Pull Up Your SOCs – 24/7 Protection of Your IT Infrastructure: A Case Study in Cyber Security

Calendar icon 08-24-2021

As the need to store sensitive data increases, our clients must identify, detect, and rapidly respond to security attacks; contain and remediate any threat; and protect their end user data. To meet this need, many of our clients are developing cyber security operations center (CSOC) programs to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information and systems. Our approach to CSOC program development must protect infrastructure on a 24/7 basis, providing security management services to identify, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

 

Major capability areas:

Cyber Security, Advanced Persistent Threat Hunting, Threat Containment and Remediation, Vulnerability and Penetration Testing, Threat Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Technical Services, Incident Response, Security Analytics, Agile Staffing

The challenges

Our clients are large and complex organizations with inherent scalability challenges, handling millions of devices, shifting networks that encounter millions of weekly security related events, and an ever-increasing amount of data that must be analyzed, tracked, addressed, and stored. At the same time, our clients face an increasing number of cyberattacks from sophisticated and persistent external and insider security threats. In the face of this unprecedented threat landscape, CSOC programs must continuously adapt their defensive tools and techniques by implementing the latest available detection capabilities, industry best practices, and security tools.

Our solution

To meet our clients’ complexity and scalability challenges while maintaining round-the-clock protection of systems and data, Halfaker, an SAIC company, leverages emerging technologies and agile staffing to provide comprehensive cyber threat intelligence, business intelligence, technical services, incident response, and security analytics. Our cutting-edge scalable SOC playbooks improve our ability to hunt, detect, contain, mitigate, and eradicate cyber threats, while drastically reducing required manpower and increasing analysis speed. We guard against the loss of informational confidentiality, integrity, and availability by performing independent verification and validation assessments of our clients’ cybersecurity posture, conducting cyber-related reporting to outside agencies, and leading departmental efforts to prepare for and defend against emerging cyber threats. Our far-reaching cyber analysis efforts include digital media and malware analysis, cyber hunt and threat analysis, insider threat analysis, and sensor monitoring. To ensure our clients remain proactive, gaming against sophisticated and shifting malicious attacks, Halfaker also engages in ongoing requirement definition and development to create and implement a comprehensive data loss prevention program that aligns to integration process standards.

Halfaker implements continuous training and workforce development to maintain a world-class cyber workforce with knowledge, skills, and abilities aligned with the NIST National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education framework. Leveraging our proven agile staffing processes, we successfully orchestrate the staffing and management of multiple CSOC teams while ensuring zero downtime or program impact during transition.

Realized benefits

By researching and implementing the latest cybersecurity tools, technologies, and techniques, we continually improve our clients’ ability to detect and remediate cyber threats while maintaining a secure and effective operational environment for information systems. At the same time, our NIST-aligned agile staffing enables clients to recruit, develop and retain a talented cybersecurity workforce, capable of handling any adversarial attack. Clients benefit from:

  • 24/7/365 protection
  • Scalable and sustainable cyber resilience
  • Up-to-the-minute threat intelligence

In the last month, Halfaker successfully completed 1 million-plus vulnerability scans of managed tools and devices across 1,200 client-owned facilities in the U.S., providing relevant, actionable, and timely cyber threat intelligence support to strengthen security posture.