Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) increases threat detection and mitigation.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software defends against threats to enterprise IT by gathering data and identifying potential security threats. Collected data is analyzed against security rules within the enterprise’s scope before notifying the company of cybercrime incidents.
No matter how skillfully your security researchers and analysts work to protect your enterprise, all threat actors need is one small gap, in one fraction of a moment, to slip by your safeguards and wreak havoc on your IT infrastructure.
Security ecosystems are crucial, with the indispensable ability to collect logs from data sources, pinpoint trends, and send alerts regarding possible security threats when anomalies are spotted. And one of the most well-regarded software tools for enterprises looking to shore up their security is managed SIEM.
What Is Enterprise SIEM?
SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management. SIEM is software that increases threat detection and management by combining security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM).
SIEM gathers data from sources throughout a business’s IT and security environment, including their firewalls and host networks. It identifies potential security threats within an enterprise by analyzing the collected data against security rules within the organization’s defined scope and notifying its security team of any real-time and historical incidents. This enables the team to detect the path of an attack and identify areas that may be compromised. Additionally, SIEM allows security teams to keep track of all activities within their IT world through data analysis, aggregation, event correlation, and logging.
Why Do Companies Need SIEM?
SIEM systems are essential for all enterprises, regardless of their size. SIEM systems also enable companies to meet compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries, providing a suite of features for efficient and thorough incident detection and management.
Data collection and organization
IT environments are composed of many individual components, including databases, applications, and devices. Collecting all of the data from these components is a challenge because each speaks its own language. SIEM can reformat this data in any desired format, streamlining an enterprise’s log management. Data can be stored in a single customizable repository, enabling security professionals to access it easily.
Incident detection and management
SIEM detects incidents by logging information from all of the company’s cyber entry points and analyzing the log entries to find evidence of malicious activity. Because it gathers information from the entirety of the network, SIEM can determine the nature and path of a previous or current security incident.
When confronted with a possible attack, SIEM can communicate with other network security controls—and work together to shut down the attack in progress. What’s more, if SIEM detects activity from known threats, the software can work with other systems to proactively terminate those interactions and nullify the threat. SIEM reacts efficiently, investigating and exposing attacks as they are occurring in real-time.
This type of incident response and containment can decrease damage from an attack and prepare security professionals for similar future incidents.
Meeting compliance requirements
Companies in regulated industries frequently use SIEM to meet compliance reporting requirements. SIEM collects event data from all network sources and creates one customizable report, allowing companies to bypass the tedious job of retrieving data from each source. Enterprises use SIEM to ensure that they are actively protecting and monitoring their data and keeping track of security events. Without SIEM, companies would have to retrieve log data and gather evidence of compliance manually—an inconvenient and time-sucking task.
SIEM Best Practices
- Set Parameters
Before you dive in, determine the nature of your IT environment. The scope of your SIEM implementation should be built on a solid foundation of policy-based rules with defining activities and historical records. Your SIEM software should monitor these parameters. The policy-based rules act as a template—compare that to external compliance requirements to determine your organization’s dashboard and reporting.
- Tweak Correlation Rules As Needed
SIEM software comes pre-configured out of the box, with its own set of correlation rules. Your organization’s security professionals can go in with their internal knowledge and fine-tune the software to fit your needs. You can set the system to enable all rules by default, which gives you a front-row seat to observe the behavior of the software.
- Chart Specific Compliance Requirements
Feature-rich SIEM software helps organizations fulfill their compliance requirements. Taking the necessary steps to outline these prerequisites ensures you’ll get the most out of your SIEM.
- Deploy Properly
If your SIEM tool isn’t appropriately deployed, it won’t work as it should. Ensure you have the needed equipment, infrastructure, and set up to support your SIEM product. Prepare in advance to make sure deployment is as seamless and smooth as possible.
- Conduct Tests
Before implementing your SIEM, it is pertinent to conduct tests and simulations of attacks. This will allow you to readjust your SIEM configuration as necessary. Assessing how a SIEM tool reacts to simulated attacks is a great way to prepare it for the real thing—testing will ensure that the software runs according to your metrics and sends security alerts properly.
- Cover Network Vulnerabilities
All network boundaries, including wireless access points, firewalls, and routers, should be defended by SIEM. Ensure that these vulnerable entryways are monitored at all times.
- Be The Gatekeeper to Critical Resources
Bad actors are always on the hunt for weak spots in your data security. A robust SIEM tool monitors access and various elements of your critical resources, flagging a host of questionable activities. This includes unusual system behavior, system failure, and remote login attempts.
- Engage In Efficient Data Collection
Anyone who collects data knows that it’s a task that can quickly become overwhelming. Collect enough data to paint a comprehensive picture of the network, but be careful not to get bogged down in the sheer volume of information. Some vital data to log includes (but is not limited to):
- Changes to user privileges
- Authorization successes and failures
- Opt-ins, such as terms and conditions
- Application errors
- Performance issues
- Administrative privilege actions
- Develop a Response Plan
Ensure that your organization has a protocol in place for how it will react following a SIEM security alert. An incident response plan will allow quick and efficient resolutions to threats and attacks.
- Continually Review Your SIEM Configuration
Cybercriminals are constantly increasing the audacity of their attacks; they will always create more advanced attack methods to out-smart security measures. Therefore, to protect your organization from its increasingly complex attacks, you have to update, refine, and improve your security solutions frequently to protect your organization from its increasingly complex attacks.
Why is Splunk Enterprise Security the best for Enterprise?
For enterprises that need trustworthy, customizable SIEM to predict and prevent IT and security incidents, Splunk is an all-in-one platform. Powered by analytics-driven security, Splunk will elevate your log management and analytics and allow your company to find, analyze, and respond to data quickly in real-time. Protecting your enterprise by collecting, aggregating, and prioritizing threat intelligence across all systems, Splunk empowers companies to act efficiently and strategically with one streamlined security stack.
Splunk’s suite of features allows you to:
- First, optimize security operations with faster response times.
- Improve security posture and visibility with machine data from the cloud and on-premise sources.
- Third, enhance investigation capabilities with behavior analytics, detected anomalies, and threats.
- Finally, make more informed decisions by leveraging threat intelligence.
Enterprises are constantly inundated with modern security threats. They need to be protected by a SIEM solution as responsive and comprehensive as Splunk to combat these. With Splunk, your security team can more quickly detect, respond and disrupt internal and external attacks. Your responsibility is to safeguard your business—Splunk has you and your enterprise covered.
