How SIEM Solutions Can Help Secure Financial Enterprises

How can SIEM solutions help secure financial enterprises? Why are financial organizations and services at particular risk for cyber attacks? What does SIEM offer that can prevent external and internal threat actors? 

SIEM functions in a manner distinct from any other cybersecurity solution. In fact, SIEM most resembles threat hunting in its tactics and capabilities. The solution conducts log management from throughout the network, collecting security event information from the most vulnerable areas.

Then, SIEM normalizes the data collection for easy parsing and analysis. Upon discovering security events or correlated events which indicates a breach, the solution creates an alert to your IT security team. Further, SIEM can help with threat hunting through alert contextualization and through freezing suspicious executions.

How does this apply to financial services? What does SIEM actually do for financial enterprises?

Why SIEM? The Use Case of Financial Enterprises

Unfortunately, financial businesses represent a major target for hackers and insider threats alike. After all, the majority of cyber attacks seek financial gains or rewards—what better target than the businesses directly dealing with finances? 

Financial enterprises do face some distinct challenges as business verticals. First, they must contend with the scaling of their IT infrastructure and digital environments; this scaling can make the scope of the data and its sources feel daunting—far more than a legacy solution could handle. With the advent and adoption of public cloud over the past few years, the environment expands even faster than predicted, and with more potential attack vectors

Additionally, financial organizations face distinct regulatory compliance mandates for implementing technology in accordance with privacy standards. These add to the already substantial consequences for a data breach or data exposure via regulatory fines.  

Finally, financial businesses in particular need to consider insider threats. These employees, whether current or former, take actions against the company either out of ignorance or malice. They can go largely undetected due to the fact that they behave almost identically to ordinary employees. They are supposed to connect to your network, and thus their behaviors raise far fewer red flags until it is far too late. 

How SIEM Helps

Fortunately, next-generation SIEM helps financial enterprises stay secure in the digital marketplace. First, these solutions ensure visibility across the entire network; this prevents devices or users from unmonitored actions or connections, preventing hackers from taking advantage of blind spots in the network. 

Additionally, modern SIEM features user and entity behaviorial analysis (UEBA); this capability enables your IT security team to identify baseline behaviors for all of your users, devices, and applications. If a user violates their baseline behaviors, your enterprise receives an instant alert, as it could indicate the early stages of an insider threat. 

Further, many SIEM solutions can help financial enterprises achieve compliance through out-of-the-box reports and automatic report filling. This takes a significant burden off the shoulders of your IT security team; instead, they can focus on innovating and threat hunting, preventing threats from gaining a foothold.

However, SIEM’s great strengths for business in a finance vertical reads exactly as it does on the tin; it detects threats that would otherwise slip by unnoticed. If a program laterally moves in an unusual way, SIEM can find it. So too can it find odd privilege changes in the system or relationships between events that would pass the naked eye unnoticed. 

A general rule of thumb for cybersecurity is that the longer a threat dwells on the network, the more damage it does. SIEM works quickly to match the unrelenting speed of hackers; you could say it moves at business speed. 

To learn more about SIEM and its use cases, be sure to download our Buyer’s Guide.  

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