SIEM is a tool that helps enterprises recognize potential threats and vulnerabilities before they can disrupt business operations. It does this by collecting event data and analyzing it in a centralized management console.
This enables the software to identify correlations across different sources that would otherwise go undetected. For example, it can pick up on failed login attempts at a company portal and correlate them with a blocked connection on a firewall.
Real-Time Alerts
When SIEM solutions detect anomalies, they generate alerts in real-time and notify security operations centers (SOC) so they can take action to prevent or mitigate a data breach. This reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) and helps security teams improve threat detection and response.
Correlation and analysis of massive amounts of log data allow SIEM solutions to identify patterns of behavior that indicate an attack. For example, an error message on a server could correlate with a blocked firewall connection and a failed login attempt at a company portal to uncover potential attacks. This intelligence enables analysts to filter and prioritize alerts, eliminating “alert fatigue” and freeing up SOC resources to address more urgent threats.
A well-implemented SIEM solution can also help security teams improve incident response times by reducing the amount of manual work involved. For example, when a suspicious event is detected, the SIEM system automatically identifies the device and application that is being affected and notifies the SOC team. In addition, the solution can eliminate blindspots by collecting data from all devices and infrastructure, allowing security analysts to see every piece of the puzzle. This information can be accessed from a live, intuitive dashboard that’s updated in real-time. This provides a complete picture of the environment to ensure incidents are responded to quickly and efficiently.
Threat Intelligence
So, why is SIEM important? A SIEM collects, stores, analyzes, and reports on log data from all systems and applications in a business network. This can include everything from user logins to changes in critical system files. Modern SIEM solutions offer additional functionality, such as security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR).
In addition to collecting data, a modern SIEM solution enables real-time alerting. Security teams are inundated with threats, but an SIEM solution filters the data and prioritizes alerts based on an organization’s established criteria. This helps to prevent security alert fatigue by focusing on actual threats rather than false alarms.
SIEM technology also performs advanced analysis and correlation of the collected data to identify potential security concerns or incidents. Correlation tools use analytics to identify patterns and relationships among the different events. This allows security teams to detect threats that might have gone unnoticed when looking at individual events in isolation.
A modern SIEM solution can integrate various data sources, including end-user devices and servers, networks, and security equipment like firewalls and antivirus software. This data can be sent to the SIEM via collection agents, an SIEM server, or through protocols such as syslog forwarding and SNMP. It can even ingest data from cloud services and SaaS applications.
Compliance Reporting
A SIEM solution combines and organizes data points from a business’s IT ecosystem into meaningful security events. The data is typically gathered from multiple sources and stored in a centralized location or database. The resulting reports then identify areas of non-compliance and provide recommendations for improving overall compliance.
While SIEM can be a valuable tool for any business, it is essential to remember that it does not replace a human security team. Even the most sophisticated software tools are limited in what they can do without the help of talented employees.
For example, human experts need to set thresholds to determine the amount of data deemed significant enough for alerting, and they must continue to refine this criteria as new threats are detected. Furthermore, security teams will still need to analyze alerts and determine their validity.
Using a SIEM system helps to automate many of these tasks and reduce the time required for a security analyst to review alerts. This can free up a security team’s schedule to focus on higher-priority threats and keep the company safe from cyberattacks.
A SIEM solution can be configured to monitor all data points from multiple sources. These sources may include servers, firewalls, databases, VPNs, email servers, cloud systems, routers, and other IT infrastructure. To collect data, SIEM solutions often employ agents, API connections, and webhooks to retrieve log files from devices in the network.
Automation
A SIEM solution collects data from a variety of sources within the business. These may include network firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), antivirus software, routers and other hardware, databases, and more. Each of these components creates terabytes of data each month. SIEM solutions gather and analyze these terabytes of plaintext logs to identify potential security threats.
The centralized data generated by SIEM tools provides security teams with clear and comprehensive reports, ensuring that crucial security events aren’t missed or ignored. In addition, modern SIEMs use intelligent business context and innovative data visualization to improve the decision-making process around threat identification.
As a result, businesses can reduce the likelihood of data breaches by detecting anomalies, enabling them to respond to these threats before they become full-blown incidents. This allows the company to continue operating without disruption and prevents negative consequences such as revenue loss, data theft, hardware damage, etc.
To ensure that the investment in SIEM and SOC is good, it is essential to establish what success metrics should be for these solutions. This includes identifying which business goals they will support. Depending on the destination, the answer may need to be configured in specific ways or use particular technologies to meet that need. For example, if the goal is to improve how the company detects and responds to insider threats, the SIEM must include behavioral profiling.