24/7 Monitoring for Suspicious Activity and Emerging Threats
Cybercrime is a thriving industry. Globally, threat actors relentlessly innovate, creating advanced technologies and techniques to exploit and compromise vulnerable systems. Internet-exposed systems face relentless assaults, from automated attacks to highly targeted campaigns. Moreover, the commoditization of attacks has lowered the barrier to entry, allowing more individuals to launch effective cyberattacks.
Consider the following:
- 70% of organizations experienced a significant or very significant business disruption because of a data breach.1
- In 2024, it took an average of 292 days to identify and contain breaches involving stolen credentials.2
- The average total cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.48 million (10% increase over 2023 and the highest total ever).3
- Ransomware continues to be on the rise. It’s estimated that there are 1.7 million ransomware attacks each day, averaging 19 attacks per second.4
Firewalls, endpoint protection, and intrusion detection systems provide some defense against these attacks, but inevitably attacks get through. If you’re only conducting periodic scans or sporadic review of logs, attacks that get past your defenses may remain undetected for long periods and provide threat actors time to linger on your network, conduct reconnaissance to identify other vulnerable and high value targets, and inflict damage.
To detect and defend against continuous attacks, organizations need to monitor 24/7 to identify critical security incidents.
Cloud Adoption Increases Attack Surface
By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.5 With this increase in cloud adoption comes a larger pool for threat actors to target for compromise.
Providing security from on-premises to cloud differs vastly, as is security between cloud providers. In-house security professionals are finding traditional point security products and practices inadequate to extend necessary security protection to the cloud.
Firewalls, endpoint protection, and intrusion detection systems provide some defense against these attacks, but inevitably attacks get through. If you’re only conducting periodic scans or sporadic review of logs, attacks that get past your defenses may remain undetected for long periods and provide threat actors time to linger on your network, conduct reconnaissance to identify other vulnerable and high value targets, and inflict damage.
To detect and defend against continuous attacks, organizations need to monitor 24/7 to identify critical security incidents.
Improve Security with 24/7 Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is a critical component for effective cybersecurity. However, there are a variety of factors that make it challenging for most organizations to accomplish this on their own.
While many businesses know they need to enhance their security team, they hit a major challenge when trying to find and hire experienced cybersecurity talent.6 According to the 2023 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, there are more than 3.99 million cybersecurity positions currently open worldwide. Despite that growth, the cybersecurity workforce gap has grown at 2x the rate, further widening the gap.7 Salaries for cybersecurity professional jumped by more than 15% in recent years8, the candidate pool is limited for entry- and mid-level candidates, and ongoing training and professional certifications can be as much as $20,000 per person annually. And even when you find a security professional to join your team, there’s a significant ramp period, constant tuning required for the tool stack, and the risk of people leaving once they have been trained means a constant vigilance program is often unattainable
Fortunately, there is another way to achieve the security your organization needs with 24/7 monitoring provided by highly skilled cybersecurity professionals. The answer is Fortra’s Alert Logic managed security services. Whether you choose Fortra Extended Detection and Response (XDR) or Alert Logic Managed Detection and Response (MDR), we become an integral part of your team, offering industry-leading service value and a commitment to thoroughly understanding your unique business and security needs.
Continuous Visibility with a Tools + People Approach
It’s crucial to have the right platform, intelligence, and expertise to achieve effective cybersecurity. Alert Logic provides the most comprehensive coverage for your workloads across your environment. Our global security operations center (SOC) is staffed by experts in security and information technology disciplines. Our expertise and technology lead to your desired security outcomes.
Our SOC provides constant vigilance, filtering out the noise and investigating and responding to incidents 24/7. Our customers are alerted only to those security incidents that need attention, so they can stay focused on their core business while having peace of mind that their network and data are being watched
Stories from the SOC: Vigilance Reduces Exposure to Risk
Attackers often use current events as a catalyst or cover for their attacks. During these times, vigilance reduces exposure to risk and it’s not uncommon to see a spike in scans from nation states and other third-party attackers. However, most of these attacks are correlated, not coordinated meaning they are automated and somewhat random until they identify vulnerable targets.
During a geopolitical event, Alert Logic security analysts noticed a rise in traffic polling systems on a client network. Certain services use specific TCP/IP ports, and the system is designed to respond to queries with information about the platform and version to facilitate connection. However, that information also can be used to identify and target vulnerable systems. The analyst contacted the customer about the activity with remediation guidance of a configuration change to prevent systems from responding to requests from unknown external sources. The result was a dramatic drop-in scanning activity.
This is just one story of how the combination of data feeds across multiple compute environments, analytics, and experienced people filtering out noise to recognize correlation between activity and potentially malicious outcomes leads to effective cybersecurity.
Ready to protect your company with Alert Logic?
4. Global Ransomware Damage Costs Predicted To Exceed $265 Billion By 2031
5. Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences
6. Bridging The Cybersecurity Talent Shortage – Alert Logic
7. ISC2-Cybersecurity-Workforce-Study.ashx
8. The Cybersecurity Talent-to-value Framework