What SIEM Adds to the Enterprise Cybersecurity Arsenal
What does SIEM add to your cybersecurity arsenal? How does it fit into your cybersecurity plans?
SIEM is a major contributor to enterprises’ cybersecurity platforms. However, some IT decision-makers can struggle with articulating why SIEM matters so much to the everyday protection of sensitive data and assets. In fact, SIEM can continue to overwhelm cybersecurity teams with its needs for maintenance and configuration.
Yet if you think of SIEM as a weapon against hackers – not too far from the truth – you can see SIEM as part of your cybersecurity arsenal. Just like any weapon, it needs care (like a whetstone for a sword) to stay sharp, but it can slice through villains with that care.
To help you understand the incentives, here’s what SIEM contributes.
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What SIEM Adds to the Cybersecurity Arsenal
Log Management
Everything in your IT environment generates logs – records of interactions – from your firewalls to your databases to your applications. Within these logs may contain vital security event information; often this information independently may not prove conclusively, but when combined with other logs it can lay out exactly what a threat actor intends.
Of course, the problem then becomes aggregating this data and analyzing it for those security event information data points. This is where SIEM steps, as its log management capabilities enable exactly that. Additionally, most SIEM solutions can normalize the data collected from disparate parts of the IT environment to facilitate analysis.
Threat Intelligence Connection
If you prepare to fight the last battle, you’ll never win the war. Yet so enterprises constantly hinder their own cybersecurity because they refuse to accept that hackers innovate as much as they do. Hackers never rest on their laurels, they make adjustments and then change their tactics to achieve their goals. Make no mistake, threat actors dictate the terms of the cyber war.
To repel them, your enterprise needs to know what hackers are planning, where they are targeting, and how they conduct their cyber-attacks. That means fresh, updated threat intelligence, which SIEM solutions can provide through streams.
Alerting
If your solution finds a threat, how does your IT security team know where to look? Can they discover the vulnerability quickly enough to mitigate the damage?
That line of reasoning is exactly the purpose behind SIEM’s alerting capabilities. IT enables the solution to specifically direct IT security teams to the exact point of vulnerability or the site of a data breach to begin the investigation and remediation processes.
Further, with contextualization tools, IT teams can more easily sort through alerts to isolate false positives from genuine threats.
UEBA
Of course, hackers like to dress up their attacks in disguises. Most often, they do this by subverting identities and taking control of user’s accounts. If they can bypass the login stage, they could move about with the compromised account and enact their malicious plans without interference.
User and Entity Behavioral Analysis (UEBA) profiles users, creates baselines for their behaviors, and measures those baselines against their current actions. If they deviate too much from those baselines, the solution takes notice and sends an alert to your IT security team, helping to catch compromised accounts faster.
That’s what SIEM adds to the cybersecurity arsenal. To find out what solution might best fit alongside your other weaponry, check out the SIEM Buyer’s Guide.
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