Let’s say you recently acquired a security information and event Management (SIEM) solution and now have a new layer of defense in the war against cybercriminals. Check! You’re done right? Not even close. The reality is there is still a LOT more work to do. So what comes next?
Gaining Quick Time to Value from Your Deployment
During the sales process, a strategic security partner should have guided you through what the onboarding process would look like, your options for a quick and easy deployment, and how to get the most value out of your investment. They need to set up reasonable expectations before the onboarding process begins, and you should have a clear understanding that there is more work ahead once you purchase a SIEM.
Most organizations can’t implement and maintain a new security platform all alone. That’s why professional services (PS) are so important to get the new system up and running successfully. Useful PS consultants help you strategize the most important logs to ingest into the SIEM first, while also teaching your employees how to effectively do that work in the future.
Once the logs are in place, there is still more work to be done. Logs tend to be chatty and need to be taught to only pass the information that the system needs, so that analysts can make quick and accurate decisions or to fit into automated rule sets.
Finding ways to reduce noise and manual tasks is critical for the efficiency of your operations (and the sanity of your analysts). To assist our clients, LogRhythm takes a customer-first approach by providing Analytic Co-Pilot services and Technical Account Managers (TAM) services. Think of these PS options as acquiring a navigator in the process and a battle engineer to ensure you get the best out of your equipment. Our services help organizations:
- Operate efficiently to collect a variety of log sources
- Optimize performance with our vast tuning and configuration knowledge base
- Design use cases based on specific business needs
- Assess deployment health and security posture to track goals and improve maturity
As you continue to plan your security operations, it’s important to assess your troops for their readiness when combating cyberattacks. Do you have enough folks to cover the business around the clock? If not, there are force multipliers out there that can help, such as managed security service providers (MSSPs). The advantages are legion here. A quality MSSP will understand your system and incident process and stand watch while your team focuses on other priorities.
Continually Assessing and Maturing Your Operations
Security is a journey of continuous improvement. It’s critical to assess and mature your operations to refine your people, processes, and technology over time. According to LogRhythm’s Security Operations Maturity Model, to get to a Level 4 maturity state — where you have full visibility and defense against even the most extreme threats — your journey does not end with SIEM.
Streamlining User-Based Detection and Response
In cybersecurity, like all battlegrounds, a good field commander must be aware of the battle happening within. The folks within your business and your technology are constantly under attack and can be compromised at any point. You need an early warning system that can identify anomalous behavior and user-based threats.
A user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) solution adds an extra layer of security monitoring alongside your SIEM. By using machine learning, this intel system tracks behavioral changes in user data of your team and the technology that is attached to your network. Once there is a pattern established of what is considered normal, any deviations from that pattern will alert you when there is a new threat entering into your arena.
By leveraging this capability, you can more easily discover internal malicious threats or compromised users before damaging breaches occur. To see an example of how SIEM and UEBA can double down your protection, check out this demo of an analyst detecting phishing and compromised account attacks.
Defending Against Advanced Network Attacks
Organizations rely on logs and agent-based data for security operations, but to defend against the most persistent and pervasive attacks that evade perimeter tools, security teams need a more comprehensive solution. With digital transformation that includes artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), operational technology (OT), remote/hybrid workplace, and cloud adoption, the amount of data that needs to be analyzed has increased exponentially. A network detection and response tool provides visibility to unsupported devices that do not have agents or log source onboarding abilities by monitoring and analyzing the massive amount of network traffic by utilizing artificial intelligence such as machine learning to surface the most critical threats.
SIEM and NDR work together to provide comprehensive visibility and response through a single pane of glass. By combining all suspicious network- and system-level data, the combination of SIEM and NDR can help organizations streamline and accelerate by presenting suspicious event, network, and log data into compact and comprehensive security alerts and automated responses. By integrating these solutions, your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) decreases and you can defend against advanced attacks with confidence.
Assess, Test, Repeat
With the right people, tools, and processes in place you will be better prepared for any cyber battle, but you are never going to be “100% secure.” After a SIEM purchase and beyond, you must constantly assess your security readiness. Tune the message traffic from logs so that you only focus on the details that are important to you and your business.
Test your readiness regularly to ensure that you won’t miss a new attack vector that is occurring and train your folks and systems to assure that they are aware of the changing landscapes on the cyber warfare front. To help address trending cyberthreats, LogRhythm posts a weekly video on our Security Spotlight webpage that covers how to implement or improve detection rules against a variety of attacks.
Whether you are in the beginning stages of your security journey or looking for more advanced solutions to improve detection and response, LogRhythm is here to answer any questions you may have along the way. Schedule a brief consultation to learn how we can address your needs.