Cost-Effective Strategies for Log Monitoring and Response: How to Keep Your Company Safe from Cyber Threats

As the world becomes increasingly digitized and connected, the importance of regular security log monitoring and response cannot be overstated. In today’s digital age, cyber threats are a constant and growing concern:

It is essential to have a proactive and comprehensive approach to security. Regular security log monitoring and response is an essential part of any cybersecurity strategy.

One of the key benefits of regular security log monitoring and response is that it allows organizations to detect and respond to potential threats quickly and effectively. By constantly monitoring logs and identifying patterns and anomalies, security teams can quickly identify and respond to potential threats, preventing them from causing significant damage.

According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, organizations that have a strong security incident response plan are able to detect and contain breaches in an average of 46 days, compared to an average of 201 days for organizations without a plan.

Another key benefit of regular security log monitoring and response is that it helps organizations meet compliance requirements. Standards such as ISO 27001 and NIST SP 800-53 require organizations to have a comprehensive security management system that includes regular security log monitoring and response. By implementing these standards, organizations can demonstrate to customers, partners, and regulators that they have taken the necessary steps to protect sensitive data and prevent breaches.

Case studies also demonstrate the value of regular security log monitoring and response:

For example, in 2016, a major healthcare organization experienced a data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 4 million patients. The cause of the breach was a failure to monitor security logs, which would have revealed suspicious activity and allowed the organization to take action before the breach occurred. This incident highlights the importance of regular security log monitoring and response and the potential consequences of not having it in place.

Companies can do log monitoring in a cost-effective manner by implementing the following strategies:

Automation: Automating log monitoring and analysis can significantly reduce the cost of manual monitoring and analysis. By using automated tools, companies can analyze and identify potential threats in real-time, without the need for manual intervention. This can significantly reduce labor costs and increase the effectiveness of monitoring.

Cloud-based solutions: Utilizing cloud-based log monitoring solutions can help companies reduce the costs associated with maintaining and scaling their own infrastructure. Cloud-based solutions also offer automatic updates, eliminating the need for additional costs to maintain software.

Prioritization: Companies can prioritize their log monitoring efforts by focusing on the most critical systems and applications. This can help them identify and address potential threats more efficiently, reducing costs and increasing the overall effectiveness of monitoring.

Regular testing: Regularly testing and evaluating log monitoring systems can help companies identify potential vulnerabilities and improve their overall security posture. By testing their systems, companies can also ensure that they are able to detect and respond to potential threats effectively.

Outsourcing: Companies can also consider outsourcing log monitoring and analysis to a third-party vendor. This can help them reduce costs associated with hiring and training employees, and also provide them access to specialized expertise and resources.

In addition, companies can also incorporate security ISO and NIST standards into their security log monitoring and response strategy to ensure they are doing it in a cost-effective manner while also staying compliant with the regulations. This will help them manage risks and remain protected from cyber threats.

Remember: regular security log monitoring and response is a critical component of any cybersecurity strategy. By detecting and responding to potential threats quickly and effectively, organizations can prevent significant damage and meet compliance requirements. With the increasing number of cyber threats and data breaches, it is essential for organizations to prioritize regular security log monitoring and response to protect their sensitive information and assets.

Whitepaper: Reducing Cyber Incidents by combatting hackers with Legal Revocation Strategy

Detering Hackers

Hacking is prevalent because of the asymmetrical relationship between cost and reward to the hacker. On average, a hacker reaps US$9.2 while expending little effort or resources. Meanwhile, the company suffers US$9.2M in total damages; this excludes IT and legal costs, ransoms, and reputation.

A company’s defense consists of patching known vulnerabilities while the IT Department focuses on ongoing business operations. Coupled with the prevalent business view that breaches are a cost of doing business rather than a critical threat, cyber breaches thrive in this organizational climate.

Watchdog provides a systematic method to remove hackers’ internet access and compromised resources through legal means while preserving the evidence for legal actions.

