Role of SIEM and Real Time Events Detection
Organizations and reputable enterprises need to proactively monitor their networks to keep up to date from suspicious activities in real time and observe the damages cause to their data by sophisticated cyber-attacks. They are also in continuous search for improving the investigations of security incidents happening to them and anomaly detection for those.
Owners and management of organizations are looking for a 360 degree view of their IT assets and a whole of their user activities. To monitor these all effectively, security information and event management (SIEM) is available that utilizes software and provide analysis of devices on a network on real-time basis. All the devices that are part of the network like anti-virus, firewalls and servers generate event logs of the whole functions they perform. These events logs are then delivered to SIEM and analysed there on detail and result is provided in a graphical form for taking appropriate decisions.
How and Why?
All the Managed SIEM of whatever type, are common in their functions of gathering events and allowing the management to take a particular decision. All the configured devices generate event logs that are all gathered by Security Information and Event Management system and send them to a collector. Collectors are usually running on a virtual machine and locating inside the host network.
Further the logs are all collected by the Security Information and Event Management system for categorizing properly into event types. Exploit attempts, malware activities, Failed Logons and Successful Logons to name a few are the categories of event types that are carried out by the system. Later, all of these event types are run against specific rule-sets for determining any illegitimate traffic so that a specific alert can be created for triggering any rule.
How SIEM Generate Incidents:
In case of successful and failed logons to a system, if a user type wrong password let’s say 25 times in a given time of 10 minutes. It may create a low-priority suspicious incident because it is also possible that the user may forget his new password. While in case of 100 tries of failed logons that are follow by one successful login in a given time might result in generating a high severity incident and might indicate a brute-force attack of having successful in nature.
Benefits of SIEM:
Security Information and Event Management system enable a centralized analysis of all the activities which are then reported for security events. Such type of analysis either detects the attacks or attempts to stop those. Following are some benefits of the system.
Handling Security Breaches:
The system offers clear processes in detail for handling and dealing with problems of security breaches. Organizational IT staff can produce a set of rapid responses to all of the security breach attempts with the help of this system.
Optimized Business Process:
The system can provide a stunning overview of all the related business processes. Cost saving is possible using SIEM system as well, because an overview of the business assets that are under use is also provided.
Effective Business Reporting:
Asset identification and Authentication and access information are two different categories of business reporting that are both available in SIEM solutions. Asset identification simply deals with grouping servers by operating systems. While the second category, authentication and access information deal with identification of unusual activities on the network.
Managed SIEM is an evolutionary step in protecting the cyber security that allows the management to handle all the security breaches in an advanced way. It also allows the management to improve the activities analysis and efficient tracking of events and alternatively improving staff productivity on organizational level.
