If there’s one thing we know about hackers, it’s that they stay busy. In fact, hackers launch an attack every 39 seconds. That adds up to more than 2,200 cybersecurity incidents every single day. 

Ideally, you’ll have a robust security stack to protect yourself and your customers. But hackers get smarter every day, meaning security stacks can become outdated—fast. 

Humans are behind many security tools. These security experts help tune and empower the intelligence for many commonly used preventive tools. But what if you could bring human expert analysis one step closer, looking at your unique environment versus what is seen globally?

A layered security stack that combines both automation and human threat hunting provides your organization with the checks and balances needed to keep attackers at bay. With automated systems that shut down recognizable attacks and human threat hunters who search for more inconspicuous attacks, you can stop and find the hidden threats that sneak past your preventive systems. 

Installing a new cybersecurity system straight out of the box might be tempting, but you should use caution when taking this approach. The default security settings may not line up with the standard in your industry.

An alternative approach is to leverage the cybersecurity solutions you already have in place and optimize them to operate the best they can. This will help improve your managed detection and response and protect your network.

How You Can Scale Your Threat Detection Safely and Securely

At Huntress, we believe the answer to most scaling issues comes down to integrating cybersecurity into your business operations.

From software installation to employee education, there should be a well-established balance between what threat detection automation can do for you and what your team can prevent. This is crucial in light of the fact that 43% of data breaches involving SMBs were due to some form of human error.

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Every member of your team, from the most senior staff member to the newest employee, should be educated and trained so everyone knows your processes and security operations as well as the full potential of the software you have in place and any new programs you bring online. 

Since threat detection and response is never-ending, you also have to continue to train and educate as your MSP grows. This also means constantly evaluating your security operations and threat detection tools for how they respond to new threats, what improvements are needed and how to update them to respond to new threats. 

Onboarding New Customers to Managed Detection and Response Services

When you’re onboarding new customers, there’s one thing you should look for to ensure they’re going to be a good fit: They must be willing to change and evolve. Providing services opens you up to potential liabilities. Your customer has to be willing to adopt proper safety protocols such as the following:

• Complex password requirements
• Multi-factor authentication
• Employee education
• Compliance and regulation standards

Adopting these protocols and methods will protect you, them and their end users. 

Once your customers are operating safely, Huntress can help you scale with success.

The Skillsets You Need to Scale Your Threat Detection with Confidence

To scale effectively, you have to be immersed in the hacker tradecraft. You have to be able to identify, analyze and understand malware so you can peel back the layers of code to figure out its different functions and commands. 

We love studying the hacker tradecraft and participating in training exercises and cybersecurity wargames. These types of exercises help us recognize malware in the field based on the patterns that robots or machines have difficulty detecting. 

Our ThreatOps team is filled with security experts and practitioners who have a passion for cybersecurity and threat detection. With these exercises, we are arming your offense with the latest and greatest threat intelligence tool tactics.

Focused Threat Detection and Response is Key

We don’t operate like most managed detection and response (MDR) or endpoint detection and response (EDR) services. Our automated threat detection finds the threats we know are at large while threat hunters catch the unknown threats hiding in your system.

Threat actors focus their attacks and constantly engage, whether it’s through malware or ransomware, because all they have to do is get initial access and establish persistence. Once they have it, they’ll do anything they can to maintain it because they don’t want to have to do the same thing twice.

And that’s where we come in. Through human-powered threat hunting, we look for these footholds to eliminate them and cut off threat actors’ access points.

Securely Scaling Your MSP’s Managed Detection and Response in the Age of COVID

With the move to remote work as a result of COVID-19, there’s been an increase in cyberattacks. Hackers and other bad actors unleashed an unprecedented number of cyberattacks during the first few months of the pandemic. 

Between January and April 2020, cloud-based cyberattacks rose 630%, while 77% of IT service providers reported an increase of overall attacks in 2020. 

As hackers evolve, so do we. We develop new and improved security functionalities and products for our partners. We also balance the optimization between the automated threat detection engines and the human element in an efficient feedback loop. 

• Data is fed into automated engines
• The ThreatOps team analyzes threats
• The automated detection processes are refined and operate more efficiently
• The ThreatOps team has more time to analyze new threats

This partnership between our manual analysis and automated detection is what gives us the ability to find new threats quickly, launch new detectors, and scale for partner organizations of all sizes. 

To learn more about how Huntress can help you scale your security operations, book a demo.