How to Leverage Your SIEM Investment?

How to Leverage Your SIEM Investment?

In the era of digital data, corporate giants feel a pressing need to defend the data from external security threats, unauthorized access, or unsolicited cyber-attacks. With the advancement in the usage of web technology structured by social engineering, cybercriminals can easily engineer cyber attacks like intellectual property theft, illegal database entry (modification or deletion), complete site hacks, or leak of proprietary information. Can the business giants to secure these kinds of cyber charges, rely on customary security solutions like firewalls and antiviruses?

Thereby, the requirement is for a service that imparts visibility and monitoring in the activities across multiple diversified systems in the organizational network mesh- internal software applications, configured mobile devices, platforms, and IT intranet used in the organization, capable of catching any attempt of cyber security red-handed. The tailored solution to fit this need is SIEM — a Cyber Security tool.

Introduction to SIEM

SIEM (Security Information and event management) is an essential cyber security solution catering to providing collection and analysis for event log management systems dedicated to security defending by sensing targeted cyber-attacks or data breaches. It incorporates both Security Information Management (SIM) and Security Event Management (SEM) as one security management system.

SIEM-as-a-Service

SIEM, first, collects purposeful logged information from diverse IT platforms, devices, applications, and individual security applications (like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, etc.) and becomes a centralized event log manager having consolidated information to conduct any investigation.
Secondly, it analyses this consolidated data to identify any suspected divergence from the normal and takes action on the malicious activity based on the customized defined rules.

Further, SIEM offers features to send emails on any alert using rules, can generate reports to be sent to auditors,

What Telemetries must be Collected

Telemetry is a recording of relevant event data from the remote system to be sent for analysis and investigation. SIEM solution if it has to be productive it needs to gather all telemetries from all kinds of IT applications. Having said that an effective SIEM should be able to configure and integrate with any kind of deployed solution — On-Premise or Cloud-based.

Security information must be gathering events like network traffic flow patterns, suspicious traffic flow, email attachments metadata, login activity of users, executed commands on the intranet, files created/modified/accessed, registry modifications, or any of the other activities in the cloud workload space.

1. Firewall:  The firewall gathers and sends different sets of telemetry like threat prevention logs (details of the threats for the destination port), file type identifications logs (types of files blocked or allowed based on configuration rules), URL reports (statistics of the categorized URL), application reports (reports of the applications known by the port and found from the traffic logs)
2. Network security device logs: Network device logs are presented in the form of real-time dashboards having multiple details like router login details, configuration changes, denied connections, and security threats categorized by malicious users.
3. AD Server:  AD is a centralized repository for organizations’ authentication data and a popular target for malicious attacks that is a centralized repository containing user account and security information. Thereby SIEM needs to gather telemetry logs to magnify cases of unauthorized access from authentication events, privilege anomalies from suspicious activities, leaked credentials, and insider threats from its employees.
4. Critical Servers and Endpoint Application Telemetry:  Endpoint security solutions analyze protection tool logs from endpoint applications like organization workstations, PCs, laptops, servers, mobile devices, and IOT/cloud workloads. Every telemetry in these endpoints must be giving any incident data linked to threat detection, and suspicious activity validation. Further, there are some critical protection events for the production servers and business applications that are necessary to be notified as critical alerts or sent to specified recipients as email notifications.

What Information must be Normalized?

When we are looking at getting extensive information from every digital corner of a vast organization in every structural depth then having infinite information lying needs to be mined and then normalized. In any digital ecosystem, various devices are connected at the same time. These devices relay different firewall log records. For example – one device might refer to it as a Source IP log and the other as a Subject IP log and if the device is a router, then it will register just a user IT logs. However, our device can normalize these different terminologies and process information as one.

The idea of having good normalization rules on different end-points is to get the information required for the effective working of SIEM so it correlates efficiently to immediately understand anything that is out of the norm and notifies through an email or any relevant alert.

What External Context must be taken into Consideration while Evaluating SIEM Solutions?

Easy Deployment: Any organization would require the SIEM solutions they choose to be easily deployable, so that solution does not require a large team of technical engineers just finding ways to station the solution on the production servers.

Support Integration of all Devices: The SIEM solution should be largely scalable to support all the systems, networks, and devices with different configurations in the organization. The integration of the desired solution to any of these systems or devices should be easily achievable without any enhanced complexity.

Threat Intelligence Feed Usage: The requirement demands a solution that can quickly acquire an intelligence streaming feed of any kind of threat or problem.

Correlate Security Incidents: Consideration should be for the solution that should be swiftly as well as efficiently be able to correlate security incidents.

Log Storage: The SIEM solution should be able to store different kinds of logs from different end-points, be able to analyze them, and take corrective actions.

Reporting & Dashboard Options: Additionally, the system should be able to give a reporting dashboard that is customizable and has the right formatting for any kind of requirements like audits, checks, or security reports.

Ensuring you have the Right Set of SIEM Detection Rules

The rules run with a defined frequency and gather the search on the criteria for the events. A rule should be effectively able to capture the anomaly and bring it to the table.

Now defined on the rule type action can be taken or an alert can be generated when one or more documents match the rule’s query. Further, there can also be Machine Learning rules or Threshold rules that alert the user when specified values based on a certain configuration match the threshold value.

Apart from this, there could be rules based on the event correlation where an alert is created when results match any event query.

For defining or configuring any rule and before activating any rule whether standard or custom the first thing is to set the scope of the rule. Further, the severity of the alert can be defined based on the criticality of the information. Based on the understanding a security professional can work on the rule schedule and decide the frequency of the run.

How can the SharkStriker SIEM Solution Help You?

Shark Striker is among the competitive brands for SIEM solutions. They offer a managed plan that offers SIEM deployment and configuration in the organizational network. The Managed SIEM service is a tailored and customized solution to meet the individual organization starting from gathering requirements to evaluating and then defining a plan of action. Based on the analysis, they offer a managed SIEM solution service plan to ensure a scalable and cutting edge modern SIEM

Along with the managed services and support on deployment Shark Striker also helps in real-time monitoring, analysis, and putting actionable alerts to facilitate rapid actions. The Managed service further provides a team of security operations experts that will be security vendors as the additional armed team in addition to the organization’s team. The team provides consultation on the deep security operations to the organizational client giving the required understanding of the given environment and helping pick the right strategy, course of action, and scope for the protection of the network.

Further, SharkStriker is empowered by a trailblazing SOC (Security Operations Centre) team that has advanced class security technology to assist them and has certified experts in the trending security learning.

Last but not least the most asked question is the pricing for the SIEM managed services - SharkStriker prides itself in putting the prices transparently and with accountability and has several packages for the customized needs of the organizations.

To conclude

With evolved security protocols and learning, what any client would like to see is whether the service can deliver and implement the latest security protocols so that the organization can get even the most demanding or strict security agreements met as per the security industry standards. With the business being global the product service needs to ensure that they need to comply and implement the security standards which belong to any part of the world whether it is GDPR or ISO27001 to name a few.

Further, the SIEM solution needs to be always relevant to the organizational size and should be able to tailor its uniqueness to its given solution. In the future, the SIEM solutions continue to evolve and become more cutting-edge to protect any given vulnerability or risk by applying any latest advancements in the technology, saving more time, giving the space-age protection and state-of-the-art service at a competitive price.