Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)

Table of Contents

What is SIEM?
How Do SIEM Security Solutions Work?
Security Operations Center SIEM Goals
SIEM Software vs. Managed SIEM
Securing Better, Together
Related Resources

What is SIEM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) is a cybersecurity software that combines:

• Security Information Management (SIM): Retrieves and analyzes log data to organize into reports
• Security Event Management (SEM): Analyzes event and log data in real time to provide event correlation, threat monitoring, and incident response

By combining these capabilities, SIEM solutions provide IT and security teams with holistic visibility of the network in real time. Using correlation rules and statistical techniques to convert raw log data and events, SIEM solutions provide actionable information to fight against security threats. Beyond identifying security incidents, these tools are used to manage incident response and generate reports for compliance.

How Do SIEM Security Solutions Work?

In today’s world it is unlikely to find a businesses with one security solution. The sprawl of security and IT solutions used to manage and protect systems and infrastructure, and the deluge of alerts they create have made SIEM security solutions a necessity.

Popular and widely available SIEM solutions tout extensive integrations, allowing organizations to tie together disparate solutions and provide central management through a single pane of glass. By collecting and normalizing data for all of these solutions, they create efficient and secure data access that can be mapped to an organization’s operational needs.

Rather than analysts managing multiple tools to identify security events, SIEMs ease the accessing and searching across raw and parsed data for threat investigation and compliance. Additionally, many SIEM vendors give the ability to map security and IT operations to existing frameworks such as NIST and MITRE ATT&CK.

In addition to these benefits, next-gen SIEM platforms work to deliver comprehensive security analytics to aid in rapid detection, response, and mitigation of threats by layering in:

• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA): Applying UEBA helps reveal insider threats by detecting suspicious activity such as repeated login attempts or unauthorized permission changes. Organizations can also use UEBA to discover compromised accounts using threat intelligence to analyze network traffic.
• Network Traffic Analysis (NTA): NTA provides the capability for organizations to intercept, record, and analyze network traffic communication patterns for threat detection and to respond to security threats.
• Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR): SOAR works to increase operational efficiency and collaboration through three capabilities: threat and vulnerability management, security incident response, and security operation automation.
• Endpoint Monitoring: Endpoint monitoring within SIEM security provides collection, aggregation and analysis of endpoint behaviors across an environment. With this data and an established baseline, organizations can identify signs of malicious activity such as registry and file changes.
• Threat Intelligence: Layering in threat intelligence into tool capabilities provides additional threat context, which can help reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and create an easier incident investigation process.

Security Operations Center SIEM Goals

While individual solutions vary in their capabilities, there are general goals that every security operations center (SOC) should have when using the tools to reduce the organization’s risk:

• Increase Visibility: SIEM solutions eliminate blind spots by displaying data through a single pane of glass. This allows SOCs to see event details across systems/domains to achieve the goal of accelerating threat investigation and incident response processes.
• Speed MTTD: With embedded threat intelligence and greater visibility, SOC analysts should be able to achieve the goals of detecting threats earlier in the threat lifecycle, and parsing out difficult-to-detect advanced threats.
• Decrease Incident Response Time: One of the main benefits of a SIEM solution is the efficiency it provides by streamlining all IT assets on the network in the form of event logs into a single interface. Using the insights for better decisioning, SOCs should have a goal of responding more quickly to threats to reduce the impact and damage to the organization.

SIEM Software vs. Managed SIEM

SIEM solutions can either reside on-premise or in the cloud and be managed by the organization. However some organizations may choose to outsource management as they find it too difficult to manage and requires specialized training to use effectively.

Managed SIEM is an alternative to an on-premise deployment where a third-party service provider is contracted to host the application on their servers and monitor the organization’s network for potential security threats. This option may be appealing for companies that need to deploy SIEM solutions faster, need to reduce to setup and training costs, or for those who do not have internal cyber security experts.

Securing Better, Together

Cyborg Security partners with today’s leading SIEM vendors including Splunk, Elastic, MicroFocus ArcSight, and Sumo Logic to ensure the proactive threat hunting resources of the Cyborg HUNTER Platform are at the center of organizations’ security operations for repeatable hunts that detect even the most advanced adversaries’ actions.

Related Resources

• Cyborg Security + Elastic Deliver Advanced Threat Hunting Content
• Cyborg Security Splunk App—Threat Feed, Hunt & Detections
• Network Content and You: Why Logs Matter in the Age of TLS/SSL