What is continuous monitoring and why is it important for cybersecurity?

Continuous monitoring in cybersecurity is like having a vigilant guard always on duty. It involves real-time tracking of network activities, vulnerabilities, and threats. This constant watchfulness allows immediate detection of unusual patterns or potential breaches, enabling swift response. In today's dynamic threat landscape, where cyberattacks evolve rapidly, continuous monitoring is crucial. It provides proactive defense, minimizing the impact of security incidents and safeguarding sensitive data. Essentially, it's our digital alarm system, ensuring a prompt and effective cybersecurity response around the clock.

Continuous monitoring is the process of persistently observing, recording, and analyzing an organization’s network and systems to identify and address security vulnerabilities in real-time. It typically involves automated tools and solutions that can efficiently detect, categorize, and mitigate threats as they occur. The primary goal of a continuous monitoring solution is to identify unusual or potentially malicious activities and flag it immediately. Continuous monitoring solutions provide the required visibility to identify attacks and provide real-time views to help IT professionals respond proactively to threats and compromise. This process enables organizations to quickly initiate investigation of potential security incidents.

Continuous Monitoring ( CM) plays an important role in maintaining a good cyber security environment. 1. Placing all the Technology controls related to CM is an important aspect. 2. Continuous Monitoring policies can be developed and reviewed properly at regular interval of time. 3. CM for Network , server , OS, host machines , storage system , Applications, VM , cloud etc is also important SIEM, IDS, logging and monitoring tools can play an important role. 4. CM for physical security is also important. 5. Monitoring social media accounts and online portals is also important. 6. Even the Monitoring CM process can also be monitored 7. Monitoring current cyber threats , CVE: vulnerability is also an important aspect.

Continuous monitoring is a crucial aspect of cybersecurity that involves the ongoing, real-time assessment of an organization's information systems, assets, and activities to identify and respond to security threats. This proactive approach helps organizations detect and mitigate potential security incidents before they can cause significant damage. By integrating these elements into a comprehensive continuous monitoring strategy, organizations can enhance their cybersecurity posture, detect and respond to threats more effectively, and minimize the impact of potential security incidents.

Continuous monitoring becomes increasingly important as our infrastructure becomes increasingly dynamic and abstract - leading to an exponential rise in complexity. Legacy on-premises infrastructure is less characterised by rapid changes and is typically restricted to approved changes, carried out by known users. With cloud and hybrid infrastructure, the rise of self-service, unmonitored access (especially post-authentication) and the rapid scaling or transient deployment of resources by DevOps teams, is critical to continuously monitor workloads for unexpected behaviours to spot attacks early and minimise the blast radius of any potential breach.

Please note that the main objective of Continuous monitoring is not to serve compliance monitoring, or at least that's not the priority. Of course, Continuous monitoring will help the professionals who have to provide compliance reports, but the very essence of Continuous monitoring is to serve the cyber team in its activities of monitoring and anticipating the exploitation of vulnerabilities. Indeed, cyber teams suffer from not having a 360° view and not having up-to-date information, which is a problem for taking the right decision at the right time.

In my opinion, the key is "proactivity", providing real-time visibility into an organization's infrastructure to detect and respond to security threats promptly.

The benefits of continuous monitoring in cybersecurity are manifold. It serves as an ever-vigilant sentinel, offering heightened situational awareness and rapid detection capabilities. This real-time insight is crucial for thwarting attacks before they escalate, significantly reducing the time and cost of incident resolution. Furthermore, continuous monitoring is instrumental in ensuring compliance with evolving regulations, providing a transparent, auditable trail of security controls. Its contribution to enhancing organizational resilience cannot be overstated, as it allows for swift adaptation to new threats and changing business needs.

Incorporating use-case-based monitoring with threat intelligence support into continuous monitoring strategies allows organizations to proactively detect and respond to threats that may not have been explicitly defined. Modern AI-based systems excel in this area by dynamically adapting to emerging threats, leveraging machine learning to identify patterns indicative of potential security risks. This approach enhances the automation capability to detect and respond not only known threats but also novel or undefined threats, significantly bolstering the overall effectiveness of cybersecurity measures.

One of the challenges is that the term is VAGUE and the context is missing. Some see compliance here, others see SOC and detection (continuous by nature), etc

A mature visibility requires a comprehensive and well-planned approach to continuous monitoring, including the use of advanced analytics, automation, and regular training for cybersecurity professionals.

Defining the value based on the environment and domain. In High Assurance and compliance environments balancing the tradeoffs and risks tend to get lost in the maturity of the organization and acceptable risk as the solution/application lifecycle evolve - automation and correlation with tools and platform take out the bias of organization culture but add additional work for system behavior which changes over time

Continuous Monitoring is a very big challenge in ICS/OT environments. These areas have zones that sometimes are not connected to the main process network, they have very limited switch or networking equipment bandwidth and PLC's are very sensitive to scanning and monitoring tools. As customers modernize their shopfloor equipment to enable condition monitoring, in-shift optimization and process optimization we will see this trend shift to OT environments, that are continually monitored. For now however we need to be very selective in proposing and architecting this feature into industrial customer networks.

