NSA's Top 5 Security Operations Center (SOC) Principles

At last week’s RSA conference in San Francisco, Dave Hogue, technical director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), reviewed the organization’s best practices for defense - as the NSA often sees attacks against their systems within 24 hours of a new vulnerability being disclosed or discovered in the wild. One important point was that 93% of all security incidents in the last year at the NSA were found to be entirely preventable using best practices they already advocated. Attackers are depending on governments and organizations to lapse in the tried-and-true basic principles so they can rely on tried-and-true basic methods, and they don’t have to burn their best (and often more difficult to use) secrets and methods.

The NSA's Top 5 Security Operations Center (SOC) Principles are worth reviewing for anyone who runs a computer network.