Organizations today produce more data than ever, thanks to the growing dependency on the cloud. But how do you make sense of this vast amount of data without overburdening your IT staff? This is where security information and event management (SIEM) tools come in. It helps aggregate and analyze security-related data, allowing you to quickly identify cyber threats.
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This guide will offer insights into the following:
- What Is SIEM?
- Importance
- How Does It Work?
- Key Capabilities
- Primary Benefits
- Challenges
- Implementation Best Practices
- The Future of SIEM
- Next Steps
What Is SIEM?
SIEM is an approach that combines security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) to help you aggregate and analyze event data from multiple hosts like applications, endpoints, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and networks to identify cyber threats.
It collects data in a centralized platform, allowing you to quickly go through it and stay on top of your organization’s security. It also offers real-time threat monitoring and alerting capabilities.
Importance
Think of SIEM as a private detective that constantly analyzes your information to identify threats or vulnerabilities and safeguards your company’s assets. These systems correlate event log entries with predefined sets of normal behavior to flag anomalies and alert your security operations center (SoC).
It filters the huge amount of data your company generates, allowing you to prioritize serious threats. Additionally, the centralized platform provides easy access to data to help with compliance management and audits, saving time and monetary resources.
Advanced SIEM modules include AI and ML capabilities to automate log management, threat hunting and incident response procedures. They also offer user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) and security orchestration and automation (SOAR) tools, making it easy to find, investigate and respond to security incidents.
How Does It Work?
Most SIEM solutions typically perform the following functions for threat identification:
Data Correlation and Analysis
SIEM relies on advanced analytics and predefined data patterns to correlate event data and generate actionable insights. You can use these insights and analytical reports to identify and mitigate threats. With automated analysis, you can reduce manual workload and improve the mean time to respond (MTTR) and mean time to detect (MTTD).
Event Log Management
You can automatically gather log and event data and effectively manage it in a centralized console. Some tools also use third-party threat intelligence systems to correlate data with a pool of security data profiles and threat signatures. This integration helps discover new and advanced threats and prepare the system for future attacks.
Monitoring and Alerting
SIEM tools utilize both on-premise and cloud-based infrastructures for real-time threat monitoring. They use predefined threat behavior patterns to discover and detect anomalies and alert your SOC to mitigate threats. You can also prioritize alerts from other monitoring devices based on their threat level.
For example, if a user enters five wrong login credentials in five minutes, the system will flag it as low-priority suspicion. However, if someone enters the wrong credentials 500 times in five minutes, then that would be flagged as a high-security threat.
Key Capabilities
It’s essential to have visibility into your IT systems to avoid vulnerabilities that can attract cyberattacks. SIEM provides in-depth visibility with capabilities like:
Threat Analytics
Threat analytics offers insights into security-related event data. Advanced solutions integrate with machine learning for increased visibility into more sophisticated and complex threats.
Cloud Security
Manual cloud inspections are prone to human errors that can result in potential data breaches. Automated cloud security minimizes the risk of human errors and offers visibility into cloud networks with reports on unusual logins, DNS zones, storage accounts and unauthorized data distribution.
Integrated Compliance
Compliance management and auditing are critical features of SIEM tools, but not all vendors offer them equally. Some solutions provide comprehensive compliance management with a range of features, including automated remediation, streamlined auditing, simplified compliance demonstration and security configuration monitoring.
User Behavior Analytics (UBA)
SIEM solutions often integrate UEBA or UBA to assign risk scores to users for easy anomaly identification. These features shield your organization against risks like insider threats, data breaches and compromised accounts.
Alerting
The system immediately alerts admins if any event deviates from regular functioning and provides detailed reports on deviations. This continuous monitoring of applications and users allows you to identify suspicious behavior across the network and take prompt actions.
Threat Intelligence
Integrations with third-party threat intelligence feeds allow the platform to cross-check event data with historical cases of cybersecurity incidents. This allows your organization to track and mitigate unknown threats when necessary.