Visibility across whole infrastructure from Data Center into Cloud is very important. Enhance your asset discovery capabilities with Attack Surface Risk Management (ASRM) to understand to understand whole landscape of assets. If you wont see you cant fix.

Continuous monitoring is generally related to security operations, which is the opposite of monitoring for compliance. Many companies are full of logs that no one is looking at. This is definitely not the best practice nowadays. Stop waiting for the perfect SIEM or XDR and start monitoring today. Maybe your AV/EDR detections and IPS alerts are good candidates to monitor now and are there waiting for your attention.

I would like to focus on "automation". Implement automated monitoring tools that can collect and analyze data from various sources, such as logs, network traffic, and system events. These tools can provide real-time alerts and reduce the manual effort required for continuous monitoring.

This STRONGLY depends on the domain. Best practice for continuous CONTROL monitoring is very difference from continuous THREAT monitoring Finally, "monitoring" implies continuity (unlike, say, assessment) so the term is sometimes avoided by some security pros and it relegated to compliance....

Continuous monitoring boils down to log analysis with threat alerting, but it should be combined with a proactive what else can I block without breaking my network approach? What if your IDS has 10,000 possible detections, but only 100 trigger? It's ineffective, enable more logging. When analyzing an alert, what % of protected hosts triggered it? All-Disable false Positive, if only 1% and a few have secondary malicious indicators? consider blocking it, you know won't break your network. Think "what else can I block/patch/remove rights to...each month to reduce my exposed surface area?" Let your analysis guide tuning all of your tools for maximum effectiveness.

Effective continuous monitoring hinges on several best practices. Foremost among these is aligning monitoring objectives with the organization’s risk profile and security strategy, ensuring a targeted, relevant approach. Selecting and fine-tuning the right tools and technologies is paramount, as is clearly defining roles and responsibilities within the monitoring team. Automating processes wherever feasible can significantly enhance efficiency and accuracy, reducing the likelihood of human error. Equally important is fostering a culture of security awareness, empowering team members with the necessary skills to effectively contribute to the monitoring process.

Future depends on the domain. To me, CM is *NOT* SOC and D&R. CM is about more frequent control assessment, not threat detections. Others disagree. So this article needs a discussion about it!

100% agree with Anton, threat detections matter if there are no/weak controls to mitigate the threat. Continuous "Controls Assessments" made possible with monitoring (and observability as an extrapolated perspective across different monitoring points) is the key to risk mitigation. You can't be healthy if you don't know how healthy you are.

We are already seeing a shift in the use of SIEM and log technology with the progression of EDR, MDR and now XDR. With computing moving more to the edge with IoT & 5G we are starting to see security monitoring moving as well. While automation & AI is helping in reducing some of the initial "manual labor" in the early stages of detection and validation, the moving of "taking action" closer to the site of the activity is shaping our future right now. We are moving away from a single location to make security decisions, and pushing our intelligence to the "edge." Expect to see things like "security on chip."

Continuous monitoring must be forefront in people's minds. Doing things manually is never going to be able to scale to the power of automation that techniques like scripting and AI are bringing to the attacking side. Organizations should be taking time to automate as much of their reactionary monitoring and instead try to be proactive. Leaving their humans to audit, threat hunt, and be as proactive as possible.

The future of continuous monitoring will likely involve increased use of automation and AI. Machine learning algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns indicative of potential security threats, allowing for faster and more accurate detection.

Most of organizations have problems with assets inventory and that’s a big problem in monitoring because you will need to cover all your assets to identify any potential threats and be able to perform investigation if there is an incident.

Continuous monitoring in cybersecurity is key for: 1. Real-Time Threat Detection: Instantly identifies suspicious activities, ensuring swift response to potential threats. 2. Compliance: Meets regulatory requirements, avoiding penalties. 3. Proactive Security: Identifies vulnerabilities early, preventing exploits. 4. Quick Response: Minimizes damage by reducing incident response time. 5. Full IT Visibility: Offers a comprehensive view of the IT environment for better control. 6. Risk Management: Continuously assesses & adapts to evolving threats. 7. Data Protection: Monitors data access and movement, safeguarding sensitive information. 8. Operational Efficiency: Automates routine tasks, freeing resources for strategic security initiatives.

Beyond the structural and technological aspects, the human element remains a cornerstone of effective continuous monitoring. Cultivating a mindset where every team member is vigilant and proactive about cybersecurity is vital. Encouraging cross-departmental collaboration and fostering an environment where security is everyone's responsibility can significantly enhance the effectiveness of continuous monitoring efforts. Additionally, staying abreast of global cybersecurity trends and threats, and regularly participating in industry forums and discussions, can provide valuable insights that bolster continuous monitoring strategies.