How an SME can go from vulnerable to fully secure by using SIEM
Introduction
From both financial and compliance standpoints, robust cybersecurity safeguards are of ever-growing importance for every organization, no matter its size or industry. In fact, 60% of the SMEs go bankrupt within six months of a serious attack (IBM). The best way for an SME to achieve the security posture it needs to prevent data breaches and cover compliance is by using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and in the next pages, you will learn exactly how.
Most of our clients are small and mid-sized organizations that must comply with a variety of regulations and standards. But to achieve this level of compliance, they need to maintain the highest level of cybersecurity, sometimes with a small, but most often - without a dedicated security team. Similarly, to many SMEs, our customers find themselves in a state where the need for a reliable all-in-one security tool is identified but the idea of actually getting one is considered close to impossible due to lack of resources.
The industry trend
Not only have cybercriminals increased the frequency of their attacks, but they have begun to consistently focus on smaller and smaller businesses, as these are considered easier targets. In fact, organizations with up to 250 employees have the highest targeted malicious email rate and the average cost of a data breach in companies with less than 500 employees has reached $2.35 million (IBM). The facts speak for themselves - reliable cybersecurity is compulsory for all organizations and SMEs make no exception.
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has also had a huge impact on the way companies do business, especially the smaller ones. A lot of new digital activities were established way too soon - plenty of employees are working from home and using VPN, there is an increased demand for video conferencing, cloud applications, and network resources. Speaking in numbers, the amount of cyberattacks has increased five-fold after COVID-19, as the pandemic brought new opportunities to cybercriminals. At this rate, cybersecurity threats are estimated to cost the world $6 trillion by the end of the year.
And since remote working became “the new normal”, it has become a growing gateway to new forms of data theft and as a result, companies face a significantly increased risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches. According to a Gartner survey, 95% of CIOs expect cybersecurity threats to get worse due to the pandemic and the statistics support their concerns.
For a long time, it has been widely considered that SIEM is not a good fit for mid-market organizations – the cost, complexity to set up and manage, made SIEM a category suitable only for corporations with big security teams and large budgets. This may have been true years ago but not today, where next-gen SIEMs are becoming more flexible and easier to get value out of, suiting the needs of SMEs.
According to Gartner, SIEMs are going to the mid-market because the problems that SIEM solves are problems that modern SMEs face as well. Value-conscious buyers will not just pour money into a solution they do not fully understand and will not be willing to spend years on a single security project. Therefore, there are SIEM vendors adapting to the needs of the new niche - the mid-sized organizations.
Modern SIEM systems can provide value and still be affordable to each organization, no matter their size. Experts from Security Intelligence explain that the older SIEM pricing models (based on fluctuating metrics like data volume) often end up making the product more expensive than it needs to be. But, today, there are more and more vendors that charge based on predictable metrics like the number of active users, for example. Such pricing models are a great fit for SMEs as they happen to be a lot more scalable and predictable.
And this does not mean that the modern SIEM systems are cheap, it means that they are built with flexibility in mind. If you are an organization of 100 employees and just a couple of systems in place, you would be paying a lot less than a corporation with thousands of people generating hundreds of logs per minute. But still, you would be able to maintain the same high level of security.?
Furthermore, a pricing model based on the number of employees allows for proper system configurations. You do not have to save on systems to reduce the cost of the tool, you can connect and configure everything, and this will not increase your SIEM bill in any way.
Finally, next-gen SIEMs do not have to be complicated – for example, we have customers where only one or two people are responsible for security monitoring. And they are not even security analysts, but rather general sysadmins. Because of the simplicity of the modern tools, they can manage them, monitor them daily, and handle any alert generated.
How the right next-gen SIEM can help you eliminate all security and regulatory risks?
Let us dive deeper into the benefits of the next-generation SIEM systems. The following chapter explains the reasons why SIEM should be a first-priority point in the CISOs list and by what means it can improve your overall security posture and ease all your compliance efforts. We will be discussing the most important capabilities of the next-gen SIEM systems and how exactly they end up saving you both valuable time and a lot of money.?
