Choosing SIEM And SOC Solution For Your School | ThreatDefence
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Choosing SIEM and
SOC Solution for Your School

Resource guide – cyber security threat detection and incident response.

Why Do Cybercriminals Target the Education Industry?

The education sector in Australia is increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks, including ransomware, data breaches, and phishing. Recently, several Australian schools have been hit by serious cyber incidents, highlighting the sector’s ongoing challenges in addressing cybersecurity risks. Despite facing similar threats as large enterprises, most schools lag significantly in cybersecurity maturity.

 

Key statistics from the education sector in Australia underline these concerns:

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The education sector has seen a sharp rise in cyber threats, with data breaches growing from 11% in 2022 to 20% in 2023

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The average cost of a data breach
for a school is approximately
$88,000.

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Most schools allocate less than 1% of their IT budgets to cybersecurity.

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On average, schools take seven days to respond to a cyber attack, making them one of the slowest sectors in incident response.

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Schools are targeted for various reasons, primarily because of the sensitive personal data they handle, such as student records. Cybercriminals are drawn to these institutions due to their often inadequate cybersecurity measures – they like schools being easy and lucrative targets.

Educational organisations also have large attack surfaces, increasing their risk exposure. With larger student populations come greater challenges, including managing complex IT infrastructures and securing vast amounts of personal data. Cybercriminals recognise this and exploit weak points where data is abundant and poorly protected.

Already vulnerable due to minimal cybersecurity investment — often less than 1% of their IT budgets — schools also often lack of technical expertise in managing cyber security defenses. This combination makes educational institutions increasingly more and more attractive target for cyber attacks.

Towards Stronger Cyber Resilience

Australian schools have already faced severe consequences from cyber breaches, revealing the critical need for stronger cybersecurity measures. Some of the key impacts include

  • Critical Data Loss: Schools have suffered significant losses of vital corporate, financial, and student-related data, causing long-term operational disruptions.
  • Third-Party Data Exploitation: Cyber attacks have led to the exposure and misuse of third-party personal information, such as parents’ and students’ sensitive data, stored on school systems. This exploitation can extend to identity theft and financial fraud.
  • Reputational Damage: Schools face considerable harm to their reputations when students’ and parents’ private information is compromised. Loss of trust from the community can lead to declining enrollments and damage long-term relationships with stakeholders.
  • Incident Response Costs: Schools are incurring enormous financial costs to respond to cyber incidents. This includes investigation, remediation, legal fees, and public relations efforts. The cost of recovering from a breach often far exceeds preventive investments.

It’s evident that schools must significantly improve their cyber resilience. But what does it mean to be cyber resilient, and what does achieving it entail?

Cyber resilience refers to an organisation’s ability to prepare for, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber attacks or security incidents while maintaining essential operations. A cyber-resilient school doesn’t just defend against threats; it ensures that even in the event of a successful attack, it can minimise disruption, protect critical data, and resume normal operations as quickly as possible.

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Faced with the same cybersecurity threats as large enterprises, most schools still lag significantly in their security maturity. Like enterprises, schools must begin adopting proactive cybersecurity measures, moving beyond traditional protective technologies such as firewalls and antivirus software. They need to take a holistic approach, one that includes technology, processes and people factors. This approach is essential for preparing schools to effectively respond to and recover from incidents or breaches, ensuring that they can minimise damage and quickly restore normal operations when a cyberattack occurs.

Building Your Cyber Security
Capabilities

If you’re responsible for IT security at a school, you’re likely facing a challenging landscape in 2024-2025Z

  • Escalating Threats: Cyber threats are more real than ever, with schools increasingly becoming prime targets for attacks like ransomware, phishing, and data breaches
  • Board Pressure: There’s growing pressure from board members to speed up the implementation of cybersecurity programs and ensure compliance, often without full consideration of resource limitations and the complexities involved
  • Limited Support: Guidance and support from external authorities are often generic and lack the specificity needed to address the unique challenges schools face, leaving IT teams to navigate security issues with limited direction
  • Lack of Visibility: Maintaining visibility into key digital assets, both cloud-based and on-premises, is becoming more difficult. As schools increasingly adopt cloud applications, ensuring complete ownership and accountability over an expanding IT footprint is a constant struggle
  • Resource Constraints: Budgets are tight, and IT resources are stretched thin. Schools must manage cybersecurity with limited financial and human resources, making it difficult to keep up with evolving threats.

