The 3 AM Problem You Can’t Ignore

Cyberattacks wait until you’re not looking to wreak the most havoc.

Alerts Might Wait – Attacks Don’t

Picture this: it’s the middle of the night. You’re peacefully asleep in your bed, but your security tools are still sending alerts. While you’re rolling over and burrowing into your blankets, your endpoint security tool has quarantined a piece of malware. A notice of a suspicious login on a cloud account comes through. There’s a surge of logins on your VPN portal that could be a brute force attempt.

Does it really matter that you’re asleep when these alerts come in? Actually, yes: up to 76% of ransomware attacks begin outside of business hours, and that’s just one example. It’s well documented that threat actors take advantage of times when people are less likely to be paying attention to launch their attacks, such as the middle of the night, weekends, and holidays.

Challenges With In-House 24/7 Protection

For most small organizations and managed service providers, 24/7 active monitoring and response simply isn’t possible. The resources it takes to have around-the-clock staffing are out of their reach, so alerts sit until there is someone in the office to deal with them. The trouble with this, however, is two-fold: first, teams start their day with a pile of alerts they must sift through to find what’s relevant. Meanwhile, the threat actor working overnight has used the dwell time that a delay in investigation gave them to move laterally, and now there’s a full security incident unfolding, instead of just an annoying alert. That gap between the nighttime alert and the morning investigation is what we call the 3 AM Problem.  

It's easy to think that the 3 AM Problem doesn’t apply to small businesses and MSPs, but that just isn’t the case. Threat actors often target small businesses more since they are less likely to have sophisticated defenses, and sometimes it’s not about targeting at all: simply falling victim to a “spray and pray” phishing attack can open the door to mayhem. Having 24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring and response for cyber incidents is no longer optional, and the MSPs who support small businesses must figure out how to provide this to their clients.

For these MSPs, building a SOC of their own is typically out of reach. The initial startup cost for a SOC is over $1 million, and that doesn’t include any of the ongoing operating costs. The money is only one part: there’s also the challenge of hiring qualified cybersecurity experts to staff it and build out the necessary processes the SOC will need.

Solving the 3 AM Problem Without Building Your Own SOC

Fortunately, solving the 3 AM Problem  does not require building a SOC from the ground up. MSPs can deliver after-hours cyber protection by partnering with a SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) provider , who can provide the dedicated security experts to monitor, investigate, and respond to alerts quickly, at all hours of the day and night. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) helps you extend the protection you offer your clients without requiring you to hire your own SOC analysts. It gives you the power of threat hunting, investigation and immediate threat mitigation, all happening while you and your clients sleep peacefully. 

Cybersecurity isn’t just what happens when your eyes are looking at a screen – threat actors never sleep. So who has your back at 3 a.m.?  

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