Breaking down the attack chain: How SecOps build incident reports
SecOps (SOC) teams face daily challenges when it comes to detecting and responding to cyber-attacks. Most security solutions flood them with alerts from various tools, each flagging potential risks. However, many of these alerts lack context, making it difficult to determine whether they represent real threats or false positives.
Analysts must filter through logs, correlate contrasting events, and manually piece together attack narratives to understand what actually happened. This process is time-consuming and prone to human error, leading to delayed responses and/or overlooked threats.
Traditionally, IDP platforms and security solutions provide insights into individual events but do not establish the connections between these events. For example, an isolated failed login attempt may seem harmless, but when followed by a successful login from an unusual location and subsequent privilege escalation, it signals a possible identity-based attack. SOC teams often struggle to connect these dots manually, including in their SIEM, leading to fragmented investigations and missed opportunities to stop threats before they escalate.
Wing’s ITDR raises suspicious incidents with minimal noise and maximum efficiency, delivering all relevant information in a clear, connected, and actionable attack story. The attack story includes attack chain analysis, enriched IoCs, and mitigation playbooks, allowing SecOps to quickly understand the full scope of the attack and take appropriate action without needing to connect the dots manually. This streamlines incident response reduces the risk of oversight, and accelerates the overall threat mitigation process.
Wing’s ITDR correlates identity-based events into a full attack story
Wing’s Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) is designed to bridge correlation gaps. Instead of analyzing individual security events in isolation, Wing ITDR automatically correlates multiple identity-based events across SaaS applications to detect attack patterns in real-time.
Every incident is structured as a story timeline for each specific identity, whether it involves a single compromised user or an organization-wide operation targeting multiple users, such as spray and reconnaissance activities.
Identifying multi-stage SaaS identity attacks
Wing’s ITDR leverages advanced heuristics and the MITRE ATT&CK framework to map suspicious activities across the different stages of an attack chain.
By linking routine user activities, such as assigning new privileges, extracting data, or changing account settings, with initial suspicious actions like unusual login patterns or activity spikes, Wing ITDR helps security teams detect threats early. This correlation provides a clearer view of potentially malicious behavior, even when the individual actions appear normal in isolation, allowing teams to respond swiftly before the attack escalates.
How Wing’s ITDR would detect and present known SaaS attack chains
Let’s break down the MGM Resorts attack, an incident that sent shockwaves through the industry. Now, imagine having a fully correlated attack chain in your ITDR product, mapped to a single identity in a centralized timeline.
From the moment their credentials are leaked on the darknet, to the social engineering of the help desk for an MFA reset on a super administrator account, to the creation of a new identity provider (IDP) using a merge feature, and finally, to exfiltration from SaaS and on-prem infrastructure.
Every event is tied to the compromised identity and enriched with full context, including indicators of compromise (IoCs) like attacker IPs, user agents, and locations. Thus, security teams can see exactly how the attack unfolded.
With this level of visibility, your SOC wouldn’t just react to alerts; they’d have the full attack story at their fingertips—stopping the breach long before exfiltration.
Isn’t that the dream?
Providing contextualized incident reports
Once an attack chain is identified, Wing ITDR generates comprehensive incident reports that provide SecOps with:
- A clear timeline of correlated events based on identity.
- Risk classification based on known attack techniques.
- Automated recommendations for mitigation steps.
By removing the burden of manual correlation, Wing ITDR helps security teams move from reactive to proactive defense, stopping identity-based attacks before they cause any real damage to the organization.
Does your team have what you need to prevent SaaS identity-based attacks? Talk to one of our experts to find out.