Battling SOC Retention and Turnover With ULTRA RED 

‍91%of surveyed cybersecurity professionals report feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated (InfoSec Institute).

64%of cyber security leaders have seen a rise in staff turnover (Help Net Security).

76% of cybersecurity staff had to take on responsibilities they were not ready for in an attempt to fill the void (Splunk State of Security Report).

64%of SOC teams pivot, frustratingly, from one security tool to the next (Splunk State of Security Report).

BACKGROUND 

Numerous surveys highlight poor staff morale, emotional stress, and burnout as the leading reasons behind high employee turnover in Security function (Figure 1).The root causes for these problems include escalating cyber alerts, countless tools to operate, and a constant Security talent deficit, now standing at 3.1million open positions worldwide. If these issues persist, then the global economy will continue to see losses due to cyberattacks and dismantling economic losses. According to the Ponemon Institute, “The difficulty in reducing threats in the attack landscape is why the IT security gap is not shrinking” (The 2023 Global Study on Closing the IT Security Gap, The Ponemon Institute). Businesses alone cannot solve for high turnover and the root causes for this issue, only a concerted effort among businesses, vendors, educators, and researchers can. At UTLRA RED we seek to combine their strengths and build their potential to collaborate against cyber threats. 

ULTRA RED:Continuous Threat Exposure Management 

MinimizingCyber Alerts

Security Operations are burdened under the weight of security alerts rife with false positives, and low risk events. It is difficult to tease out the threats and attacks that matter; it’s even more difficult to prioritize them according to business risk and to drive actionable remediation. ULTRA RED drives focused threat reduction through the “3 V” Framework: Visibility, Vulnerability, and Validation. 

Visibility

The ULTRA RED Attack Surface Management (ASM) and Digital Risk Protection Services(DRPS) tools scan, discover, inventory, and categorize all of your known and unknown assets in less than 3 clicks. Our discovery scans leverage rich internet telemetry with an extremely low false positive rate to automatically uncover all company assets under the organization's scope. We utilize a proprietary system to check and re-check the validity of results. By expanding the attack surface the likelihood of finding a breach increases. In our scans, we uncover any instance of account compromise across the web (i.e., clear, deep, dark), on social media, and in app marketplaces.  Our asset management module “inventories” all intelligence and threats related to the organization's assets into specific categories. This can include outdated technologies, misconfigurations, compromised accounts, risk score, present andnon-present technologies, along with their remediation status. With the help of our powerful “out of the box” filtering tools, timelines, and including abuilt-in chat between all Ultra Red users to allow anyone to document any changes, an organization's assets can be managed, prioritized, and remediated with ease. ULTRA RED’s proprietary continuous scanning processes help you monitor your assets for changes, remediations, and weaknesses that are found as a result of network changes and its growth. This continuous monitoring allows for organizations to concentrate on fixing the issues and not have to worry about manually starting or validating scans on their organization.

Vulnerability

Our Vulnerability Management (VM) tools discover, filter, analyze, prioritize, validate all of your asset vulnerabilities with automated recursive discovery. We filter the false positives for you and generate immediate, defensible, and actionable policy remediations. This is integral for Security functions given that the main problems that Security functions deal with is “not having the security solutions that can keep up with exponentially increasing amounts of data (40 percent of respondents). This is followed by the inability of IT and IT security teams to agree on the activities that should be prioritized to close the IT security gap” (The 2023 Global Study on Closing the IT Security Gap, The Ponemon Institute).

ULTRARED’s vulnerability scanner module will continuously scan and detect new vulnerabilities along with weaknesses on each asset with an extremely low false positive rate. ULTRA RED’s vulnerability scanner is not only able to uncover known public vulnerabilities, but also covers a wide range of proprietary scanning findings and the industry leading repository of Darknet based vulnerabilities. Embedded, automated recursive discovery helps Security teams filter through false positives, duplicate alerts to surface prioritized vulnerabilities. This can allow an organization to keep up with the latest security updates and configurations along with being able to test them with ease. 

Validation

Our Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Continuous Threat Intelligence (CTI)tools test your perimeter defenses against all of your known internet-basedthreat vectors in a safe and secure environment. When ULTRA RED detects a weakness, it will validate it without having an impact on the scanned system, security infrastructure and controls - allowing production system continuity. The user receives all the accompanying intelligence - impacts, external references, actionable remediation list along with steps, and POCs for leveraging the weakness (for learning purposes). With our continuous threat intelligence, we enable your organization to stay ahead of vulnerability remediation and to fortify your security controls.

