Security Operations (SecOps) Developer Salary in 2024

Security Operations (SecOps)

What Is SecOps

Security Operations (SecOps) is a merger of security teams with IT operations using tools, processes and technologies to improve the practice of information security.

There was an even larger divide between security and operations teams. They would rather integrate all of them. Each of these groups has different priorities, procedures and tools, leading to competing efforts and inefficiencies in the face of a common and nefarious world-at work. Ultimately, this means less effective security efforts.

For instance, in some incidents security tools such as corporate firewalls or intrusion prevention systems (IPS), often run by the SOC, would shut down business-critical applications causing damage to the business. An integrated approach to security looks at these situations and sees both cyberattacks and downtime as risks to the organisation and neither can be simply ignored.

This brings the work of the security team and the IT operations team behind the productivity of the IT environment more together, raising awareness about security risks, thereby also providing both the teams with a good ‘current state’ assessment of the IT environment goals along with priorities for action where needed, how security processes need to be supported to achieve IT goals and how to plan any changes in risk balance. Another benefit of the SecOps nous is the integration of tooling and automation across both the security and the IT operations teams, with the aim of increasing velocity and reducing friction.

SecOps benefits and goals

In the right context, SecOps pushes beyond enforcing security measures during smooth development cycles. In the right firm, a SecOps policy might include specific, concrete objectives such as: developing good security partnerships between disparate teams, identifying milestones that show progress of the SecOps policy, and ensuring everyone adheres to well-defined security practices.

Security best practices aren’t usually something you think about at the end of a project, or just in case something goes wrong, but should be part of day-to-day operations. Some of the practical advantages of a sound SecOps strategy include:

• Adding more people to the fire – spreading security across teams ensures more people can address growing, changing threats.
• Securing speed – A core problem with DevOps is that velocity gets most of the organisational attention at the cost of security. Putting security first means that you gain velocity and security.
• Applications are less buggy — implementing security more thoroughly means fewer bugs reach production.
• Security keeps up with innovation — if innovation outpaces security, it can become a liability.
• Faster response — attackers are increasingly finding ways to exploit vulnerabilities faster, requiring immediate action.

5 critical SecOps functions

There are now many IT organisations that have specialised teams that spend their working days monitoring financial systems collective in a specialised, organisational centre called a security operations centre (SOC), where team members perform SecOps activities. The SOC is in many ways the brain of your organisation’s information security efforts and SecOps is making it faster, faster automating, and better integrated with other parts of your organisation.

1. Security monitoring

The SecOps team is usually responsible for monitoring security activity across the organisation, including networks, endpoints and applications that are deployed in private, public and hybrid cloud environments – and this monitoring includes not only security events but also the operational health and performance of the applications and infrastructure.

2. Threat intelligence

Everyone agrees that security teams and tools will be more effective if they know who their attackers are, why, and how.

SoC teams, as part of their duties, should perform threat intelligence (TI) collection, purchase it from third-party providers, and consume it in security processes. Threat intelligence is a form of data that provides insight into security threats an organisation is facing.

Threat intelligence is consumed directly by human analysts, and also fed into other security tooling. For instance, threat intelligence can enrich an alert from a SIEM, or be fed into a list of known bad IPs to be blocked on the firewall immediately.

Threat intelligence is distributed as ‘feeds’. There are many free ones out there, and many others for which some vendors of security tools or security research firms will naturally charge. In addition to facilitating the acquisition of all such feeds, threat intelligence platforms will organise them and connect them to the correct security instruments.

3. Triage and investigation

SecOps teams’ existing tools are sophisticated enough now to provide real-time detection and investigation. In many organisations, there isn’t much of a defined response process either. As a consequence, security incidents are investigated and dealt with in various ways by different analysts, depending on each individual’s understanding of security domains and their analytical and investigative predispositions, which represent a loss of time, and a lack of consistency and detection, as one method might not be as productive as another.

Another issue is that legacy SIEMs are opaque – they provide minimal end-user knowledge that security teams can immediately put to use. Legacy SIEMs embrace massive customisation efforts, and teams invest significant effort into customising their SIEMs to their business needs. This capacity for customisation creates enormous barriers-to-entry, significantly delaying the value on security investments, and – even worst – delivering little value (or an increase in coverage of inherently less relevant threats) days or weeks after the investment.

Modern SIEMs provide this support by offering powerful end-to-end workflows, along with prepackaged analysis packages that allow teams to automate and standardise the TDIR process from day one. That means they derive value from the solution immediately – and they can also become much more adept at spotting and triaging the most threatening issues.

4. Incident response

The responsibility of the SecOps team is to implement an incident response plan, which discusses how the organisation should detect a cyber attack and what steps it should follow to mitigate the situation.

An incident response team at SecOps would follow the below process:

• Preparing for incidents by setting out a clear incident response plan.
• Detecting incidents and analyzing them to confirm a cyberattack and understand its severity.
• Containing the threat, eradicating it, and recovering affected systems.
• Conducting post-incident activity to learn from the incident and improve security processes.