Schools are seeking budget-friendly cybersecurity options that offer more than just compliance-driven solutions. However, many global and local cybersecurity providers focus primarily on the enterprise market, often overlooking schools due to their limited budgets. The solutions specifically designed for schools are usually more affordable but tend to be limited in scope, often providing only basic, scaleddown versions of what would be deployed in larger organisations.

This situation often pushes schools toward compliance-focused, “tick-the-box” services. While this problem isn’t unique to schools, the lack of a common reference standard for implementing cybersecurity technologies makes it challenging for schools to evaluate the real value of these offerings. Schools must carefully determine whether these solutions truly provide adequate protection and are worth the investment.

Anecdote:

A major educational organisation in Australia invested in cybersecurity capabilities, including SIEM and SOC services from a global vendor. Every year, a global consulting firm conducted a review, reporting incremental improvements in their security posture. On paper, they appeared compliant and secure, satisfying their auditors with the systems they had in place.

However, after a significant breach that led to millions of dollars in losses and weeks of disruption, an independent review exposed numerous issues with their cybersecurity controls. Despite their investments, the review flagged a low level of cyber resilience. Notably, their SIEM and SOC services only covered a limited number of systems, providing little visibility across their broader environment.

It became clear that their compliance-focused approach met formal auditing requirements but failed to deliver meaningful protection in practice.

Return on Investment in Cyber Security

Every cyber security defender knows about this – approval for a cyber security investment often only comes after a business has experienced a significant compromise.

While not every cyber-mature organisation has been breached, many only prioritise funding after an incident, when the urgency becomes undeniable. Suddenly, budgets become available, and solutions are deployed rapidly. This reactive approach highlights a deeper issue— most businesses still don’t anticipate these events as real, imminent threats, even though the risks are well-known.

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) in cybersecurity is particularly challenging because it’s not about immediate gains or cost reductions. The value of cybersecurity investments lies in avoiding financial damage, reputational harm, and operational downtime.

During a breach, schools often confront the harsh reality that their capabilities, both human and technical, restrict their ability to follow the predefined response steps. They often struggle to extract detailed insights necessary to identify the initial point of compromise or to fully understand the impact on affected systems and data. Schools find it challenging to quickly assess the extent of the damage, confirm whether the attacker has been fully contained or determine if it is safe to commence recovery.

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So how can you assess if your investment in cyber security is sufficient at your school? Reflecting on our answers to the following questions can help you to determine level of your readiness:

 

 

  • Can your IT staff monitor all critical systems continuously, ensuring they are not compromised.
  • Do you have comprehensive visibility into user activities across both cloud and on-premises environments to quickly identify and contain account takeovers, and provide assurance to the business that attackers did not spread to other user accounts.
  • In the event of a system compromise, how quickly can your team detect, investigate, and contain the threat? Can they accurately determine the root cause, scope of impact, and whether data was exfiltrated.
  • What measures do you have in place to ensure that attackers cannot leave backdoors or regain access to your systems.
  • If you were to receive an advisory from a government regulator requesting you to review all of your systems for specific events and indicators of compromise, how quickly would you be able to do it?

Considering People, Process and Technology

Effectively responding to a cybersecurity incident hinges on your ability to confidently address critical questions. Clear answers allow for a smooth recovery, while uncertainty can lead to delays, uninformed decisions, and greater risks. To avoid this, it’s essential to have a solid cyber resilience strategy in place.

Building strong cyber resilience involves aligning people, processes, and technology.

