Security teams need to have SIEM tools in place to protect their networks from cyber attacks. These tools rely on data from various sources to monitor, detect and respond to threats.
The best SIEM products offer instant overviews of security alerts, centralized incident response tools, and drill-down compliance-ready analyses of past threats. However, choosing the right solution depends on company priorities and budget, tech staff availability to roll up their sleeves, and many other factors.
Real-time Threat Monitoring
Each month, a single IT system can generate terabytes of plaintext data, so SIEM tools are essential. They collect, standardize and normalize this data, helping security teams identify suspicious behavior in real-time and reduce risk by identifying vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
The best SIEM solutions include built-in automated alerting so that if an attack is detected, it can quickly alert the relevant security team to prevent damage and minimize data loss. The software can also integrate with third-party threat intelligence systems to correlate internal and external information, providing valuable context that helps organizations better understand the severity of a cyberattack.
Most advanced SIEM solutions use ML and AI to help security teams handle complex threat intelligence protocols, and incident management processes more efficiently than human teams, which require significant time and resources. By combining this technology with pre-built workflows for automated incident response (SOAR), SIEM can enable teams to detect and resolve threats in much shorter timeframes than traditional teams.
The next generation of cybersecurity tools will offer more robust automation to reduce the manual workloads of security analysts. They will incorporate user behavior analytics, allowing cybersecurity professionals to identify suspicious activity patterns that could signal compromised accounts or insider threats. They will also support larger workloads, provide a more unified search experience across massive amounts of event data, and integrate with other tools for further automated incident response.
Event Correlation
The primary function of SIEM software is to detect incidents by monitoring all aspects of an organization’s IT infrastructure. This includes all devices, servers, network equipment, and applications. SIEM solutions typically also incorporate threat intelligence feeds, providing constant intel on existing and potential cyberattacks.
When suspicious activity is detected, the SIEM system generates an alert for the security team to review and take action. The tool prioritizes log data based on its importance to the security posture of the IT environment. This helps to reduce the volume of alerts triggered by the system, allowing security workers to focus on the ones that require immediate attention.
The collected data is then normalized and parsed, converting it to a consistent format that makes it easier to identify trends or patterns. Machine learning algorithms and predefined rule sets correlate the gathered data, recognizing occurrences that may indicate an incident or threat.
For example, a SIEM solution can detect lateral movement across the network by analyzing information from multiple systems like firewalls, IDS, antivirus, and authentication products to see which assets are targeted. It can also use UEBA to monitor user behavior for malicious activity, such as excessive file downloads and other activities that may indicate an insider attack.
Automated Incident Response
In the event of a cyber attack, it is vital that your organization can respond swiftly and effectively to mitigate the damage caused by a breach. SIEM tools can speed up the response process and reduce costs by automating certain functions like security alert creation. This makes it much easier to quickly detect and analyze threats, which is vital for improving your business’s cybersecurity.
SIEM tools gather event and log data generated by host systems throughout your IT infrastructure, including applications, firewalls, antivirus filters, and servers. They then bring this information together on a single platform so you can easily identify issues and generate alerts. The software can also automatically create a ticket for each alert, making it easy to track and resolve issues as they occur.
With centralized access to system logs, you can quickly reconstruct past events and investigate new ones, improving your ability to spot security risks. This also helps you satisfy compliance standards.
In addition, the advanced features of a SIEM tool can improve your threat detection capabilities by leveraging machine learning algorithms. User and entity behavior analysis (UEBA) can look at normal behavior patterns to understand what is a valid security event and what isn’t, helping you catch attacks in the act and mitigate the damage they cause.
Reporting
When security threats do occur, the ability to detect them and respond quickly is essential. SIEM software enables real-time monitoring that reduces the time between when a threat occurs and when it is detected by your system, allowing security teams to stop attacks before they can cause serious damage. Modern tools of cybersecurity in Los Angeles include artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enhance and simplify threat detection and response.
In addition to real-time threat monitoring, a quality SIEM solution provides centralized log management and reporting, making it easier for cybersecurity professionals to identify vulnerabilities and remediate threats. For example, SIEM solutions collect data from all hardware, operating systems, and security applications across the entire network and consolidate it into a single report, making identifying patterns or activities that may indicate a security incident or breach easier.
As part of the centralized log management process, SIEM tools automatically normalize and parse data from different devices and apply event correlation using pre-written rule sets or machine learning algorithms. Once an event has been identified as a potential threat, the tool generates alerts for immediate action by security teams. For example, if the system detects a pattern of failed login attempts, it could email users asking them to change their password. This can significantly reduce the number of breaches and insider attacks.
