5 Issues SIEM’s Visibility Capabilities Can Help You Find

In many of our articles, we talk up the benefits of SIEM’s visibility capabilities. However, we don’t always explore what SIEM’s visibility capabilities can actually discover lurking in your environment. 

As your enterprise’s IT environment scales, your enterprise may struggle to maintain visibility over it. Without proper visibility, you aren’t just at risk—you practically lay out the welcome mat for hackers. 

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Here are a few examples of what cybersecurity visibility improvements can find:  

Five Issues SIEM’s Visibility Capabilities Can Find

1. Unsecured Data Storage

First, SIEM’s visibility capabilities can uncover sensitive data. Surprisingly, your enterprise can quite easily lose track even of sensitive data and databases; it comes as a side effect scaling environments and more users engaging with the data. Naturally, some users (often well-meaningly) store sensitive data on devices or in unsecured sites. 

Previously, companies have suffered due to unsecured S3 web buckets or plaintext personally-identifying information storage. You need stronger monitoring to just find these databases, if not to close them or move them back to your environment’s center. 

2. Unwarranted and Suspicious Installations

Of course, as the network scales, so does the digital attack surface area. As a result, users can add applications or forge connections unmonitored—some of which might prove malicious. Obviously, your IT security team should have final approval and evaluation of all potential installations. However, without SIEM’s visibility, this policy may prove difficult to enforce. 

With SIEM deployed, your cybersecurity can trigger when a user installs an application without permission and freeze the activity. Then your team can investigate to determine whether the application is benevolent or something worse before it gets free reign.  

3. Unpatched Devices  

Every device carries its own threat intelligence and cybersecurity firmware. However, this firmware does not update on its own. Further, the designers may not alert its customers on the updates promptly or at all. Thankfully, SIEM’s visibility capabilities can uncover vulnerabilities like that and help your IT security team resolve them.

Remember, hackers prefer exploiting vulnerabilities rather than designing their own attack. Best cut them off at the pass, so to speak.  

4. Undiscovered Devices 

Then there is the alternative to unpatched devices—devices not even registered by your cybersecurity. Frequently, IoT devices and mobile device additions mean devices end up unmonitored without SIEM’s visibility capabilities; instead, they become blind spots in your network. Therefore, they represent an ideal vector for hackers to plant dwelling threats. Alternatively, they could use unmonitored devices as a stepping stone or man-in-the-middle attack to reach their real prize in your environment.

Through log management, SIEM allows you to keep a close eye on these devices. Additionally, it helps you facilitate cloud security—a decentralizing challenge after digital transformation.  

5. Abnormal Behaviors  

Finally, SIEM’s visibility capabilities help shed light on your users and third parties. With SIEM, you can establish behavioral baselines for each user, device, application, and third party as they conduct their business workflows. If they deviate from these behaviors—as in an insider threat or credentials compromise—your SIEM solution can detect it. Then it can alert your IT security team or freeze the activity or user in more severe cases. 

As your network scales, you also gain more users. Each user represents a potential attack vector if not carefully monitored. Here’s your chance. 

You can learn more in our SIEM Buyer’s Guide.