As IT services and infrastructure gravitate towards hybrid models, and with the recent proliferation of data, it is becoming imperative for organizations to have a centralized security solution to track users' behavior and critical security incidents.
Threat actors are growing more adept at detecting and exploiting gaps within an organization's network, and cyberattacks are continually evolving. While administrators can respond to attacks that have already occurred, it is more difficult for them to predict attack patterns that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.
To avoid falling victim to cyberattacks, organizations should deploy an advanced solution that can identify malicious activities that may have circumvented their front line of defense. SIEM solutions use real-time event response systems to warn admins about a user's or an entity's suspicious behavior.
How does a SIEM solution work?
SIEM solutions gather log data from cloud services, applications, networks, and other entities. The solution then locates, classifies, and analyzes security incidents and events to provide a comprehensive perspective of an organization's IT infrastructure. SIEM solutions can also extract data from a worldwide list of blocklisted IPs or other threat data sources and compare it to logs from an organization's own network to see if a security breach has occurred. They also provide critical insights into user and entity behavior with the help of real-time alerts and reports.
On-premises or cloud-based SIEM systems are available. These solutions leverage rules and statistical correlations to produce actionable information during an incident's investigations by analyzing all the data in real time. SIEM technology monitors all confidential data and categorizes threat behavior by risk level to assist security teams in quickly identifying malicious insiders and mitigating cyberattacks.
Because of how well these technologies can discover anomalies in an organization's network, machine learning and automation are becoming more common in SIEM solutions, aiding in the detection of malicious insiders by analyzing patterns that are frequently overlooked when manually correlating events.
SIEM use cases
In today's security landscape, SIEM has a variety of uses including insider threat detection and prevention, and helping organizations comply with various regulatory requirements.
Meet compliance mandates
Organizations are being pushed to invest more extensively in IT security as a result of stricter compliance laws, and SIEM plays an essential role in helping organizations comply with PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX standards. These compliance regulations are becoming more common, putting additional pressure on organizations to detect and report breaches.
Prevent malicious insiders
Insider threats pose a significant concern, especially given the ease of access to numerous resources such as financial records and critical servers. SIEM solutions enable organizations to track employee behavior in real time and trigger alerts for unusual events that deviate from their normal activity. Organizations can also use SIEM to undertake comprehensive monitoring of privileged accounts and generate notifications for actions that a certain user is not permitted to perform, such as installing software or disabling security software.
Core functions of SIEM
- Recognizes subtle changes in user behavior to detect internal threats such as data exfiltration and user account compromise
- Identifies suspicious or blocklisted IPs, URLs, and domains intruding into the network by correlating log data with reputed threat feeds
- Detects, disrupts, and prevents sensitive data leaks from endpoints like USBs, printers, email, web apps with real-time security monitoring
- Uses readily configurable workflows to automate responses to events and save critical response time
- Supervises all active VPN connections for suspicious VPN activity, VPN connections from dangerous sources, and more
SIEM solutions enable admins to help their organizations prevent malicious insiders and data breaches by executing an end-to-end incident management strategy. With AD360's threat hunting capabilities, admins can efficiently handle incident detection and real-time alerting, and preconfigured incident routines can be utilized to set up fast incident response mechanisms. This drastically decreases the average time to detect and resolve a security incident.