SIEM, SOC & Threat Hunting
Choose The Best Preventative Security Measures
Your infrastructure creates a lot of logs. Hidden inside these logs can be evidence of wrongdoing – be it external criminals or employees planning or committing fraud. How do you extract evidence of illegal behavior when it’s buried and concealed within millions, if not billions of records of perfectly legitimate business activity?
There are a number of ways to sift through data to ascertain security exposure: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Operations Centre (SOC) and Threat Hunting are all variations of the same concept. That is, a process for storing logs and other forensic evidence, and ignoring the good to investigate only the bad. Knowing which one is right depending on how your evidence is generated and what your tolerance level for breaches is.
A SIEM is mostly an automated log solution with out-of-the-box and customizable correlation rules. If out of the box, the rules don’t consider your risks, the value of your assets and how your business processes interact with your technology. However, it can make some good assumptions about detected hacking activity.
A SIEM, for example, can detect when an account has had multiple failed log-ins, followed by a successful login. It can then follow the activity of the user after the login is ready for a security analyst to determine whether someone forgot his or her password or the account was ‘brute forced’.
However, a SOC goes further to provide real time response to events. Rather than logging and correlating all activity after successful login, the SOC operator can determine the most reasonable course of action: Call the employee? Lock the account or watch the account activity in real time?
Threat Hunting uses the same infrastructure but takes it further again. After the SIEM has missed a relevant event or a SOC operator has dismissed an event as benign, threat hunting looks for patterns of behaviors that may indicate a compromise. Was an admin account created through a command prompt? That’s not common. Is a computer visiting a blank website every 60 seconds? That’s more likely a remote access Trojan phoning home than a user with precise timing
Ask an Expert for Help
The forensic review of security information, whether through a SIEM, SOC or threat hunt, provides valuable intelligence on how well your preventative security controls are coping with contemporary threat landscapes. If you feel you aren’t getting the most out of your current preventative security controls, contact DataSecure to help you deliver the appropriate level of information security assurance.