SIEM and Threat Intelligence: Enhancing Detection And Response Capabilities

Cyberthreats are growing in both frequency and severity, and the amount of data that security professionals must attend to is enormous.

With more threats comes more data on unusual or suspicious activity, access logs, and security incident alerts. Sifting through all of this data is time-consuming and resource-intensive.

To address this, many organizations are turning to Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) solutions and integrated threat intelligence.

These solutions aggregate and analyze unusual activity that may point to attacks. They assist with prioritization and incident responses, enabling security teams to solve the most urgent problems more quickly.

The Role Of The SIEM

If your organization is struggling to stay on top of the massive volumes of security alerts that come in every day, you may need something to sift through the noise for you.

Although it’s important to be aware of everything that’s going on in your environment, there are benefits to a solution that can sort alert data based on type and priority.

SIEM solutions collect raw security data from multiple sources and analyze it. These solutions are then able to streamline your processes and decrease the number of alerts that you must respond to, creating instead groups of alerts.

These groups mean you will only need to address one notification about what could be a spat of similar security incidents.

There are a few useful functions of the SIEM:

• Data collection. When there is an event or unusual activity detected around your application or network, the SIEM logs it and alerts security teams. However, the SIEM will group very similar data points to better show patterns and reduce noise.
• Eliminate clutter. Aggregation will make it easier for you to address high-priority alerts, and responding quickly means you are less likely to suffer a damaging attack. You and your security team can define rules for security incidents so that the SIEM will be able to pinpoint unusual behavior. SIEMs also come with defaults, so you aren’t building all of your rules from scratch.
• Compliance assistance. SIEM benefits your organization’s security, but it is also useful for things like PCI DSS compliance and other security standards. Since you could be penalized following a successful attack, fast threat detection and strong response capabilities are important to your organization’s success.

Essential for centralizing visibility and cutting down on alert volumes, SIEM is a highly effective tool for improving threat detection and your organization’s response.

When there is a sea of data, it can be very difficult to determine what is important and what is noise or low-priority.

How Threat Intelligence Improves Detection

Without knowing what you’re looking at, though, all the data aggregation in the world can’t help you make optimal decisions. To help you more quickly identify attack precursors and malicious activity patterns, consider adopting SIEM solutions that are integrated with threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence is the collection and interpretation of data that helps you understand your attackers. By analyzing attacker behavior, threat intelligence can determine the attacker’s capabilities and strategies. In many cases, threat intelligence can tease out the attacker’s motive.

Having this information means you can effectively prioritize potential threats and respond to the highest-risk activity. SIEM may indicate that there are several looming threats, but threat intelligence can narrow that further by indicating which attack would have the greatest impact on your organization.

With all of this information, your security teams can effectively prioritize issues and protect your applications and network. Combining threat intelligence and SIEM security data enables the security team to find and address security threats far more quickly and appropriately than manual effort.

Maximizing the Value of the SIEM and Threat Intelligence

To get the most out of SIEM, make sure you choose a solution that is fully integrated with threat intelligence. The integration combines the strengths of each, ensuring that you receive the most accurate and informative reports from SIEM.

Some fine-tuning will be required. You should select security tools with threat intelligence integration, and then you will have to configure SIEMs with the right data feeds to optimize threat detection and response.

The appropriate data feeds will depend on your organization and your industry, so make sure you’re choosing the most relevant information to you.

Additional security tools can be useful as well. Application and network security tools that fully integrate with the SIEM you choose can help prevent and mitigate attacks.

While the SIEM is highly effective at threat detection and facilitating your response, other tools like WAF, DDoS protection, and RASP can aid your response. Although your monitoring tools are constantly noting potential threats (and possibly spamming you with notifications and alerts), this raw data alone is not enough to keep you informed.

To get a clearer picture, tools like SIEM and integrated threat intelligence are useful. They can help you parse the data you receive and group similar alerts, which will ultimately save you time and improve your responses to the threats.

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