what is MSO and why do your cybersecurity tools need it cybernetiq

What is MSO? And Why Do Your Cybersecurity Tools Need It?

As more attack surface technology sprouts up in the cybersecurity space, sadly not all of it lives up to its hype. We can do better.

How do you know if your attack surface management is making the best use of the available resources and security investments? 

An effective and more efficient state-of-the-art solution is one that makes use of the entire security stack, not just one segment of the enterprise.

To identify that kind of ability in the toolsets you compare, look for something called MSO: Multiple Source Overlay. 

What is MSO?

MSO (Multiple Source Overlay) is a data stack feed that attack surface analysis platforms interpret to visualize, detect, correlate, investigate and respond to attacks in real-time across your entire security ecosystem. 

It takes the entirety of your security outputs, tools, and technologies, concentrates them into a synthesized datastore of all your existing information, and automatically generates an accurate representation of the fullest picture of your network including, subnet, and netblock. 

It’s a holistic view of the ground truth of the threat surface to the enterprise. 

But What Does MSO Do?

MSO levels up the corporate SecOps:

Reducing the time from exposure to closure, MSO interconnects otherwise siloed tools to deliver fast detection, deeper investigations, and seamless remediation actions with reflexes through AI-powered technology. 

This instantly levels up a team, providing greater flexibility, decreasing time to respond, and improving network and asset visibility

Senior operators can operate more quickly and efficiently, and junior operators can increase their range of ability simply and with greater accuracy.

MSO harnesses the full security tools spectrum: 

Multiple Source Overlay consolidates and compresses the security data from across the entire attack surface into actionable incidents with centralized incidents response capabilities. 

Teams that snap in MSO-enabled platforms can create ready-to-go actions and events that can automatically trigger additional intel, all in a single click.  

MSO concentrates security tool sprawl into a single interactive lens:

  • Security information and event management (SIEM)
  • Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR)
  • Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
  • Network detection and response (NDR)
  • User and entity behavioral analysis (UEBA)
  • Threat Intelligence Platform(TIP) in a cloud-native platform

How Does MSO Work?

Comprehensive Data Collection

MSO provides a 360-degree view of the network by collecting and transforming the data across your entire IT Infrastructure from network, endpoints, users, cloud to applications. 

No more siloed systems. No more questioning which source of truth is the most accurate or up to date.

Intelligent Threat Detection 

MSO incorporates automatic threat detection and correlation through machine learning and behavior analysis. 

Cohesive Integration

With MSO, security applications are tightly integrated to work together in harmony, able to detect threats across the entire cyber kill chain.

Automatic Responses

MSO enables automatic responses, without leaving a platform. This in turn reduces the threat dwelling time from hours/days to mere seconds/minutes. What could that kind of threat response time mean for your organization?

Effective Visibility

Accurate threat detection is possible in real-time, by piecing together complex attacks that are missed by the tools lacking MSO. This instantly levels up SecOps teams, giving them complete visibility of their networks, devices, and assets.

Cloud-Native Intelligence

MSO is built with micro-service clustering architecture, scaling automatically with your organization’s ever-growing data across the hybrid cloud environment.


What’s Next?

The cyber landscape is rapidly changing. With so much industry evolution in the past year, it’s more important than ever to ensure your team is enabled with the technology to combat modern attacks, view and prioritize critical information, and make quick, informed decisions based on a single source of truth. 

The beauty of MSO is that it has the ability to level up and increase the value of your team, without adding to headcount. And in a time where qualified cyber security professionals are fewer between and harder to find, that kind of technology is invaluable. 

If getting full visibility of your cyber security landscape is a priority for your team, MSO is a non-negotiable feature for the platforms and toolsets you choose to incorporate into your cyber strategy. It’s part of our mission to change the way we see cybersecurity.

CybernetIQ’s Attack Surface Analysis platform, CLAW, was built by security operators, for security operators. MSO is deeply ingrained into the very core of the toolset, giving it the ultimate edge over competing software. If you’d like to see how it works live for yourself, schedule a demo with one of our cyber security experts

We’re in the business of blowing people’s minds, and we’d love to show you how we can transform and elevate your cyber operations.

With MSO in your security stack, you can get ready for the kind of peace of mind most operators only dream about.