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ENTERPRISE SECURITY OPERATIONS AND THREAT MANAGEMENT THROUGH SIEM INTEGRATION

Leverage the Power of Advanced Automation and Precise Orchestration

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Cyber threats just aren’t what they used to be. At some point and time, it was enough to fire up a generic antivirus program and forget all about the dangers on the internet.

But those days are long gone.

Analysis of modern threats shows that breaches in security are not only guaranteed to occur, but that they’re also bound to happen without an enterprise being aware of their existence. Naturally, this is cause for great concern among all industries.

Thus, the concept of “assumed breach” was born. The idea is that businesses accept that data breaches are largely unavoidable. Instead, the game plan shifts from protecting against any and all breaches – which is unfeasible and nearly impossible – to mitigating the damage and risks that stems from these breaches.

The 2017 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report gave us sobering statistics related to cybersecurity breaches that occurred worldwide. These were gathered from 1,900 confirmed breaches and 42,000 reported security incidents.

Financial services firms are at the top of the charts with confirmed security breaches, with the healthcare industry closely following. – Verizon

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SOME KEY STATISTICS INCLUDE:

• 73% of the breaches were financially motivated

• VERIS, Verizon’s incident database, found that 75% of the breaches were conducted by outsiders, with 51% of them tied to organized crime

• Cyber espionage is the most common type of incident by a large margin in the manufacturing industry, typically from competitors or nation-states trying to steal intellectual property

• Financial services firms are at the top of the charts for confirmed security breaches, with the healthcare industry closely following

The Verizon report emphasizes that these threats aren’t slowing down in the near future. They’ll increase with intensity and complexity in the years to come, which begs the question: what are enterprises supposed to do? What tools can they leverage to deal with the looming threats that are guaranteed to affect their businesses?

THE INTRODUCTION OF SIEMSecurity information event management (SIEM) is the pillar upon which modern threat analysis stands. It entails the gathering and analysis of information from network and security devices. Furthermore, it considers the external threat data as well as current database application logs. In short, it provides a bird’s-eye view of threat analysis.

Despite the consolidation of data that SIEM offers, the bottleneck in the process remains the same: people. Security teams are comprised of people that are simply incapable of scaling with the rapid onset of cybersecurity threats.

Having a manual system of cross-checking threat analysis and comparing data slows down your defense capabilities significantly, and it can even create exploitable gaps in your security.

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You can use a platform that automates and orchestrates all critical functions to parse the data in an effective, manageable manner.

More specifically, the issue arises with the sheer amount of data that specialists receive. Segmentation of security information from different areas means that companies require a tremendous amount of manpower and expertise to parse the information in a digestible (and useable) manner.

Let’s say you’ve got SIEM technology in place for your endpoint solutions using software A. You’re getting information on all relevant security facets. It can sometimes be too much, but your security team is managing the influx of data well enough. However, you’ve also got software B with SIEM technology running on your network-level protection. This data is even richer than that of software A, and now your team is getting spread thin in their attempts to make sense of it all.

Now imagine you’ve got other SIEM systems in place from software C, D, E, and F in areas such as malware detection systems, access and identity solutions, and more. Suddenly, you realize that you’re not being helped at all. You’re being drowned in far too much information for any team of people to properly analyze.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. You can use a platform that automates and orchestrates all critical functions to parse the data in an effective, manageable manner. You can attain a single view of all data flow that can help you pinpoint exactly what needs to be done, and where.

There are three vital factors that your platform must cover in order to truly assist your business.

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SECURITY INCIDENT RESPONSEWhen security incidents happen, your security sensors are the first to send out alerts. These alerts must be sorted and prioritized by a team of people, which is both extremely tedious and time-consuming. In essence, security responders adopt the role of “cyber detectives,” in that they must manually search for clues and correlations between the incoming SIEM data streams.

The security responders must ask themselves questions such as:

• What risks are tied to these assets?

• How vulnerable are they?

• Have we seen this before in a similar context? Or is this a brand new threat?

• Is this coming from internal or external sources?

• What’s the immediate course of action?

There are many questions to be asked. The simplest answer? Automate the processes entirely. With the proper security operations solution, you can prioritize threats based on specific enterprise-defined rules. You can feasibly use automation software to perform accurate correlations for you, at a pace that is much quicker than any single person or team.

With an automated system in place, your security team can tackle the issues far more effectively. They can utilize the data gathered from SIEM data streams to create a visual grid, showing them exactly what needs attention. Additionally, you can optimize these flowcharts to prioritize threats based on company policies or particular vulnerabilities.

Other than that, the automated security operations solution can automatically compartmentalize necessary information to each relevant department. You effectively orchestrate operations by reducing information overload and streamlining communications processes as a whole.

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THREAT INTELLIGENCESecurity responders typically shoulder the burden of manually checking URLs for malicious activity, as well as file hashes. With the right security operations solution, your threat intelligence becomes ever-evolving.

Any unknown cyber threat can be cross-checked with various enrichment providers, thereby providing necessary information on the threat. It’s also important to build and maintain a database of threats. After all, who’s to say that a threat should only strike once?

Having a detailed repository of information about the threats can lead to a considerable decrease in the time it takes deal with the issue, should it arise again. Your threat intelligence should link back to SIEM data feeds and actively seek to create and make note of correlations.

VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENTRegardless of how large an organization is, it’s more than likely that they still utilize vulnerable and exploitable methods of communication (such as

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emails and spreadsheets). The tracking and reporting of these vulnerabilities is usually only as accurate as the most recently completed scan.

But in the end, it’s not enough to simply point out the vulnerabilities. Your security operations solution must develop strategies for remediation of the threats. This requires a fundamental understanding of operations, company policies, change management, and other business-critical functions. This is imperative to the creation of an effective escalation chain that can categorize severity. It must fit seamlessly and integrate with the needs of each individual company.

Using the data acquired from SIEM streams and vulnerability scans, security responders can have a better idea of how to deal with the threats. Much like security incident response protocols, each remediation team should be assigned with specialized tasks for efficiency and effectiveness.

Even with all of that, it’s not enough to properly protect a business. Your security operations solution must scan all vulnerabilities after they’ve been addressed to ensure that the job was done correctly. And in certain cases, automation can take over orchestration completely. For some simpler threats, it’s possible to complete remediation efforts end-to-end without ever touching a device in the first place.

ENHANCED ENTERPRISE SECURITY WITH QOS CONSULTINGAt QOS Consulting, we’ve got the tools and the know-how to establish a security operations solution that works for you. Additionally, we can spread your security architecture and protocols wherever they need to go with the power of SD-WAN. To find out more about how SD-WAN can help you, take a look at our free whitepaper.

A comprehensive enterprise security solution goes hand-in-hand with orchestration and automation. With the flexibility of working with any SIEM-integrated branded solution, you can attain an ever-evolving security platform that can streamline cyber defense processes.

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And that’s far from all it can do. It also stops your employees from draining their time working on tedious issues that can be effectively automated. That translates into more time spent doing what matters for the business, so that you can continue to grow as fast as you can.

If you’d like more information on the next generation of enterprise security, feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to have a chat.

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