Data Security Matters:
With the average cyber breach costing $9.2 million dollars per incident, governments are increasingly holding corporations accountable for basic cyber security. Fully 72% of network breaches are conducted by opportunistic hackers without a focused target. These involve lesser secured networks instead of attacking more secure networks.

By increasing network security and pushing back against hackers, an organization can decrease attacks, preserve forensic evidence, and automate government-mandated compliance reporting.

The data breach results from a multi-stage process known as a “cyber kill chain”. These may take weeks or months to complete and is dependent on the previous stages being uninterrupted.

Automated breach detection and revocation of a hacker’s resources lowers the attack’s frequency and reduces the chances of an attack becoming successful. Halting the process earlier in the kill chain generally results in lesser damages and liabilities.

The Kill Chain (What Hackers Do)

A successful breach requires the sequentially dependent steps to be undetected and unremoved.

Reconnaissance – gathering social or technical information to prepare for the attack

Weaponization – creating malware to exploit the discovered backdoors

Delivery – delivering the malware for future execution
Exploitation – activating the previously delivered malware

Installation – installing additional malware

Command and Control – enabling remote control of discovered assets

Action – extracting, encryption, or deleting of the critical assets

Watchdog Active Countermeasures

By imposing a noticeable cost to hackers, legal active countermeasures can deter most attempts to establish a kill chain in a network, thus preventing future breaches. Hackers avoid networks that are expensive to exploit.

Watchdog’s active countermeasures consist of:

Analyzing network activity logs with our artificial intelligence to detect malicious activities.
Sending revocation requests to the ISP’s and companies where the threat activity originated from.
Maintaining a database of threat activity records as time-stamped evidence for use by your legal department if it is ever needed.

Why are Active Countermeasures effective?

Implementing active countermeasures is an effective deterrent because of:

Decreased Breach Exposure. The majority of breach exposures are exploited because of misconfigured network settings, protocols, or unintentional interaction of different service services. Detecting low-level breaches and sending out revocation requests will undermine the hacker’s resources. This makes your network more secure and lessens a hacker’s inclination to attack a network that rapidly decreases known vulnerabilities.

Automated Mitigation. Alerting Internet Service Providers to possible compromises on their network will lead them to stop the rogue processes or suspend user accounts in most cases. They will effectively be assisting you in protecting your network from bad actors by denying them “safe harbor” on the networks where they launch their attacks from.

Focused Organizational Resources. Watchdog analyzes web activities and sends out alerts. This will allow your team to focus on the most critical attacks. Your team focuses on end-stage breaches to prevent a devastating hack.

Can’t do it? Let Watchdog do it for you!

While Offense gets the glory, it is DEFENSE that wins the Game! Beef up your defensive strategies with Watchdog.

Watchdog will take your router, firewall, and server weblogs, then analyze them with our artificial intelligence application that is monitored by a certified cybersecurity team housed in our Singapore-licensed security operations center (SOC).

Watchdog will enhance your raw logs with other annotated data to create revocation requests that are automatically sent by e-mail to the ISP’s and companies where the threat activity originated from.

Finally, Watchdog will archive all the log records as integrated, time-stamped evidence for your legal department.

Enroll in our free pilot to demonstrate the benefits (US$10,800 value)

For a limited time, we are offering qualified companies a FREE 30-day Trial of Watchdog cyber monitoring and alert service, valued at US$10,800 annually.

Click < HERE > to avail of this FREE Trial subscription.

Early Breach Detection Lowers Costs

According to a March and McLennan study (Cyber Risk in Asia Pacific), Asian firms take 1.7 times longer to discover a data breach.

In addition, IBM Security and Ponemon Institute computes the average total cost of data breach at USD 141 per lost or stolen record.

The study also showed a strong relationship between mean time to detection (MTTI) and the cost of each data breach. The good news, if we can call them that, is that the worldwide average breach detection time has improved from 201 days in 2016 to 190 days in 2017.

