5 Benefits of Detection-as-Code for Security Engineers

Threat detection isn't a new concept, and detection and response teams have been around for decades. Today, security teams tasked with keeping their organizations safe must do so in a much faster world filled with ballooning amounts of data, sophisticated adversaries, and increasing cloud complexities. However, many teams are trying to combat threats with processes and approaches that are still designed for the past and tools that have yet to be kept up. In my ten years in incident response, I saw that while security teams had the skills and talent, they needed more effective approaches.

What is the best tool that security practitioners can use today? Detection-as-code. Here's why.

Reasons to Adopt Detection-as-Code

Detection-as-code is identifying security issues using a programming language. It marries the benefits of software engineering, such as expressibility, testing, and version control, with the functionality of detecting behaviors that could lead to a breach. This opens up a more sustainable world for incident response teams, as detection-as-code can bring standardization, sustainability, and reliability to security teams.

Why would security teams want to adopt detection-as-code? The first reason is that monitoring complexity has risen. Migration to cloud applications and SaaS has increased the data security teams' need to do their job. Over the past year, 48% of security professionals have seen triple the number of daily alerts. They must also monitor for similar-style behaviors across each of these logs as well.

Another reason to adopt detection-as-code is that the scale of the internet will never stop increasing. The volume of internet data is expected to double every two years, and by 2025, it’s estimated that the cloud will store over 100 zettabytes of data. This means that teams need repeatability and predictability. Defining “everything-as-code” provides repeatability with the ability to test, deploy, roll back, and, most importantly, add structure.

Finally, writing code makes you more creative. Most people who know how to code say that it’s probably one of their most important skill sets. Writing code is problem-solving and turns on a new way of thinking that can broadly apply to security. If you can learn to write code that expresses attacker behaviors, it’ll inspire you to develop more detection coverage and find new ways to monitor.

5 Benefits of Detection-as-Code

Detection-as-code brings added flexibility, creativity, and scalability to your security approach. Here are some benefits of detection-as-code and how it can help your organization.

1. You Can Build Custom Detections Tailored to Your Organization

One of the biggest benefits of detection-as-code is that you can create sophisticated, high-quality, and tailored detections that alert you to exactly what you're looking for. Using a universal coding language like Python, you're also untethering yourself from restrictive domain-specific languages that can hinder your response. You'll also be able to utilize third-party libraries created by the security community to enrich your approach.

2. You Can Reuse the Code

You'll find patterns and similarities in the code as you start writing detections. Teams utilizing detection-as-code can easily reuse that code, keeping them from starting from scratch and risking human error in the rewrite. This helps teams see bigger commonalities and shared functions and gives them the tools to adapt use cases accordingly.

3. You Can Automate Your Workflows

Another benefit of detection-as-code is the ability to automate workflows, improving team efficacy, reducing human error, and decreasing response time. Automation also frees up team time so you can focus on fine-tuning detections and reducing false positive alerts. Finally, automation plays into a greater strategy of moving security to the left and adopting a CI/CD pipeline for detections.

4. You Can Test Your Development as You Go

After you build your detections, don't just trust that they work — test them before, during, and after deployment. Detection-as-code allows you to take a test-driven development (TDD) approach, which can help you discover blind spots early on, cover testing for false alerts, and evolve your detection efficacy. With this approach, you can not only be more flexible and agile, but it allows you to think like an attacker and learn accordingly.

5. You Can Leverage Version Control Systems

As you continuously improve and iterate upon your detections, you want to ensure that you're using the most up-to-date code. This is where version control can help, as it shows you your most recent detection and allows you to revert to a previous version if needed. Version control systems also provide context to help you learn why a specific alert was triggered.

Better Threat Detection Today

Threat detection isn't a new concept, but detection tools need to evolve to handle the level of data a security team ingests and analyzes each day, allowing security teams to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Detection-as-code is the next step to help you better protect your organization and prepare you for the future of cybersecurity.