Threat Hunting in a White Label SOC: Operationalizing Intelligence Across Clients

With cybersecurity threats constantly changing, a constant element of security strategy for organizations that want to stay ahead of adversaries is threat hunting. Challenges Operationalization of threat intel in the white label SOC model, which provides a suite of ongoing security functions to multiple clients. Yet this challenge presents an opportunity to providers of threat hunting teams to improve and adds security value in a wide array of sectors.

In this blog post, we’ll examine why threat hunting matters to a white label SOC and the obstacles posed by running an outsourced SOC service at scale all while effectively operationalizing threat intelligence across a range of clients. You’ll come away with a better understanding of how to maximize security outcomes through effective and scalable threat hunting.

What Is a White Label SOC?

A white label SOC is a SOC service that provides security monitoring, threat detection, and incident response capabilities for an MSP or organization without the end client knowing who the underlying provider is. These security services are branded by the MSP or organization providing them, with the actual technical and operational work typically done by a third party SOC supplier.

White label SOCs can cater to a range of clients with varying security requirements and offer around-the-clock threat surveillance as well as instantaneous response. One of the key challenges in a white label SOC approach, however, is that all clients are unique in terms their threat landscapes and environments – this must be dealt with effectively on an ongoing basis to guarantee security indefinitely.

What is Threat Hunting and Why Does it Matter?

Threat hunting is the act of opposing threats, uncovering unknown and unnamed threats that have evaded existing security defenses. Instead of waiting for an automated system to raise the alert, threat hunters scour for indicators of compromise (IOCs), aberrations and patterns that indicate a hack.

Threat hunting is significant for a number of reasons:

Enhanced Detection: It reveals threats that can slip by automated solutions or legacy security services.

Shortened Dwell Time: Organizations can find and eliminate intruders before they have a chance to do damage when they are actively hunting threats.

Enhanced Incident Response: Because hunting drives early discovery, response time is faster and damage can be minimized.

In a white label SOC, threat hunting becomes more complex as hunters need to be able to adapt their methods and tools in order to serve multiple clients with various systems, vulnerabilities and requirements.

Struggles of Threat Hunting in a White Label SOC

In the multi-client white label SOC, there are several challenges that need to be addressed for successful threat hunting:

Data Segmentation and Isolation

Maintaining client segregation and data security: one of the basic principals behind a white label SOC is to make sure that every client’s data is kept secure and separated. This can be tough when you are looking for threats, since the data from multiple clients often needs to be pooled and analyzed to see cross-network patterns or potential indicators of compromise.

Diverse Security Environments

Every client has their own network, infrastructure, technologies they use, security tools and how are configured. Each of these environments call for threat hunters to acclimate themselves and know the ins and outs of each one of their clients. This could mean managing everything from old-school legacy systems to modern cloud infrastructure, with all the different security protocols those might entail.

Scalability of Threat Hunting Efforts

Scaling up threat hunting for individual clientrequ irements becomes increasingly difficult as the number of clients goes up. Considering various stages of security maturity among clients, hunters may have to queue their hunt down few notches and ratchet down the magnitude of their efforts for a client to receive commensurate focus.

Balancing Customization and Efficiency

Within a white label SOC, threat hunting must have a balance between being tailored to each individual client and cost-effective to applicable across all clients. The objective, then, is to establish a reproducible and scalable hunting process that can be adapted for different venues without commuting beyond the complexity-minimized search metric described earlier.

Applying Threat Intelligence Across Your Clients In a White-Label SOC

Organizations must effectively operationalize threat intelligence in order to address these hurdles and bring out threat hunting in a white label SOC. Here’s how you can do that:

Centralized Threat Intelligence Platform

A central threat intelligence platform is required to collect, digest and share invaluable threat data across all customers within a white label SOC. With threat intelligence centralized in a single platform, SOC analysts can identify trends across multiple environments and monitor new threats while orchestrating responses as they develop.

