🛡️ CISO Strategy • SOC Optimization

Stop the Blind Spots: The 5-Pillar SOC Action Plan for Closing Threat Detection Gaps

By CyberDudeBivash • October 02, 2025 • Strategic Guide

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Action Plan: Table of Contents

CyberDudeBivash’s Recommended SOC Stack: XDR & Threat Intelligence (Kaspersky) • CISM & SOC Analyst Training (Edureka) • Cloud Infrastructure (Alibaba)

Pillar 1: Achieve Complete Visibility (The Foundation)

A SOC is blind without data. The number one cause of missed detections is a lack of visibility into a key part of the IT environment. Your foundational goal must be to collect the right telemetry from across your entire enterprise. A modern visibility strategy is built on the **SOC Visibility Triad**:

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): Your central log aggregator. This is where you collect logs from everything: firewalls, servers, applications, and cloud services.
EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response): Your “flight recorder” for endpoints. It provides the deep, granular detail of process execution and file modification that logs alone can’t provide. This is non-negotiable.
NDR (Network Detection and Response): Your eyes on the wire. NDR analyzes network traffic to find threats that EDR might miss, such as malicious lateral movement from an unmanaged IoT device.

If you do not have robust data feeds from all three of these sources, you have critical blind spots where attackers will operate freely.

Pillar 2: Build High-Fidelity Detections (The Brains)

Collecting data is easy. Getting meaningful, actionable alerts is hard. A SOC suffering from “alert fatigue” is a sign of a poor detection strategy. The goal is to create **high-fidelity alerts** that are almost always indicative of a real threat.

Action Plan:

Move Beyond Signatures:** Stop relying on simple IOCs (IPs, hashes). Focus on building behavioral detection rules based on attacker **TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures)** from the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
**Correlate Across Sources:** Your strongest detections will combine data from multiple sources. Example rule: “Alert when an EDR agent sees `powershell.exe` launch, *and* the NDR sees that process connect to a suspicious domain, *and* the user has never run PowerShell before according to host logs.”
**Integrate High-Quality Threat Intelligence:** Automate the ingestion of structured threat intelligence feeds to constantly update your detection logic with the latest TTPs and IOCs. We covered this in our guide on **optimizing MTTD with threat intel**.

Pillar 3: Implement Automated Response (The Muscle)

The speed of a modern attack is measured in minutes. A human-only response is too slow. You must automate your response to common, high-confidence alerts using a **SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response)** platform.

Action Plan (Start Simple):

Workflow 1 (Malware Containment):** If an EDR alert for a known malware hash fires, automatically trigger a SOAR playbook that: 1) Isolates the infected endpoint from the network via the EDR API. 2) Creates a critical incident ticket in your ITSM. 3) Notifies the on-call analyst.
Workflow 2 (Phishing Response):** If a user reports a phishing email, a playbook can automatically: 1) Extract all URLs and attachments from the email. 2) Detonate them in a sandbox. 3) If malicious, search all other inboxes for the same email and delete it.

Pillar 4: Enable Proactive Threat Hunting (The Elite Force)

Detection is about finding the “known unknowns.” Threat hunting is about finding the “unknown unknowns.” It is a proactive, human-driven process that assumes a breach has already occurred and your automated tools have missed it.

Action Plan:

**Dedicate Time:** Allocate a percentage of your senior analysts’ time (e.g., 20%) specifically for hypothesis-driven threat hunting, not just reacting to alerts.
**Develop Hypotheses:** Start with a simple hypothesis based on recent threat intelligence. Example: “An attacker has compromised one of our servers with the new **SoopSocks backdoor**. What would that look like in our data?”
**Hunt Across the Triad:** Use your SIEM, EDR, and NDR tools to search for the subtle signs of the attack that might not have been enough to trigger an automated alert on their own.

Pillar 5: Drive Continuous Improvement (The Feedback Loop)

A SOC is a living organism; it must constantly evolve. A “set and forget” SOC is a dead SOC.

Action Plan:

**Measure Everything:** Track key metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), and false positive rates. Use this data to identify your weakest areas.
**Create a Feedback Loop:** The results of every incident response and every threat hunt must be fed back into the system. Did your threat hunt find a new TTP? Create a new high-fidelity detection rule for it. Did your response take too long? Create a new automation playbook for it.
**Run Purple Team Exercises:** Regularly test your detections and response playbooks with a dedicated internal or external Red Team to find your blind spots before the real attackers do.

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About the Author

CyberDudeBivash is a cybersecurity strategist with 15+ years in building and optimizing Security Operations Centers (SOCs), threat hunting, and incident response, advising CISOs across APAC. [Last Updated: October 02, 2025]

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