Cybersecurity practitioners fight a hard battle. Analysts in the trenches struggle to stay on top of the mountain of alerts, and CISOs are being held personally responsible when systemic things go wrong. We’re all fighting the existential threat of looming breaches, ransom demands, and public disclosures should we fail. It’s easy to get caught up in all the marketing hype surrounding the latest in ML/AI, but cutting out the noise with some simple automation can improve security and give your team back some valuable time.

The need for autonomous defense

It’s not breaking news that security teams are overworked and overwhelmed. To find respite, they rightly turn to technical solutions and tools: On average, post-pandemic companies employ 19% more security tools than before, raising the total number to 76 per organization. (… And that number is 2 years-old.)

But far from being “76 times more protected”, the increase has just led to debilitating tool sprawl. According to recent research, only 36% of respondents felt very confident that their subsequent security controls were working as intended – a full 82% admitted, despite the vast number of solutions, that they were still caught off-guard by a security event. Another industry survey revealed that 53% of respondents felt they had wasted over half of their security budget, with no significant improvement in remediation to show.

If more solutions aren’t the solution, then what is? We don’t have all the answers, but we do have some ideas to get the most bang for your cybersecurity buck.

Work smarter, not harder

The average SOC gets hit with 11,000 alerts per day. Reducing that figure doesn’t come down to cutting false positives alone (although it does help). There must be a way of weeding out scans, probes, and inbound exploits before they even make it to your SIEM (if you have one), so we’re not wasting the SOC’s precious time, and there has to be a way to do that automatically.

Our Nomic Outpost autonomously performs the monitoring, vetting, and blocking necessary to mitigate the low-hanging fruit of inbound probes and exploits before they make it to your network – or even see it. Installed in front of your firewall and directly behind your ISP router, the Outpost is in a prime position to silence all the noise being thrown at your public attack surface. 70% of that inbound traffic is “bad”, so it makes sense to use the Outpost to hide your entire network (firewall and all) from these malicious IPs. It’s a unique blocking methodology we call “Network Cloaking.” By effectively hiding your network from view, it prevents any further interference and causes the threat actors to seek opportunity elsewhere. You can’t hack what you can’t see.

Force-multiplying your security team

Being posted at the furthest point on the network is not the only advantage of the Outpost. Our proprietary threat feeds play a large part in our Outpost devices remaining on the cutting edge of threat intelligence. Through clever automation, each Outpost receives real-time threat intelligence from every other Outpost … A near real-time network of sensors, protecting each other with what we call Collective Intelligence Network Security (CINS). CINS pulls threat data from each sensor deployed around the world and shares it back with the network so they’re all equally informed. In addition, the Outpost receives threat data from a curated list of community feeds as well – a comprehensive and fully autonomous Threat Intelligence Gateway, managed by a team of cybersecurity experts.

Even in the age of AI, threat intelligence feeds are a simple and effective means of stopping known exploits and reconnaissance, but not all threat actors come with a calling card. For these cases, the Outpost employs a deep packet inspection engine, monitoring traffic for malicious behavior and “cloaking” the network against the external threat. Modern firewalls can perform similar work (if their CPUs are up to the task), but the Outpost takes it a step further still: The Outpost blocks all communications originating from the malicious IP to your assets. This means no more probes for open ports, or attempts to reach that web server in the DMZ – nothing. All contact between the IP in question and your network will go completely dark.

A final stage of proactive, autonomous defense is Outpost’s rogue packet technology: When requests from unauthorized networks show up at the front door hoping to get through, The Outpost dynamically blocks and “cloaks” this traffic – it’s a simple, handy little tripwire that’s been improving our customer networks’ security and performance for years.

Lastly, The Outpost doesn’t only block threats coming from the outside in; It’s also the last line of defense for outbound communications, stifling command and control communications for various strains of malware and ransomware beaconing.

The evolving digital climate, emerging threats, and an expanding attack surface make the job of total network security too big for security practitioners to do alone. Autonomous Threat Defense levels the playing field and leverages creative solutions, simplifying your security stack and empowering you to do more with less. To learn more about the Outpost, start here.