Old way: In today’s complicated digital environment, you simply cannot afford to lack control and visibility of your IT environment - the current cyber threats are complex and distributed, acting in concert across multiple systems and using advanced evasion techniques to avoid detection. Without a reliable and comprehensive security tool like a next-gen SIEM system, it is practically impossible to achieve full visibility of all your systems - even if you have only a few.?A SIEM is like a radar that pilots and air traffic controllers use. Without one, your security team is flying blind and you are left vulnerable.?
If you lack visibility, you end up going blind on some or all of your systems and it may take you months to discover an attack. More and more undetected and unaddressed security incidents start to pop up and this will definitely invite additional attackers and become a growing organizational vulnerability over time. It may even end up completely destroying your business.
New way: A next-generation SIEM system is able to ensure 360-visibility of your entire IT landscape. In order to be fully secured, organizations need a SIEM product that includes monitoring capabilities that can be applied in real-time to any data set, regardless of whether it is located on-premises or in the cloud. The most advanced tools on the market can be integrated and can parse data from all types of systems - cloud, on-premise, legacy and custom-built internal applications, document management systems, network appliances, and etc, unleashing plenty of benefits not just for the security team but also for the management and business development people.?
No more blind spots - with a next-gen SIEM system in place you can see everything happening across your entire IT environment into a single easy-to-use dashboard.
Having 360-visibility of all your systems means that you also have the ability to observe and get to know all your infrastructure a lot better so that you can identify where the vulnerabilities are and what you need to straighten the security.?
Moreover, if you can parse data from all systems, then you can also collect, correlate and analyze these data, bringing extra value not just for the information security team but also for the management as they would be able to analyze all processes better and identify ways of improvement and optimization.
Old way: Organizations that do not have a SIEM system in place usually apply manual threat detection with no dedicated security tool or use multiple unintegrated free and open-source software (FOSS).?
In the case where you use manual threat detection, you should have people proactively going through every log, one system at a time, looking for a threat. In that case, you have no centralized log collection and overview, no capacity to do correlation analysis, which is concerning as most attacks happen with multiple actions in different systems.
Some organizations decide to rely on one or more FOSS tools and sometimes even add custom scripts to them. That way they might achieve centralized logging, however, this is pretty much it. FOSS products do not allow rule-setting and correlation, they do not use machine learning, threat intelligence, or behavior analytics.
Hunting threats on your own with no security tool and centralized logging is very ineffective as you cannot respond to the complexity of the attacks. Moreover, the time required to perform manual detection and investigation is astronomical.?If you use FOSS tools, you may achieve some results as centralized logging is in place. However, simply collecting logs in one place is not enough to achieve and maintain a sustainable level of security. We should also discuss the integration of those FOSS tools. The process of connecting and setting everything up is extremely time-consuming and can take weeks or even months. But even then the security system that you end up with would be hardly customizable, very user-unfriendly, and not trustworthy enough.?
New way: An analytics-driven SIEM can adapt to new advanced threats and spot incidents automatically by implementing rule-based and machine learning detection in combination with threat intelligence and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).?
Next-gen SIEM systems normally detect threats in real-time based on correlation rules and machine learning that catches malicious and anomalous activities in your network and your systems inside the network (or on the cloud). The most efficient way to cover all possible threats is by implementing both rule-based and machine learning detection.?
By setting rule-based and machine learning threat detection across all systems together with threat intelligence and UEBA, you basically cover all possible threat scenarios as you can identify malicious patterns that your team would not think of protecting through rules. You are immediately alerted as the attack is happening or a specific response mechanism is triggered and the attack is stopped immediately. Further, you are able to not only detect potential threats, but also to determine the scope of those threats by identifying where a specific advance threat may have moved to after being initially detected, how that threat should be contained, and how information should be shared.