5. Forensics and root cause analysis

Forensic analysis refers to the SecOps team’s ability to collect, correlate, and analyse data that can be used to identify the cause behind a security incident, a performance problem, or some unexpected event. With the help of specialised software tools and platforms, the SecOps team determines what actually occurred on the systems that were affected by some type of breach, performs root-cause analysis, and responds to the threat or the malfunction before it is able to go on and damage further parts of the backend infrastructure.

Best practices for SecOps implementation

Define the SecOps scope

Define the scope of a SecOps strategy upfront, depending on the company-specific needs and use cases. Some of the tasks may be better executed by experts and vendors outside the company, rather than internally by the security team. Let’s take security testing. A lot of it can, and probably should, be done in development as part of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows – but that’s still insufficient to make sure that the very applications that you’re building and then spinning up thousands or even billions of times day after day won’t be able to be cracked or tampered with by malicious actors.

Furthermore, following a public disclosure of new vulnerabilities and, often, new exploits, it’s critical for SecOps and DevOps to have a clear line of communication for asking questions, sharing information and automatic escalations. In the context of a more recent example, SecOps could field a query such as: ‘Do we utilise Log4J within our environment?’ And as incidents and tickets are assigned back to DevOps to patch or update, the search for indicators of compromise and malicious activity exploiting vulnerable targets amplifies.

Build repeatable workflows

SecOps must also deal with these and other similarly moving targets across a company’s infrastructure Ops typically takes a process-driven approach to security, applying the same exhaustive, security-agnostic pipelines to all applications, servers and environments alike. SecOps extends this approach to apply the same processes to security, automating security practices through IaC tools and pipelines.

If security requirements are so disparate, and security tools present so much operational overhead, then how can any one security process be effective? In fact, the best current solution may be to recognise that no security process will have a significant system-wide impact. To make the most of SecOps, IT operations professionals must try to design security processes that are broad enough to handle as many threats – and as much of the IT estate – as is practical with current tools and processes in a given business. The team might need to reconfigure tools on a regular basis across different threat categories, but SecOps as a process has to be – and can benefit from being – unified.

Conduct red-blue team exercises

The SecOps team can increase its threat intelligence skills by performing their own red-blue team training exercises. The

red team of the security practitioners attacks the system, whereas the blue team defends the system. Through this approach, security practitioners’ skills can be enhanced and the team can start anticipating various attack techniques. In addition, the team can identify weakness in organisation’s policies and controls during these exercises.

This is where the red team sends port scanners, phishers and pentester robots to do their thing. Meanwhile, the blue team performs all the duties that SecOps is supposed to do. Both teams will file reports for your review; sometimes, a third team emerges, a so-called ‘purple’ team that’s positioned to review both. In 2014, when this was still Revolutionary, Williams approached me with press releases and media opportunities as a co-founding partner of a cybersecurity event called Hack In The Box (HITB). At the time, i worked as a writer, researcher and curator for a public art and internet research institute in Miami. My brother Andy worked for Williams, but occasionally I would lend a hand. At Williams’s invitation, I found myself dining at a French restaurant in Mission Bay with Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania; Michael Nash, then chief security officer at Mozilla; and Jay Jacobs, then communications director at the Mozilla Foundation.

Automate the right processes

This means that automation makes SecOps viable without hindering the rapid automated development and deployment cycles that make software agile. Real-time security actions such as vulnerability scans or activity monitoring make more sense when they’re rapid, and automation suites can remediate some threats automatically, acting on predetermined incident response policies.

But other processes remain, especially those requiring more nuanced or unusual work. The SecOps team might be able to automate most tasks with incident response playbooks, especially simple, repeatable ones. However, human security experts will still have to vet and respond to more sophisticated threats. The SecOps team has to know what they can and cannot automate with most processes likely involving hybrid approaches.

Incorporate security throughout the delivery pipeline

For SecOps to act as an enabler at every stage of a delivery pipeline, it must address security threats from several angles – however, this isn’t what often occurs. For example, traditional security teams are not accustomed to working with developers and Ops teams upstream to ensure that source code is secure code before it’s deployed. Instead, they tend to focus on apps that have been deployed and running in production environments. But at that point, security-related issues tend to pile up and require often extensive rewrites – then slow down application performance.

In a modern SecOps scenario, we look for vulnerabilities early on – when a developer writes a new piece of code, we scan at that very point; we run various security tests during the software delivery lifecycle, and continuously probe our applications post-delivery to detect bugs and vulnerabilities.

Define the SOC’s responsibilities

Create an incident-response plan outlining the SOC team’s role in helping the organisation. Responsibilities of the SOC team should include:

• Communication – knowing how to speak to DevOps, asking what software composition analysis it’s done, and what other possible vulnerabilities might be present, and creating an SLA back and forth that enables information-sharing.
• Incident investigation: filtering alerts and investigating events to catch real security incidents and weed out false positives.
• Prioritization — triaging the detected threats and identifying which incidents pose more significant risks.
• Overseeing incident response – including reaching out to different stakeholders and leveraging tools for orchestrating and monitoring incident response including triage of tickets (patching CVEs) and remediation of incidents by DevOps.