However, this is still far from the ideal 100 days mean time to breach detection. The graph below shows that the longer a company takes to discover a data breach, the higher the associated cost to contain it later on.

So one key goal of your company’s security framework would be to shorten cyber breach detection times. One common way seasoned network admins do this is via SNMP monitoring of all network and server devices.

Then they also add SIEM capabilities (Security Incident and Events Monitoring). By correlating SNMP, syslog and SIEM data together, it will be easier for network guys to detect breaches in a shorter time.

Affordable Network Security Software

As a reseller of Untangle for Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, Futuregen is proud to highlight the top of mind questions about the affordable network security software from Untangle.

Why do you need a network security software to secure your network?
If your network is connected to the internet, chances are you are being attacked, spammed, spoofed, or your enterprise assets are being compromised…without you even knowing it! It’s scary.

Securing your network not only protects your enterprise assets, it also ensures that your web facing applications are available to users when they need it. To learn more, here is a short video on the Untangle Network Security Software

If network security is so important, why aren’t other businesses securing their network?
Two factors: Cost and expertise. Top of line security products do cost a lot. It comes with esoteric commands that require a highly trained security professional to operate.

But these are things of the past. Our solution is not only free to download, it is also easy to use. The graphical interface enables you to set options and then wait for the executive summary reports to arrive via email!

With our solution, there really are no excuses for not protecting your network.

What can Untangle as a Network Security Software?
Well a lot! Here is a list of what it can do, and we call the term in the security industry:

Web Filtering. It blocks your employees from time-wasting and unproductive surfing. You control what sites are allowed and not allowed for users inside your network. Best of all, you can just select categories like violence, hacking, sex and the software will do the rest!
Spam Blocker. Stop spam at your gateway even before it reaches your users. They won’t even need to download the spam, and frees them from having to delete it!
Firewall. You can define what types of traffic can enter your network. So it enables your network to show a ‘smaller attack footprint’ on the internet. In short, it limits the points of entry that are open to hackers.
Virus Blocker. Scan all network traffic for viruses and drop them.
Spyware Blocker. Protect users from websites and files that install malicious codes
Intrusion Prevention System. Protects the network from known attack signatures by preventing them from reaching their targets. It gets zapped at the gateway!

If it’s a free Network Security Software, how does Untangle make any money?
Untangle sells commercial add-ons for advanced networks. These are sold as subscriptions. Commercial Add-ons include live support, advanced management features and applications for additional security and remote access.

How much does the Untangle Network Security software cost?
Many will get everything they need for free, but with Commercial Add-ons starting at just $5/mo anyone can afford Untangle. The Professional Package with live support is the best value and it starts at just $25/mo. Full price list available online.

Does it cost anything to join?
Nope. And training is free too. If you’ve got customers with spam, spyware, web filtering or remote access needs, we’d love to work with you.

How does subscription licensing work, if I have multiple offices and want to install an Untangle Server with the Professional Package at each one?
The software license is governed by each Untangle Server and the network it services. We have four pricing tiers based on the number of personal computers on the network. The tiers are 1 – 10, 11 – 50, and 51-150, and 151+.

Let’s look at an example:

You have a main office with 78 employees and two branch offices with 25 and 7 employees respectively. You install an Untangle Server in each office and want to run the Professional Package on all three servers. Your subscription would total $225/month broken out as follows:

$150/mo for the main office with 78 employees (51 – 150 license)
$50/mo for the branch office with 25 employees (11 – 50 license)
$25 for the branch office with 7 employees (1 – 10 license)

Additional discounts are available for longer commitments.

What is the difference between personal computers on the network versus employees?
Untangle’s subscription licensing is by personal computers on the network. If your employees share a set of common computers, you should base your license on the number of computers, not the number of employees. Likewise, if your employees have more than one personal computer each, the license is still based on the total number of personal computers.

Next Steps:

If you are as excited as we are at this point, your next action should be to download the Network Security software and just try it out! You can also email marketing[at]futuregen.sg for any support or pre-sales inquries.