Old way: ?Privacy regulations (including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PSD2, and more) always require centralized logging, secure storage, long-term retention, log integrity, and etc. Therefore, the first step to achieving regulatory compliance is getting a tool that collects all your logs into one safe place, otherwise, there is simply no way to achieve compliance.?
In case you have some security tool in place but not a SIEM system, you would probably have some sort of log collection depending on the richness of your sources and the abilities of the tool. That is good but you will still be unable to automate processes crucial for compliance such as threat identification, incident response, data access restriction, data extraction and will also be failing to ensure retention, privacy, and integrity of the logs.?
If you rely solely on manual effort, you can barely take the appropriate technical measures to tick all boxes required by the regulators. Therefore, you will find yourself subject to tough fines, legal fees, and reputational damages. But most importantly, you will fail to achieve the real purpose of those regulations - protecting the citizens’ personal data. Not to mention that if you do not comply with all applicable regulations, you are less likely to find reliable partners to work with because you do not comply with the same high standards as they do.
New way: SIEMs provide you with a single platform to ensure the safe collection, storage, and use of sensitive data. The most advanced systems can do everything at once - automate data collection, store event logs, improve threat identification and reporting, restrict data access, guarantee legally-sound digital evidence as well as flag policy and compliance violations to ensure that organizations meet all their compliance requirements. Many SIEM tools already cross-reference their rules and reports to support compliance standards and management frameworks as well as have the ability to monitor directory services to address privilege-based management requirements such as creation, modification, and termination of user accounts.
A next-gen SIEM system can save you plenty of time and money by automatically setting you up on the way to achieving indisputable regulatory compliance and easing audits and reporting. Having a SIEM system in place means that you are ‘automatically compliant’ and the regulators know that very well.
Old way: Without a next-generation SIEM system you have no other option but to generate all your reports manually - not only those related to compliance and audits but also management reports or reports that would serve the needs of the business-related departments.
Manual extraction of logs is a hard and very slow process. Generating reports without a SIEM system involves plenty of repetitive manual actions that would slow not just your working process but also the work of your colleagues and the auditors.
New way: Next-generation SIEM systems allow you to access all your log and event data into a single dashboard. With a SIEM in place, you can automatically export information and generate all kinds of reports within seconds.?
The SIEM products usually have a number of built-in reports, which serve the needs of the auditors, regulators, and management. They provide valuable insights into different activities and performance metrics related to your IT infrastructure such as MTTR and MTTD. In addition to this, you can also gauge security and compliance risks present within your network, for instance, the number of devices requiring software updates, list of orphan privileged access accounts, and more.?
With a SIEM system in place all audits are much easier both for the organization and for the auditor as you have everything visible in one place and you can export log data in no time. Being able to generate reports automatically saves up to 80% of your time and allows you to concentrate on what really matters. The preconfigured report templates that most modern SIEMs have save you even more time, raising the percentage of time saved to 90%.
Old way: According to Veronis, 30% of data breaches involve an internal actor. An ‘insider threat’ does not always have to be caused by a malicious employee, sometimes a person can unknowingly pose a threat by leaking their credentials by accident.?Without a SIEM system in place, you are not likely to learn about such an accident before it is too late and a breach has already taken place.
Inability to detect and block suspicious actions across your network can appear to have devastating consequences. If the appropriate security measures are not taken, privileged insiders are very well-positioned to exfiltrate data and then use it unlawfully.
New way: Next-gen SIEMs are now more and more focused on the actors engaged in malicious activity. By setting behavior rules, you can monitor the risk scores of employees and get alerted if the score of a person has increased. These rules create a baseline for a given data source or a set of data sources and monitor for deviation from that baseline. They are normally defined via a wizard and can be expressed in plenty of different ways, for example: trigger the alert if the number of actions in the last 5 minutes is bigger than 2 standard deviations compared to the last 2 hours; apply this only within working hours.? Some SIEMs are even able to automatically block the malicious act straightaway.?
