Hidden Tax on the SOC
The Hidden Tax on the SOC (Security Operations Center) is a cybersecurity concept that describes the significant, often unmeasured, cost and operational burden imposed on security teams by the lack of certainty and context in the security data they receive.
It represents the cumulative time, effort, and resources wasted when analysts must perform manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks to validate and attribute ambiguous technical findings.
Key Drivers of the Hidden Tax
Manual Correlation and Validation: Analysts receive thousands of alerts daily, many of which are false positives or lack sufficient detail to act upon. The tax is incurred when they must spend hours manually cross-referencing information from disparate tools—like vulnerability scanners, threat intelligence feeds, and asset inventories—to answer basic questions:
Is this finding real?
Which asset owner is responsible?
Does this risk warrant immediate attention, or can it wait?
Lack of Business Context: When an alert is received, it rarely includes the necessary business context, such as the asset's financial value, its regulatory status (e.g., PCI DSS scope), or its specific internal owner. The "tax" is the labor cost of analysts manually establishing this context by contacting various internal teams, which slows decision-making and delays remediation.
The Crisis of Context: This lack of immediate, high-certainty information creates a crisis, forcing the SOC to operate in a reactive, high-friction mode. The resulting delay in identifying and remediating critical threats is the actual, costly outcome of the hidden tax.
In essence, the Hidden Tax on the SOC is the overhead of human labor and time spent on incomplete, unactionable security intelligence.
ThreatNG's capabilities are specifically engineered to eliminate the Hidden Tax on the SOC by automating technical validation and providing immediate, definitive Legal-Grade Attribution and business context for every external finding. This allows analysts to focus on remediation rather than reconnaissance.
ThreatNG’s Solution to the Hidden Tax
External Discovery
The platform performs purely external, unauthenticated discovery and assessment of the attack surface. This outside-in, adversarial view ensures that the raw data analysts receive is immediately validated as a real, exposed risk, eliminating the time typically wasted validating false positives or non-exposed assets.
Investigation Modules
The primary mechanisms that automate context and eliminate the need for manual correlation are the Context Engine™ and Policy Management.
Contextual Risk Intelligence (ThreatNG Context Engine™): This patent-backed solution achieves Irrefutable Attribution by using Multi-Source Data Fusion. It iteratively correlates external technical security findings with decisive legal, financial, and operational context. This definitive linkage (Legal-Grade Attribution) eliminates the need for analysts to research asset ownership or business relevance manually.
Certainty Intelligence (ThreatNG Veracity™): This capability resolves the Contextual Certainty Deficit by transforming ambiguous security findings into irrefutable, actionable proof. Providing this proof directly addresses the Crisis of Context that contributes to the Hidden Tax.
Policy Management (DarcRadar): This feature provides Customizable and Granular Risk Configuration and Scoring to align perfectly with the organization's risk tolerance. It ensures that high-certainty evidence is tailored and strategically prioritized based on unique business logic, telling the SOC exactly how vital a finding is without requiring manual triage.
Intelligence Repositories
The Context Engine™ uses information from various intelligence repositories to fuse technical risks with business context, providing certainty about ownership and severity.
Detailed Examples of Supporting Intelligence:
SEC Form 8-Ks (DarCache 8-K): Provides critical corporate event data for accurate ownership and priority attribution, eliminating the need for analysts to check public filings.
Sentiment and Financials module: This uncovers publicly disclosed Lawsuits, Layoff Chatter, and SEC Filings, providing the legal and operational context necessary to definitively attributerisk to a specific internal function or legal entity.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
The platform integrates this high-certainty, attributed data into the risk assessment process.
Detailed Examples of Context Integration:
MITRE ATT&CK Mapping: Raw findings (like open ports or leaked credentials) are automatically translated into a strategic narrative of adversary behavior by correlating them with specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques. This provides operational certainty by defining how an attacker might use the finding.
External GRC Assessment: This capability provides a continuous, outside-in evaluation of the GRC posture, mapping external risks directly to GRC frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. This pre-mapped compliance context saves analysts time they would spend manually correlating risks to regulatory mandates.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
ThreatNG provides Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface and digital risk. This ensures that the attribution remains up to date and that new risks are detected immediately.
Reporting Examples: The Executive and Prioritized Reports contain Reasoning to provide context and insights into the identified risk, and Recommendations offering practical advice on reducing risk. This high-context output, underpinned by Legal-Grade Attribution, enables the SOC to move directly to the Recommendations phase, bypassin the manual research phase.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's high-context intelligence enables its output to serve as a high-fidelity trigger for other security systems, drastically reducing the labor cost of investigation.
Example of ThreatNG Helping:
ThreatNG helps by definitively connecting an exposed development environment (via Subdomain Intelligence and Content Identification ) to a specific subsidiary mentioned in a recent SEC Form 8-K filing. This Legal-Grade Attribution eliminates the Hidden Tax by providing conclusive proof of ownership, allowing the SOC to instantly open a remediation ticket with the correct internal owner without any manual investigation.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions Cooperation:
ThreatNG detects a highly critical finding: an Amazon AWS Access Key ID leaked in a Mobile App. The Context Engine™ provides Legal-Grade Attribution by correlating the app with the organization's high-value sales division (found via Sentiment and Financials or Domain Intelligence).
A complementary Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform could use this Legal-Grade Attribution to immediately bypass all manual triage steps and automatically execute a complete remediation playbook. This automation, powered by the definitive proof from ThreatNG, eliminates the Hidden Tax by instantly revoking the exposed key, forcing associated user resets, and notifying the relevant executive stakeholders with complete certainty.