As cyber attacks grow more sophisticated, schools need to enhance their ability to detect and respond to threats with greater speed, scale, and efficiency. Based on our experience, here are the key factors that schools need to consider:

  • Managed SIEM: A SIEM system integrated with all critical security logs ensures centralised monitoring and analysis.
  • Live DFIR (Digital Forensics and Incident Response) on Endpoints: Enables the collection of forensic data across the organisation, allowing for comprehensive searches for signs of compromise and at-scale investigations.
  • NDR (Network Detection and Response): Provides continuous visibility into network traffic, creating essential evidence records for tracking and stopping threats.
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  • Multi-Cloud Visibility: With many schools utilising multiple cloud platforms, the ability to gather and analyse log data across different cloud environments is crucial.
  • Unified Data Model: A single, unified data context across tools like SIEM, EDR, and DFIR ensures consistency in threat detection and response efforts.
  • Attack Surface Awareness: Knowing your attack surface in real-time is vital for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities quickly.
  • Dark Web Visibility: Proactive monitoring of the dark web for mentions of your organisation, compromised credentials, or leaked data can provide early warning of potential threats.
  • Threat Intelligence: Integrating threat intelligence feeds enhances your ability to identify and respond to emerging threats.
  • Continuous Monitoring: Around-the-clock monitoring ensures that your environment is watched from the start of an incident, enabling prompt and effective response.
  • Threat Hunting: Actively searching for hidden threats helps uncover vulnerabilities that might otherwise remain undetected.
  • Incident Response: A well-practiced, adaptable incident response process ensures quick and efficient reactions to cyber threats.

By focusing on these essential capabilities, schools can build a comprehensive and resilient cybersecurity strategy that not only meets compliance requirements but also provides strong, practical protection against evolving cyber threats

ThreatDefence Solution

ThreatDefence is proud to offer a 24/7 Cyber Threat Detection and Incident Response service specifically designed for schools in Australia. Having provided Security Operations services to major organisations in Australia and globally, we are now bringing our proven threat detection solutions to the education sector. By partnering with multiple Australian schools, we have developed a deep understanding of the unique challenges schools face in today’s evolving threat landscape.

The service is designed to provide additional cyber resilience mechanisms to help protect your school’s data and assets from advanced cyber threats. It includes continuous 24×7 monitoring of critical systems and technologies, including corporate servers, O365 and other cloud platforms, campus network activity, external vulnerabilities, and even Dark Web monitoring.

The solution is powered by ThreatDefence’s Australian-hosted SIEM platform, providing full visibility across your entire environment. By aggregating logs from various sources into a central location, our platform correlates millions of events, distilling them into a prioritised set of actionable alerts.

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Our platform has an extensive library of detections and playbooks, continuously updated by our expert team on a daily basis. Additionally, we leverage Machine Learning and AI algorithms to identify deviations in user behavior and other unexpected events. We enhance anomaly detection by combining our threat intelligence with years of experience handling cybersecurity incidents across Australia. We also detect anomalies using our extensive threat intelligence, coupled with years of experience handling cyber security incidents across Australia.  As a network partner of the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), we integrate their threat intelligence into our analysis, flagging anomalies based on ACSC insights.

Our service is fully aligned with Australian security standards, including ISO 27001, ACSC Essential Eight, and NIST cybersecurity frameworks.

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Why Partner With ThreatDefence?

Everyone is being hacked despite spending millions on cyber security.

It seems like every vendor has a solution on how to protect your business. The promise is simple and reliable cyber security. So why are organisations still getting breached?

The main reason is lack of visibility – most solutions in the market provide limited coverage, and at the same time operate as a black box – your security data is being sent somewhere to a cloud, however you can’t ever see what is being collected and what is not.

An alternative is to build your own, customised Security Operations which will employ a variety of tools to provide you with end-to-end visibility, putting you in control over your data. This process normally takes months and requires a significant investment across technology and people domains.

ThreatDefence provides IT teams with ready to use, end-to-end Threat Detection and Response solution, including a full stack platform able to capture and correlate all types of security data, supported by Next-Generation SIEM, NDR, endpoint visibility, integrated threat intelligence, automation, SOC workflows and 24×7 team of cyber security experts.

We exist to evolve your cyber security approach from ‘promise-based’ to ‘evidence-based’ security, from ‘probably secure’ to ‘provably secure’.

Our evidence-based approach to cyber security provides you with deep, forensic-like visibility in your environment. Our SIEM platform can be deployed in minutes, transforming your data into evidence, and detecting active and dormant threats in your environment.

At the same time, it integrates with your existing security stack from day one. You can select your current security products from the list of hundreds of pre-built integrations, and also use our lightweight sensors across your on-prem and cloud environments to collect additional telemetry data.