Key features to consider:

Multitenant architecture: Keeps the data for each tenant isolated while providing centralized monitoring and reporting.

Personalised dashboards: The dashboard should be customisable to the individual needs of each client and deliver insights that can be acted on in an easily digestible manner.

Automated threat intelligence sharing: You also can share global threat intelligence (e.g., threat feeds and alerts) across your clients’ environments, accelerating and amplifying the effectiveness of threat hunting.

With a centralized system in place, you’ll decrease the challenges associated with operating across all of your client networks and make it easier to detect threats.

Standardize Threat Hunting Methodologies

Having standardized hunting methodologies is key to ensuring best practices are not overlooked in any of our client enclaves. Although each customer can have its own systems, the process to hunt threats may still be the same.

Key strategies for standardization:

Create hunting playbooks Create standardized threat hunting process that can be customized based on client environments. These playbooks should encompass typical attack vectors like phishing, ransomware and data exfiltration.

Leverage common tooling: Take advantage of threat hunting tools and platforms that you can use to hunt across multiple environments. This is a more frictionless process and allows hunters to effectively do their job regardless of the client’s systems.

Threat model templates: Create generic threat models for each client profile (healthcare, finance, manufacturing) to allow hunters to zero in on top relevant threats.

Centralizing methodologies make sure that threat hunting is efficient, regardless of the scale.

Integrate Automation and Orchestration

Automation and orchestration are indispensable for scaling threat hunting in a multi-tenant SOC universe. With the automation of repetitive tasks such as data gathering, initial analysis and alerting and triage, SOC analysts can concentrate on complex investigative work.

Benefits of automation:

Improved response times: With automated alerts and procedures in place, it can significantly speed up the process of identifying threats and making responses.

Fewer manual mistakes: Automating processes eliminates the element of human error in repetitive work and results.in uniform analysis and fulfillment.

Scale: As we add more clients hunting, automation ensures that the hunts are still effective without hiring 10x as many staff to execute them.

Orchestration tools such as SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) can serve to streamline the entire hunting process from detection to resolution.

Leverage Cross-Tenant Threat Correlation

Cross-tenant threat-detection correlation You and your SOC team can also spot behavior.Ing across multiple client environments. By searching for common IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) or TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), threat hunters could possibly uncover broad threats that may be impacting more than a single client.

If one client has a new type of ransomware discovered on their system it can serve as an early warning indicator for the others. Threat hunters can then proactively look for evidence of such a variant on other clients’ systems in advance of it ever being launched at scale.

Cross-tenant Threat Correlation can be facilitated by:

Consolidated threat intelligence feeds: A way to pull in worldwide threats so you can see what everyone else is experiencing.

Multi-tenant SIEMs – Utilize an SIEM that is designed for multi-tenancy and able to identify anomalies from multiple customers at once.

Continuous Feedback and Improvement

Lastly, THI operationalization calls for feedback loops and continuous improvement. As you learn more in each client environment, continue to polish your threat hunting playbooks, methodologies, and tooling to ensure that the next time you go hunting will be better than this last one.

Mature your approach—Regular post-incident debriefings can be very effective in improving the threat hunting process and allow you to adapt for new attack variations. This progression allows you to refine your strategy, so that your white label SOC is always as nimble and effective against new threats as today.

In Conclusion: The Importance of Streamlining Threat Hunting for Better Security Outcomes

Making threat intelligence operational across a range of clients and their various customers in a white label SOC is no mean feat, yet it is necessary for such responsibly proactive Security Services. Centralization, automation, standards and shared threat hunting across tenants: These are a few things that can make MSPs much more efficient at arms control.

A specialist white label SOC can do just this with the right tools and approach to predict what NDR (Network Detection & Response) should be used on suspicious behaviour in a safe manner. The solution is to combine the best of collaboration, automation and expertise so that threats are discovered and stopped well before they can inflict damage.