. Endpoint monitoring thus helps organisations maintain their network visibility and prevent disruption of business operations caused by a lack of connectivity or security issues on the network.
2. Network Monitoring
Network monitoring involves tracking and analysing network activities to detect and respond to performance issues, which could indicate an intrusion or leave the network vulnerable to an attack.
Networking components that are slow, overloaded, crashing, or experiencing outages or other technical failures can render your network susceptible to attack. Also, overloaded servers, computers, or other devices can be a symptom of a cyberattack.
You can analyse your security system from these components by incorporating diagnostic tools, applications, or appliances into your network. When the software detects a performance issue or threat, it sends an alert to your IT team via email, text, or another alarm system. With early detection, your IT professionals can respond quickly to mitigate the situation.
Importance Of Monitoring Security
The organisation must monitor the network and the data being sent toward the network to guard against cyberattacks and avoid any casualties. An organisation should practice the following to keep its network safe.
1. Reduce Data Breach
Continuous network monitoring will assist in identifying threats before they materialise. The organisation can stop these breaches from impacting the data it has on its customers and workers. Continuous security monitoring will therefore be helpful.
2. It Helps Avoid Delays
You run a risk of losing a lot of customers if your company breaches its privacy. Many customers find dealing with businesses that have experienced reported data breaches and cyber-security issues unpopular.
When this happens, businesses will face difficulties in the form of delays and disruptions. However, to address these problems, companies must react quickly and create a continuity plan.
Continuous cybersecurity monitoring requires being ready to recover lost, damaged, or missing data to prevent business interruptions. If the risks are identified and addressed on time, it aids in the creation and execution of the backup plan. Further, it avoids business delays and disruption in operations.
3. Be Less Security Vulnerable
Every system contains shortcomings. An organisation can seek and rectify the vulnerability before fraudsters can take advantage of the situation. Cybersecurity focuses on vulnerabilities that may pose a significant risk. So, maintaining the most recent versions of firewalls and all networks is crucial.
Most organisations have programs for bug hunting. In the bug-hunting program, the organisation asks ethical hackers to hack the system ethically and submit a vulnerability report to verify and fix it.
4. It Helps You Comply with Regulations
Business systems must adhere to various data security, data protection, and cybersecurity regulations. IT experts ensure that the system and network activity is continuously monitored in real-time to be aware of possible cyber-hackers and cyber threats. Regular network monitoring, strict access control, and developing a comprehensive information security policy all contribute to regulatory compliance and help guard against potential breaches and violations.
5. Reduces Downtime
An utterly functional network that manages all activities will help reduce downtime because network outages can be monetarily and financially damaging to a company. And if an organisation is threatened, it should act quickly to address the issue. Therefore, ongoing cybersecurity monitoring will reduce the likelihood of bringing the server or the network offline.
6. It Prevents Unauthorised Access
Most organisations operate remotely. Therefore, organisations utilise cloud services to give their workers access to their necessities. However, this creates an issue because it is necessary to implement access control measures to ensure intruders cannot access the data even if they attempt.
Since there can be loopholes, you can not avoid unauthorised access. Therefore, it is wise to monitor traffic to spot threats, and any unauthorised users who attempt to log in should be banned or stopped.
7. Increase Productivity of the Employee
Employees are essential to any company. Increasing staff productivity is what every company seeks.
Focusing on cyber security monitoring will increase employee output because a well-organised, secure network will enable workers to concentrate on their primary competencies and accelerate task completion. Keeping an IT pro on staff who can manage all the technical duties will be an excellent way to accomplish this. Thus, this will increase everyone’s output.
8. It Helps Maintain Company Stability
Many businesses are investing in digital technology to automate processes in response to the quick transition from traditional workplace settings to remote ones. For virtual meetings and remote job assignments, these companies use tools like client relationship management systems, third-party contact applications, and project management systems. To keep a remote or hybrid workspace for your business, you must invest in relevant cybersecurity technologies, such as cloud security solutions.
With reliable and ongoing cybercrime tracking, you can protect your applications, website, application programming interface (API), and infrastructure. This contributes to preserving company stability further.
9. It Helps You Know How to Detect Attacks
Hackers frequently use a variety of cybersecurity attacks to get through an organisation’s network. Having cyber security monitoring in place is the only way to detect one or more attacks being used against your organisation. Most IT teams know of some of these, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), malware, brute-force password guessing, and phishing (which steals passwords through phoney login forms and sites). Even when conscious of them, they frequently lack the knowledge to identify them.
Security Monitoring Tools
Because the IT team cannot be accessible around the clock to watch the traffic, automation tracking tools are used to notify the IT team of any suspicious behaviour or threat.
There are even some tools that, when a predetermined circumstance is reached, will carry out specific tasks autonomously. The best security systems tools that improve monitoring include the following.
1. ARGUS
ARGUS stands for Audit Record Generation and Utilization System. It ranks among the top open-source network surveillance tools that are accessible online. It analyses network data and examines traffic in great detail.
2. OSSEC
OSSEC stands for Open source HIDS Security, while HIDS is a Host-based Intrusion Detection system. It is a host-based breach monitoring security solution that is free and open-source. It constantly observes most source devices attempting to connect or access an organisation’s network. It carries out rootkit identification, log analysis, time-based warning, etc.
3. Splunk
Splunk is similar to a multitasking tool because it is made for real-time analysis and past data queries. Its design is very user-friendly. Splunk is premium software that allows for a free version with fewer functions.
4. P0F
P0F is simplified and effective. It is used to identify the servers’ operating system with which it communicates any potential threats. There are numerous additional tools for tasks like this, but they produce name lookups, various inquiries, investigations, etc. P0f is ideal for these tasks because it is light and faster but difficult for beginners to master.
5. Nagios
Nagios monitors hosts, networks, and systems and transmits warnings when any strange activity is observed. The user can configure the communication they want to receive under any circumstance. It keeps an eye on the majority of services, including HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol), and many others.
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If you would like to learn more about how Sapphire can support your organisation’s cyber resilience, get in touch with us.