Operational Security Center (SOC) - Definitions, objectives and deployment

The Security Office Center (often referred to as the SOC) is a risk management system deployed by public and private sector organizations to ensure they have the organizational, human and technical skills they need to guarantee enhanced preventive and reactive detection capability in the face of cyber risks.

The SOC can be defined as a primarily organizational device enabling an organization (company, administration) to equip itself with a detection and investigation capability in the face of security incidents it may be confronted with. SOCs also have to anticipate various external threats, such as attempted cyber-attacks, or internal threats, such as data leaks linked to employee malice, for example. The SOC's challenge is also to guarantee a high level of responsiveness, by industrializing the response to security incidents, and defining the processes for dealing with them. In most cases, this translates into a 24/7 on-call system.

This approach is based on the assumption that such incidents can occur at any time, and more particularly when in-house teams are not in a zone of vigilance, or are understaffed (nights, weekends).

The increase in cyber threats, now seen as risks both in terms of severity (critical impact in the event of a proven attack) and frequency (attacks are becoming a daily occurrence, whatever the sector of activity or company size), makes it increasingly essential for an organization to rely on an operational security center.

What's more, the Operational Security Center does not address a single risk, such as ransomware attacks, but rather a range of threat scenarios and vulnerabilities (denial-of-service attacks, external fraud, internal fraud), as part of a global risk management approach.

The operational security center provides operational monitoring of the company's security consoles. The teams making up the operational security center (system security engineers, investigation analysts) also have the means to take the first steps, known as emergency measures, in the event of a suspected incident. These are known as precautionary measures. These emergency measures make it possible to reduce, or even avoid, the impact of current attacks. They do not replace more global decisions, such as those taken by a crisis unit. They do, however, provide a basic foundation of measures to be taken prior to any crisis unit.

Even if the teams at an operational security center have the technical capabilities to implement certain remediation actions, it is up to the customer organization's internal decision-makers to define risk acceptance or refusal situations (with associated avoidance, transfer or treatment measures). This presupposes that the threats,...