Malicious actors always plan their actions backdoor and act only when they are well-prepared. By analyzing user behavior and risk profile, you are able to detect if something unusual is happening - people doing things for the first time, logging at an unusual time for no obvious reason, and so on. With a SIEM system in place, you are alerted when something like this is happening and you can take the appropriate measures when the breach is still in a planning phase. In a nutshell, the SIEM is not just watching your employees but proactively observing and sending automatic alerts making it impossible to cover their tracks even if they are unknowingly involved in an outsider attack.
Old way: Even if the IT team is aware of an anomaly, it takes time to collect the required data, fully understand the attack, and stop it. If you do not have a SIEM system in place, you would need to manually collect this data. Such manual actions can take hours or even days and, in the end, it may be too late for the attack to be blocked. The longer this investigation process takes, the harder it gets to prevent the threat.?
New way: A modern SIEM system can automatically collect this data for you and significantly reduce the response time. Some tools even have automated response capabilities. The SIEM system is actually acting as a multitasking and extremely fast member of your team - it is constantly monitoring the entire IT landscape, looking for threats on multiple data sources, and preventing malicious actors from exfiltrating data in real-time.
Old way: If you lack threat intelligence features, you lack the knowledge of past attacks and malicious actors who targeted not just you but also other organizations.?Thus, you can end up being the next victim of an attacker who was previously reported by another organization that he/she has targeted. This increases your cybersecurity risk and is easily preventable.
New way: By automatic subscription to important threat intelligence sources, a next-gen SIEM system can detect emerging threats against your infrastructure and block them. Malicious IP addresses and URLs are the most straightforward threat intel data that can be correlated with firewall or router logs. Some SIEM systems also collect malicious domains, emails, and file hashes. Threat intelligence can save you up to $1 million of fines per breach avoided and is known to improve your overall security by as much as 22% on average.
Old way: Nowadays, malicious actors are often automated and do not sleep – so, if you leave anything open in the wild, it will be brute-forced and exploited in any way possible. And, as already mentioned, cybercriminals always plan their actions in advance. If you do not have a honeypot in place, you give them time to freely investigate, search and identify the valuable data.
New way: A honeypot would allow you to collect structured information from communication with malicious actors and get early warnings for upcoming attacks. A SIEM system with a honeypot functionality adds an extra layer to your security and protects you from malicious actors as it also sends immediate alerts if somebody is trying to harm you.
Old way: As working from home has become "the new normal", it is also a gateway to new forms of data theft and as a result, companies face significantly increased cyber risk. In fact, 76% of remote workers report that working from home would definitely increase the time to contain a breach. Now, more than ever, remote work needs to be properly protected.
Thus, relying on perimeter security or no security at all is no longer an option if you want your organization to survive. The FOSS tools are unable to monitor VPN logs, secure video conferencing, prevent phishing and brute-force attacks, and, therefore, cannot cover “work from anywhere” security.
Old result: If you rely on the traditional perimeter security and do not have a next-generation SIEM system able to monitor your entire IT landscape, you can never secure the remote working. You will always be left vulnerable and will soon end up a victim of cybercrime as your company data will be always exposed to threats.
A next-gen SIEM system lets you protect your VPN logs and services by comprehensive security monitoring tailored to a work-from-anywhere environment. To guard company data against being compromised, the modern SIEMs utilize brute-force security measures such as rule-based real-time alerts, for example. Unlike legacy SIEMs, they use machine learning to fetch behavior anomalies based on big data that is gathered and analyzed. This way, next-gen SIEM systems can immediately respond to the ever-changing security threats caused by work-from-home.
Although there are just a few of them, the most advanced next-gen SIEM tools on the market can also notify you in case of leaked user credentials and can scan your employees’ emails for phishing threats. They can also analyze your VPN logs in order to spot any anomalies and malicious attempts.
