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Are companies with a SOC team less likely to get breached?
This article is part of the Information Security issue of November 2017, Vol. 19, No. 9
Companies outsource functions of security operations centers. But most agree that management of strategic activities -- security planning, alignment to the business, performance assessments -- should stay in-house. Are companies that have information security operations centers (SOCs) less likely to get breached? That data is hard to come by. Target did not respond to automated warnings about suspicious activity during its 2013 breach. The SOC manager left the retailer in October. The breach occurred in November and was publicly acknowledged by Target on December 19, 2013, after Brian Krebs reported it on his Krebs on Security blog. According to reports by Bloomberg Businessweek and others, alerts issued by FireEye malware detection were noted by Target's security staff in India but then ignored by the SOC team in the United States. Today, the retail company runs a 24/7 Cyber Fusion Center at its Northern Campus in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. A recent job posting for an event analyst noted that the future SOC team member would ...
Features in this issue
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Are security operations centers doing enough?
SOCs are maturing, but organizations facing the increased threat landscape understand that improving their effectiveness must be a priority in the year ahead.
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Transitioning to the role of CISO: Dr. Alissa Johnson
Serving as White House deputy CIO prepared Johnson for her CISO role: "When we let the culture in a company or agency drive security governance or innovation, that's a problem."
Columns in this issue
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Are companies with a SOC team less likely to get breached?
Information security operations centers are “growing up,” according to one study. But, with staffing shortages and manual collection of data, performance metrics are hard to get.
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From the White House to IBM Watson technology with Phyllis Schneck
The managing director at Promontory Financial Group, now part of IBM, talks about supercomputers, cryptography applications and her start in computer science.