Incident Response
There’s no point in detecting threats if you don’t have any remediation strategies in place. SIEM helps with threat categorization and analysis, saving you time to focus on remediation. Additionally, it offers forensic analysis and detailed investigation of incidents to structure the framework of your threat response system.
Primary Benefits
Normalize Data
Various hosts across your IT environment generate event data and logs in different formats, which is difficult to analyze manually. SIEM tools can automatically collect, aggregate and process this data into a readable and structured format, enabling you to easily correlate it.
Save Resources
Real-time monitoring and analysis capabilities help minimize the time required for IT staff to identify and prevent threats. They can use this time to focus on creating better security remediation policies and fixing vulnerabilities.
Prevent Alert Fatigue
Several security applications like endpoint protection platforms, EDR solutions and unified endpoint management (UEM) generate countless numbers of security alerts, leading to alert fatigue. With SIEM solutions, you can prioritize these alerts based on their threat levels to avoid false alarms and minimize alert fatigue.
Ensure Compliance
All businesses need to follow compliance regulations, and audits are necessary to ensure adherence. However, the process can be tedious and time-consuming. SIEM takes away the burden by automating compliance to several common standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA.
Detect Unknown Threats
SIEM tools allow you to detect threats that normally bypass traditional cybersecurity defense systems. These threats include insider threats, zero-day attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs), SQL injection, XSS attacks and DDoS attacks.
Challenges
Although the benefits of SIEM solutions outweigh its limitations, like any technology, there are some challenges to consider. Here are some drawbacks of implementing SIEM tools:
- SIEM tools can’t work on their own without the support of other monitoring tools. Therefore, you need to integrate them with other solutions, which can be time-consuming and daunting.
- The solutions require extensive oversight and control from security experts. Sometimes they even require an entire section of the SOC to inspect and analyze the generated events.
- The initial cost of SIEM implementation can be hefty. There may be additional costs for maintenance, support, management personnel and data collection software integration.
- SIEM tools can’t differentiate between data from regular activities and other incidents. And sometimes, without proper context, they end up sanctioning regular activities that can damage user data and your company’s intellectual property.
Implementation Best Practices
Here are some best practices that you can follow to get the most out of SIEM implementation:
- Firstly, identify what your security requirements are and how SIEM can fulfill them.
- Create a set of predefined rules for data monitoring and apply them across all security solutions in your IT infrastructure, including cloud deployments.
- Now create a framework for SIEM to recognize and monitor your most critical digital assets.
- Prepare a list of your compliance management and auditing requirements and ensure that your SIEM tool has the necessary framework for handling your company’s security posture.
- Clearly define security policies, including BYOD policies, IT restrictions and configurations, so the platform can use them in data correlation, normalization and monitoring.
- Ensure that your SIEM solutions are connected to as many hosts as possible to access vast amounts of data and maximize ROI.
- Perform test runs and keep high maintenance standards to reduce the possibility of false alerts.
- Integrate AI, ML and SOAR to automate your day-to-day tasks.
- Last but not least, create customized incident response plans for quick remediation.
The Future of SIEM
The global SIEM industry has gained immense popularity in the past few years and is expected to reach $18.12 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 16.4% from 2021-2030. Some trends in SIEM include:
- Currently, most basic SIEM tools provide moderate automation in log management, analysis and compliance. Next-generation tools will have AI and ML integrations for advanced automation and improved orchestration.
- Companies will continue with the two-tier security approach to ensure robust cybersecurity. Integration of SIEM tools with other monitoring and threat identification tools like EDR, XDR and intrusion prevention systems is likely to increase in the near future.
- The combination of SIEM and SOAR will provide better automation, leverage third-party threat intelligence data and streamline security operations.
Next Steps
The role of data security has become paramount in not just protecting your business assets but also customer data, PII and other sensitive information, so you can no longer take chances. Implementing SIEM tools can help you take care of both cybersecurity and compliance. To analyze different software vendors, you can compare them directly in our SIEM Tools product directory.
Which security systems have you integrated with SIEM solutions? What difference do you think they make to your company’s security posture? Do let us know in the comments below.
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