SIEM can serve SMEs
In the era of exponential technology, SIEMs evolve rapidly. Functionalities expand and gain sophistication, making SIEM solutions a lot more flexible, faster, better, and for every company. In the following section, we are about to discuss some myths on SIEM for SMEs and prove that they are no longer valid.
1) “It’s too expensive, an SME cannot afford it”
Myth: It is a common belief that SIEM always turns out to be expensive. On one hand, as they are usually priced per volume, and as data only continues to grow so does the cost. It is also believed that a SIEM requires an army of security specialists to manage the system which is a scarce and expensive resource for an SME.
Truth: Price can be affordable and predictable.
Evidence: The problem with the total cost of ownership used to be valid but today you have options to reduce that significantly. Some next-gen SIEMs offer the client options for pricing per user or source, ensuring predictability. Once you have selected a pricing model that will not penalize you, it is all about the right setup and configuration of the tool. So, you can get immediate value in terms of security, visibility, threat detection, and compliance. In the end of the day, quick time to value and extensive functionality at a reasonable cost produce a high ROI for the SME.
2) “SIEM requires a large security team”
Myth: If you are reading the data sheets and watching the demos you are under the impression that unless there are several people to monitor, respond, hunt threats, configure and reconfigure the SIEM and its rules on a daily basis, you are not using it right. SIEMs are perceived as too complex and requiring heavily trained teams.
Truth: A trained IT professional can handle it all
Evidence: Your organization can benefit from SIEM’s functionalities even without an army of security experts. One IT professional can do out-of-the-box integration of the most crucial and vital systems from your IT infrastructure which will cover the most common use cases. Advanced machine-learning and sophisticated risk scoring help to focus only on what matters most and hugely save on time. Furthermore, next-gen SIEMs normally have pre-built correlation rules for almost everything, so that you do not need to spend plenty of time defining rules.
3)?“The integration of a SIEM is complicated and takes months”
Myth: It is a common belief that a SIEM is a complex solution and deployment, and configuration is a separate lengthy, and expensive project by itself, usually involving an expensive external consultant. An SME just does not have this capacity and resources.
Truth: Integration is straightforward and can be done within a few weeks
Evidence: That was true before, but today you can get running with a SIEM within a few short weeks without the need of an army of experts. Modern SIEM systems offer plug-ins and out-of-the-box integrations with the most commonly used applications and platforms. In addition, some providers offer user guidelines for easy deployment which will walk you through the process and ensure fast adoption of the tool.
4) ?“Setting up of correlation rules is complex and time-consuming”
Myth: The configuration of security rules is crucial when using a SIEM and has to be revised and redone regularly in order to cover the threats and really avoid a security breach. This requires again a lot of time and effort, and it is not a priority for an SME.
Truth: Pre-built rules and machine learning minimize configuration efforts.
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Evidence: Manual rule setting is always an option, but there is a better, faster, and more efficient way to go. Next-gen SIEM systems have built-in correlation rules for common attack patterns to ease the rule-setting process. For example, LogSentinel SIEM has more than 650 pre-defined rules. You can also define statistical rules that detect deviations in the normal flow of data - these can be based on the whole data, or on aggregations. Thanks to this feature you automatically monitor for missing logs over a period of time that would indicate connection problems or collector problems.
And we should not forget that the real value of a SIEM is hidden in the automation of this process by machine learning capabilities. Automation is “rules on steroids”. It includes automating evidence gathering, opening tickets and sending messages, executing automated response commands on endpoints. And it does save a lot of repetitive tasks for the security team, thus, enabling them to focus on what really matters - getting value out of the SIEM.
5) “SIEM is only needed when having complex IT infrastructure”
Myth: If an SME does not have a complex IT infrastructure it does not make sense to invest and use SIEM. The cost of the SIEM will be unjustified.
Truth: You can get value out of a SIEM even with only a few systems in place.
