LimaCharlie as a low-cost way to improve cyber resilience

Organizations know that they need to become more cyber resilient, and are asking MSSPs and enterprise security teams to help. But in a time of economic uncertainty and shrinking budgets, the goal of cyber resilience is often at odds with what management is prepared to invest. 

The good news is that LimaCharlie can be used to help security professionals improve cyber resilience—with a level of control and at a cost efficiency unparalleled industrywide. 

The difficulty of building cyber resilient organizations

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cyber resilience as “the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.”

Clearly, that covers a lot of ground. Building a cyber resilient organization is a vast, all-hands undertaking—and is probably best understood as an ongoing process rather than a final state to be achieved. 

For security professionals, the challenge is compounded by the fact that they're frequently working with leadership teams that have a limited grasp of cybersecurity. The ask may sound something like “just make us cyber resilient already,” without an understanding of what that entails…or how much it costs.

What makes LimaCharlie different

Fortunately, LimaCharlie offers unique advantages that security teams can use to build cyber resilient organizations:

• A powerful Detection, Automation, and Response Engine that supports advanced cybersecurity disciplines like detection engineering and security automation.

• An engineering-centric, API-first approach to delivering security tooling and infrastructure that provides direct access to cybersecurity capabilities in the form of interoperable, cloud-native primitives in a unified data format.

• A platform that serves as versatile cybersecurity middleware, allowing cybersecurity teams to bring in telemetry from any source and output data to any destination—helping avoid vendor lock-in and optimize spending on high-cost tools. 

• An on-demand, usage-based delivery and billing model: no contracts or fixed minimums; fully transparent and predictable pricing.

• One year of free telemetry retention in a searchable, normalized data format, easing compliance demands and helping to cut storage costs.

3 low-cost ways to improve cyber resilience with LimaCharlie

To give a sense of what’s possible with these capabilities, here are a three examples of low-cost ways that LimaCharlie might be used to improve cyber resilience:

1. Close gaps in detection coverage and improve visibility

A big part of cyber resilience is visibility and ease of asset management. IBM’s Cyber Resilient Organization Study 2021 found that in organizations with high levels of cyber resiliency, 65% of survey respondents said that the “ability to have visibility into applications and data assets” was a top priority for improving cyber resilience. Among organizations that had failed to improve cyber resilience, a lack of visibility into assets was one of the most commonly cited reasons for failure. For many organizations, issues of visibility are further compounded by an incomplete migration to the cloud. Cisco’s recent Security Outcomes Report: Achieving Security Resilience found “a 15% difference in resilience scores between early hybrid cloud environments that are difficult to manage and advanced cloud deployments that are simpler to manage.” 

LimaCharlie’s Detection, Automation, and Response Engine has a strong detection footprint and can help to give greater visibility into assets and close gaps in coverage where they exist. We have EDR-tier sensors for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, and Edge, providing broad coverage in almost any environment. We also support external telemetry ingestion via the LimaCharlie Adapter, giving you access to your data streams from 1Password, CarbonBlack, Office 365, and many more. For organizations that need help defending against CI/CD pipeline attacks, there is also a dedicated sensor for analyzing GitHub audit logs.

All telemetry data is brought into LimaCharlie in a unified data format and in a single view—a great help in securing hybrid environments, since you can easily combine multiple data types and better manage multi-source telemetry. Telemetry data can be analyzed and responded to at wire speed using our highly customizable detection and response (D&R) rules engine. Pricing of sensors is extremely competitive and completely transparent (see our pricing guide and pricing calculator for more details).

For a deeper dive into this LimaCharlie use case, see our webinar: Enhance your SOC's visibility on Microsoft platforms with LimaCharlie.

2. Automate security workflows and reduce alert fatigue

Another interesting finding of the IBM study was that the majority of highly cyber resilient organizations rely on security automation, AI, and machine learning. In a similar vein, the Cisco report found a 45% gap between the resilience scores of organizations that had made no progress toward XDR capabilities and those that had “mature XDR implementations,” which Cisco defines as XDR that incorporates automation/orchestration and threat intelligence.

LimaCharlie was designed for security automation—and for teams wanting to implement advanced detection and response. In the context of cyber resilience, this is a massive advantage, because you’re starting with a platform that was purpose built to do the kinds of things that produce dramatic increases in cyber resilience. 

LimaCharlie also integrates with no-code security automation platforms such as Tines and Torq. This extends the already robust automation capabilities of LimaCharlie, allowing teams to automate cybersecurity workflows, better triage events in order to reduce alert fatigue, and use the time of security personnel more efficiently and cost effectively. 

Last but not least, LimaCharlie offers an integration with the open-source Atomic Red Team library of tests, which makes it possible for security teams to automate security testing using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. This is an important benefit for cybersecurity practitioners attempting to improve organizational cyber resilience, as it enables them to understand their coverage in a systematic, evidence-based, and reproducible way. 

To learn more, see: 

Advanced Detection and Response with LimaCharlie

Automating MITRE ATT&CK Testing w/ Atomic Red Team & LimaCharlie

3. Respond to incidents faster and simplify remediation at scale 

Implicit in the concept of cyber resilience is an acceptance that cyber attacks will happen. They can’t be avoided, it’s possible to be prepared for them—and to improve an organization’s readiness and response time.

LimaCharlie offers several features that help incident response (IR) teams prepare for and respond to cyber incidents more quickly and more effectively.

First, the fact that LimaCharlie is delivered on demand, self-serve, and without contracts makes it possible for IRs to come into a scenario and begin installing sensors immediately—without having to talk to salespeople or negotiate pricing. Sensors can be deployed using the LimaCharlie web interface, or by using mass deployment tools for greater efficiency.

In addition, LimaCharlie’s built-in automation features help to streamline remediation tasks, especially when working at scale. Because the LimaCharlie agent can be used to execute payloads on endpoints, emergency patches can be deployed in just minutes.

Lastly, LimaCharlie offers pure usage-based billing for teams that need it. Sensors can be deployed in sleeper mode at almost zero cost, allowing IR teams to pre-deploy sensors across a client’s fleet. In the event of an incident, the sensors are ready and waiting to be turned on—giving responders instant access to the full power of the LimaCharlie agent. From a cyber resilience standpoint, this means that an affordable rapid response capability is available to any organization that wants it. And cybersecurity companies, sleeper deployments also make it possible to offer extremely competitive service-level agreements to customers. Some IR shops that leverage LimaCharlie offer SLAs as low as 20 minutes. 

For an example of how one DFIR team leveraged LimaCharlie to respond to a supply chain attack—and expand their customer relationship—read our incident response case study.

Learning more

To explore LimaCharlie’s capabilities for yourself, get started for free or book a demo today. 

If you’d like to talk about a use case that wasn’t discussed in this post, drop us a line on our community Slack channel or stop by during our regular weekly office hours.