Deep Visibility and Next Generation SIEM

Full enterprise coverage, simple pricing model

Deploy in hours with full content and threat intel. Get comprehensive coverage from day one and avoid additional licensing costs in 1-2 years.

Recorded Evidence – Foundation for Premium SOC and IR

Everything is recorded and can be inspected in real-time on any scale

In-depth, forensic-like visibility for breach detection, real-time forensics and incident response.

Premium SecOps – NDR, Deception, SOC Automation

Cover your entire attack surface with premium capabilities

Deploy all SecOps tools from the same platform and detect threats in secods.

Evolving Cyber Security

Stay ahead of threat actors with evolving SecOps

We continuously update and improve our tools to provide you with the latest SecOps capability, keeping attackers at bay.

Service Details

Activating our platform and service is simple and quick. Since the platform is fully cloud-based, onboarding your log sources typically takes just a few hours. Once data starts flowing from your school into your instance, our SOC team immediately begins analysing it to detect anomalies. Any detected anomalies are first handled by our SecOps AI, which provides an instant triage, transforming events into actionable insights. These insights are then automatically escalated to our 24×7 SOC team for further investigation.

Commercial Model

  • No implementation cost
  • Per user per month pricing
  • No minimum commitment

 

Business Outcomes

  • Enterprise-grade security solution from the leading Australian provider
  • 24/7 security monitoring, threat detection and response
  • Call our SOC team anytime
  • Full incident response support
  • Reporting and assurance for your board

 

Unlike many MDR/SOC providers, we provide full access to all security data and dashboards. Your team will have the same visibility as ours, with the ability to view all reports and dashboards our platform generates. The web-based interface allows easy drill-down into raw events with just a few clicks, reducing Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) from weeks to minutes. It continuously tracks key security metrics against widely accepted standards (such as the Centre for Internet Security) and sends notifications for any anomalies or baseline deviations.

Service Details

Feature Comparison

Comparing solutions matrix
Feature ThreatDefence Overseas SOC Providers K12-Focused SOC Providers
SIEM:
Log and Event management, event correlation, reporting, alerting * * *
Customisable dashboards, IT teams can browse data * Black box – only summary reports provided Black box – only summary reports provided
Advanced telemetry from endpoints and network * Premium subscription Not available
Network Detection and Response * Premium subscription Not available
Extended Detection and Response:
Deep endpoint visibility * * Not available
Network traffic inspection * Premium subscription Not available
Cloud API monitoring * Limited Limited
User behavior analytics * * Limited
Australian Threat Intelligence * Limited Very limited
Cyber Risk Management:
Vulnerability scanning * * Not available
Endpoint compliance assessment * Not available Not available
Cloud security assessment and risk management * Limited Not available
Dark Web Monitoring * * Not available
Incident Response and Digital Forensics:
Quick threat containment * * Not available
Historical forensic searches * Need to Call SOC Need to Call SOC
Integrated Threat Hunting capabilities * * Not available
Non-Technical Criteria:
Data sovereignty * Not available *
Local SOC team * Not Available *
24×7 SOC team * * Limited, on-call support
Full incident response lifecycle * Extra cost Limited capability, extra cost
Cost $$ $$$ $
Contract term No minimum commitment Usually 3yr commitment Usually 3yr commitment

The detailed comparison is available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sndf6Ekc4CnbeMzNzeJfdB2E_vdeeTeYN6JyBTyYuXU/edit?usp=sharing

How to Start

Getting started with ThreatDefence is simple. Reach out to our team today to schedule a demo or request a free trial. Our friendly experts are ready to discuss your specific needs, understand your environment, and provide tailored recommendations on how our service can best protect your school

Deploy in Minutes

  • Easy installation, management, and support; 100% cloud-based platform
  • Comes with numerous integrations to support your existing tech
  • Supplied with threat intel, hundreds of detection use cases and playbooks

 

Enterprise-Grade Capabilities

  • Evidence-based security with NDR, endpoint DFIR, deception
  • Next-Generation SIEM, integrated automation and Threat Hunting
  • Cyber risk management with Dark Web, multi-cloud visibility, attack surface monitoring threat intel and more

 

White-Labeled SecOps

  • All-inclusive pricing model
  • White-labeled to your brand
  • New SecOps features based on your feedback

Access the Education Cybersecurity Playbook

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