A Single Platform Approach 

Managing multiple security vendors and solutions can be complex and time-consuming. Consolidating vendors into a single platform can streamline management and reduce the need for various interfaces, saving time and resources. When security teams consolidate vendors, configuration, maintenance, and integration processes are much simpler and require far less labor and resources, which results in a significant reduction in costs. By using a single platform, coordination, and communication among security components is far simpler and less convoluted than dealing with products from multiple vendors. Therefore, a single platform solution allows a more cohesive and comprehensive security strategy that can identify and respond to cyber threats faster and more effectively. When using a single platform, generating a comprehensive assessment of the organization's network perimeter and security postures is far simpler than when operating with multiple vendors. This modified approach provides valuable insight for ongoing security planning and strategy and allows security teams to analyze their systems in place more efficiently. Organizations that adopt the tool reduction transition will undoubtedly experience tremendous improvements to their existing cyber threat defense systems. The change, however, will unlikely be the simplest one nor the quickest one. Gartner's research suggests that transitioning from multiple vendor platforms to a single vendor platform could take more than five years. Despite these challenges, organizations seeking this transition must know that help is available. ULTRA RED is a leading cybersecurity solutions provider looking to help organizations with their cyber threat defense needs. If you and your team are considering transitioning to a single-vendor platform solution, contact ULTRA RED here to request a demo and speak to an industry expert.

Asa result of the proliferating best-of-breed software instances in IT and Cybersecurity functions, there is often miscommunication and entanglements over the “right” source of truth. From assets recorded in CMDBs, to vulnerabilities logged across scanners, and JIRA tickets left unattended to, every user views their intelligence from only one dimension filtered through the lens ofself-interest when it is time to update assets and patch vulnerabilities. Manual processes across tool platforms also increase instances of error in data aggregation and sharing. As tool siloes increase, these errors are only amplified and compounded thus further skewing the truth. 

The ULTRA RED approach is a one source-of-truth approach, within which every truth is aggregated and assimilated in one platform to yield the best courses of action. This democratized visibility into all of your assets and their vulnerabilities, your threats and internet-facing exposure, your security controls efficacy, and all of your pending risk remediations will enable faster, efficient, and evidence-based security remediation. With this approach, we also reduce SaaS fatigue from buying and managing too many software solutions across functions to feed the same collaborative end.  

Alleviating Talent Deficit Pains 

The ULTRA RED CTEM platform is a “no code”, easy-to-use, and simple platform built with “human design” in mind. This means that any security analyst across Threat intelligence, Red/Purple teams, and all operations can operate ULTRA RED: CTEM in little time. In lieu of a severe talent deficit, alleviating the issues that current Security teams deal with is our priority.

Additionally, cybersecurity functions are only as effective as their cross-functionalcollaboration and buy-in. It is no secret that Cybersecurity struggles to gainbuy-in across functions, especially with IT Operations, who ultimately enable security fixes. The two functions have all the reason to be more functionally collaborative, and so require a shared platform that befits their responsibilities throughout the lifecycle of their vulnerability and security management duties. With a best-of-breed approach comes many sources of truth. Too much siloed and niche software accomplishing different tasks and carrying siloes of intelligence also becomes a burden when every function wants access. This only yields higher licensing costs, burdensome administration, and greater security risks. Without sufficient, unified visibility for all collaborators in the lifecycle of a process, miscommunication, conflict, and more bureaucratic hurdles will persist longer than necessary and get in the way of risk reduction. In vulnerability management, the benefit of a collaborative platform outweighs any siloed approach. This is what UTLRARED has to offer. 

Expected ROI

With the ULTRA RED: Threat Exposure Management platform, you will: 

• Build efficiency and assurance in your security function with specific, actionable, and pointed operations and Intelligence for all of your staff and stakeholders.
• Enable faster vulnerability remediation with our intelligence-rich prioritization and remediation suggestions.
• Reduce your attack surface by remediating vulnerabilities faster and fortifying necessary security controls.
• Optimize your costs by lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO) through in-platform automation and reduced sourcing, implementation, maintenance, and operating costs.
• Maximize your Security controls by testing and enhancing rule sets to minimize your risks.

‍