A SIEM collects and aggregates security data, normalizing it for analysis. It can also ingest threat intelligence and provide detection capabilities depending on how it is set up.
A good SIEM solution can reduce the cost of a data breach, helping companies avoid devastating attacks. However, there are times when SIEM steps get skipped – and the consequences can be costly.
Security Monitoring
What is SIEM, and how does it operate? Unlike antivirus software, which scans files and looks for malicious code, SIEMs track all the data moving through your network. They gather and normalize logs from various security systems in your stack, centralizing them to aid in the identification of aberrant activity, malware assaults, and insider threats.
As attacks become more sophisticated, it’s critical to have the right tools to identify them. Modern SIEMs combine event correlation, threat monitoring, and incident response capabilities in a single interface that delivers security visibility and control for the entire IT environment.
They can also incorporate threat intelligence feeds to speed up alerting and detection. It can include file hashes, IP addresses, hostnames and domain names, Indicators of compromise (IOCs), and matches to YARA rules.
Today’s security teams are understaffed and time-constrained, so they must prioritize and respond to the most critical threats. The best SIEMs use machine learning to ease their burden by automating tasks, reducing false positives, and providing enhanced context and situational awareness.
It makes it simpler for SOCs to create new efficiencies that solve the cybersecurity skills gap and enable them to be more proactive against security threats. In addition, they support a range of advanced capabilities like UEBA and machine learning to improve the accuracy of threat identification. They’ll also integrate with unified endpoint security and BCS for SAP, helping your SOC team manage these critical assets from a single pane of glass.
Detection
A solid SIEM solution ingests massive amounts of data across your IT infrastructure, making it human-readable on a single platform. Then, it analyzes this data to detect anomalies and threats.
In a world of increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks, threat detection is vital. Unlike legacy solutions that run a security sweep every few hours or once a day, a good SIEM solution is continuously monitoring your IT infrastructure in real time. It enables you to swiftly recognize risks and take appropriate action before they cause harm.
It is possible thanks to an integrated threat intelligence platform (TIP) and AI integration, which can help illuminate patterns of behavior that might indicate a malicious attack on your IT infrastructure. The ability to comb through large volumes of data in seconds and filter out false positives frees up your security analysts’ time to devote their attention to the most critical alerts.
Once a threat is detected, your SIEM tools can communicate with your other security software to block and contain the threat, making it easier for your IT team to find the source of the breach. They can also provide investigation tools, like event log correlation and log forwarding, that make it easier to understand the incident in more detail so that you can prevent future breaches.
Reporting
A SIEM solution collects, filters, and analyzes log data to provide security analysts with real-time alerts and dashboards on various security events. It also provides contextual information distinguishing between a false positive and an actual threat. These include strange user and entity behavior (UEBA), protocol, and web intelligence.
It helps prevent costly breaches and avoid compliance violations that entail hefty financial penalties. Many SIEM solutions have tools to help you comply with industry standards and regulations like PCI DSS, GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, and more.
The ability of SIEM to absorb and analyze threat intelligence and automate responses is becoming increasingly crucial with the rise of artificial intelligence in the cybersecurity sector. It allows you to act faster when a potential threat is identified and reduces the time for an analyst to take action.
Despite all the benefits of SIEM, it still needs to replace your IT environment and security team. It is crucial to have an experienced staff to implement, monitor, and fine-tune your SIEM solution to meet your business and IT environments. Training these employees on how to use and understand the data provided by the SIEM system is also necessary.
Response
As a security solution, SIEM gathers and analyzes event data in real-time to support security monitoring, threat detection, and incident response. It combines and normalizes log data from your IT infrastructure, cloud systems, software-as-a-service solutions, network devices, and hardware such as firewalls, antivirus applications, and more to detect anomalous behavior. The best SIEM tools combine these centralized analytics with advanced capabilities such as unsupervised machine learning and user and entity behavior analysis (UEBA) to identify threats and risks in your environment.
When selecting a SIEM application, be sure it covers all your most critical data sources. Otherwise, you risk your security team becoming desensitized to the sound of alarm bells with limited context. For example, what appears to be a significant transfer of files could be a cyberattack designed to steal petabytes of sensitive and confidential information.
Look for a SIEM tool that lets you configure rule sets to flag and halt suspicious activity. This way, you can keep attackers from gaining access to your network, stealing data, or disrupting services. Many SIEM tools also integrate with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms to automate responses based on threat intelligence and speed up your SOC’s ability to respond to events and stop attacks in progress.
