Threat Detection Software: A Deep Dive

As the threat landscape evolves and multiplies with more
advanced attacks than ever, defending against these modern cyber
threats is a monumental challenge for almost any organization.

Threat detection is about an organization’s ability to
accurately identify threats, be it to the network, an endpoint,
another asset or an application – including cloud infrastructure
and assets. At scale, threat detection analyzes the entire security
infrastructure to identify malicious activity that could compromise
the ecosystem.

Countless solutions support threat detection, but the key is to
have as much data as possible available to bolster your security
visibility. If you don’t know what is happening on your systems,
threat detection is impossible.

Deploying the right security software is critical for protecting
you from threats.

What do we mean by threat detection
software?

In the early days of threat detection, software was deployed to
protect against different forms of malware. However, threat
detection has evolved into a much more comprehensive category.

Modern threat detection software addresses the challenges of
identifying threats, finding the legitimate alerts out of all the
noise, and locating bad actors by using Indicators of Compromise
(IoCs).

Today’s threat detection software works across the entire
security stack to give security teams the visibility they need to
take appropriate steps and actions.

What capabilities should threat detection software
include?

To meet the demands of a rapidly-changing workplace, good threat
detection software should be the cornerstone of a robust threat
detection program that includes detection technology for security
events, network events and endpoint events.

For security events, data should be aggregated from activity
across the network, including access, authentication, and critical
system logs. For network events, it’s about identifying traffic
patterns and monitoring traffic between and within both trusted
networks and the internet. For endpoints, threat detection
technology should provide details regarding potentially malicious
events on user machines and gather any forensic information to
assist in threat investigation.

Ultimately, robust threat detection solutions give security
teams the ability to write detections to look for events and
patterns of activity that could be indicative of malicious
behavior. Security teams often include detection engineers
responsible for creating, testing and tuning detections to alert
the team of malicious activity, and minimize false positives.

Detection engineering has been evolving to adopt workflows and
best practices from software development to help security teams
build scalable processes for writing and hardening detections. The
term “Detection as Code” has emerged to describe this practice. By
treating detections as well-written code that can be tested,
checked into source control, and code-reviewed by peers, teams get
higher-quality alerts – reducing fatigue and quickly flagging
suspicious activity.

Whether it’s an XDR platform, a next-gen SIEM or an IDS, the
platform should provide security teams with the ability to craft
highly customizable detections, a built-in testing framework, and
the ability to adopt a standardized CI/CD workflow

The traditional software vs SaaS debate for threat
detection

While traditional software and SaaS may both provide the same
“software”, the approach is drastically different.

The traditional approach would be to install a piece of software
and run it locally. However, this has several drawbacks — including
high maintenance costs, lack of scalability, and security
risks.

By contrast, many SaaS services will automatically update
themselves when new versions become available. Plus, you typically
get more reliable performance and service levels from vendors.

The threat detection benefits of cloud-native
SaaS

Traditional security teams may have been slower^[1]
to embrace cloud native SaaS solutions, as they are typically more
understaffed than their general IT counterparts.

Often, the focus on on-prem infrastructure & applications is the
result of business leaders operating under the false assumption
that their SaaS vendors are responsible for security.

But as their infrastructure becomes even more cloud-based,
deploying a SaaS solution is the more practical strategy today and
into the future.

We discussed benefits like lower costs and enhanced business
agility above, but for security teams, the most crucial advantage
is faster detection and remediation.

When new threats and bad actors seem to surface every day, an
organization’s security environment needs room for rapid
innovation. With serverless technology, security teams can take
advantage of scalability, performance and the ability to analyze
massive amounts of data quickly.

Most importantly, cloud-native SaaS allows organizations to be
proactive about threat detection and management. Modern SaaS
security solutions typically include well-honed processes,
tracking, and a single pane of glass visibility in a centralized
hub for proactive and responsive threat management.

With a swelling tide of security-relevant data that security
teams need to collect and analyze to detect threats, traditional
tools are not cut out to handle these workloads.

These solutions take threat detection software to new heights
with well-honed processes, tracking, and a single pane of glass
visibility in a centralized hub for proactive and responsive threat
management.

Panther’s
cloud-native threat detection software^[2]

With Panther’s serverless approach to threat detection and
response, your security team can detect threats in real-time by
analyzing logs as they are ingested, giving you the fastest
possible time to detection. You’ll also gain the ability to craft
high-fidelity detections in Python and leverage standard CI/CD
workflows for creating, testing, and updating detections.

It’s easy to write detection rules in Panther. But if you want to get an even
better understanding of how you can improve detection efficacy with
Panther, book a demo today.^[3][4][5]

Follow Panther on Twitter^[6]
and LinkedIn^[7].