How to perform incident detection and examination with SIEM tools?
I want to start with the step before the incident detection and response, Breach. A security breach, also known as a data breach, is when sensitive, protected, or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, or used by an unauthorized individual or a group. This data can be stolen, held for ransom, or even destroyed.
Incident detection and response, also known as attack/threat detection and response, is the process of finding intruders who have breached into a companies network or computer setups. By examining how attackers compromise systems and move around the network, Investigators can be better equipped to detect and stop attacks before stolen valuable data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a software solution that aggregates and analyzes activity from many different resources across your entire IT infrastructure. SIEM collects security data from network devices, servers, domain controllers. SIEM stores, normalizes, aggregates, and applies analytics to that data to discover trends, detect threats, and enable organizations to investigate any alerts. SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) delivers advanced detection, analytics, and response. SIEM tool combines SIM (Security Information Management) and SEM (Security Event Management) to offer real-time analysis of security alarms generated by applications and network devices. SIEM tool scans events for sub-second searches to identify and evaluate sophisticated threats utilizing global intelligence. Data analysis, event correlation, aggregation, reporting, and log management help security teams understand and follow the IT environment’s actions.
SEIM can perform the following functions:
- Basic security monitoring
- Advanced threat detection
- Forensics & incident response
- Log collection
- Normalization
- Notifications and alerts
- Security incident detection
- Threat response workflow
- Threat detection
- Investigation
- Time to respond
Some of the famous tools:
- Splunk: Splunk is a full on-prem SIEM solution that Gartner rates as a leader in the space. Splunk supports security monitoring and can provide advanced threat detection capabilities.
- IBM QRadar: QRadar is another popular SIEM that you can deploy as a hardware appliance, a virtual appliance, or a software appliance, depending on your organization’s needs and capacity.
Log management is a complicated aspect of SIEM, consisting of three major components:
- Data aggregation: bringing together massive volumes of data from several applications and databases in a single location.
- Data normalization: SIEM enables the comparison, correlation, and analysis of all heterogeneous data.
- Data analysis/correlation of security events: Identifying potential indicators of a data breach, threat, attack, or vulnerability.
Additionally, SIEM enables compliance and alarm reporting. It allows companies to streamline compliance reporting by utilizing data dashboards to store and organize event data and monitor privileged user access. This is critical since most industrial and governmental laws (including HIPAA) impose some level of log compilation and standardization and reporting requirements.
Limitation: SIEM applications provide limited contextual information about their native events, and SIEMs are known for their blind spot on unstructured data and emails.