Evidence: It does not really matter if a company uses 5, 20, or 50 systems. Operational and regulatory risk always exists for an SME operating with sensitive data - according to Solvere One, 47% of small businesses experienced a cyberattack in 2020 —and out of those, 44% experienced more than one. By connecting just a few systems you get good value out of the SIEM, more than justifying the investment in a cost-efficient SIEM.
Here comes the one-million-dollar question – How do I decide on a SIEM solution? Well, there are a few things you need to do first:
Case Study: Take a look at how LogSentinel helps a mid-sized provider of financial services in achieving information security and compliance?
LogSentinel SIEM benefits
We have built LogSentinel SIEM to perfectly fit the needs of mid-market organizations around three core principles: every organization can get value from SIEM, every security log is important, every security incident is preventable.?
Data source-based, asset-based, and employee-based models with no lower bound are preferable for SMEs that cannot afford huge budget overflows and do not have the time to estimate current volumes for even getting a quote. The majority of SIEM vendors charge based on more fluctuating metrics such as log volume or events per second. The problem with such pricing models is that the cost is usually very hard to estimate and predict and can grow rapidly overnight if you connect a new system or accidentally turn some feature on.
We, at LogSentinel, charge based on the number of active users, which makes it extremely easy to reason about the price now and in the years ahead. Such predictability and scalability do not mean that the product is cheap, it simply means that the cost is estimated depending on the size of the company, so small businesses will need to pay a small amount of money, respectively - big corporations will be charged a bigger fee. Those kinds of pricing models incentivize proper security configurations as you will not save money if you spare some of your firewalls, for example, therefore, contributing to improving your overall information security posture.
Read more: https://logsentinel.com/pricing/
Implementation is the hardest part of getting value out of a SIEM. It often involves a chaotic onboarding process, approvals from multiple departments, back-and-forth communication about permissions and integrations. This is not the case with LogSentinel SIEM - we offer easy deployment, guidance, and plenty of out-of-the-box integrations. LogSentinel provides templated implementation to streamline the whole process for you. Once you specify your desired data sources, we automatically generate a project plan that includes a project timeline - giving estimates on each data source based on our experience; infrastructure details - detailing the requirements for the LogSentinel Collector and agent-based on organization size and expected volumes as well as training.
Each data source may require configurations and approvals from various stakeholders. LogSentinel SIEM makes that easy by automatically generating emails with links to the relevant documentation for configuring each data source and tracking progress and highlighting delayed integration of sources that may require additional intervention and support. All of this saves you even more time and effort.
Thanks to the flexibility of its collector, LogSentinel SIEM can easily collect data from everywhere. The LogSentinel Collector is an open-source component that gets set on-premise to listen to a configured set of log sources. It can be installed on Linux and Windows and supports log files, database tables, syslog, NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow, SSH, database logs files, MS SQL audit trail, MS SQL change tracking, Oracle audit trail, access logs, Linux audit log, Windows event logs, directory changes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Teradata, Hadoop, VSphere logs, SNMP traps, network capture and vulnerability scans and any combination of these can be configured.
Note that for most target types the collector can be installed on a different machine than the actual log source, thus supporting full agentless collection. For example, in the case of database tables or database audit trail, the collector can be installed on another machine that connects to the database server via a database connection string and credentials.
Read more: https://logsentinel.com/integrations/
LogSentinel SIEM does not require a big security team, just one or two IT people taking care of it would be enough. Our product has one single very intuitive dashboard that provides both an overview of all activity within the organization as well as the ability to drill down to the specific application, time, user, or type of action, giving the security team а complete overview of activities in the IT infrastructure. Moreover, LogSentinel SIEM has 650 pre-built correlation rules for the most common threat scenarios and automated response functionalities able to open tickets, gather evidence, block actions, and more. We always undertake an on-boarding process and have put together a detailed user manual to help you navigate yourself and save you time.
Cloud, on-premise, legacy, and custom-built internal applications, document management systems, network appliances, and more – LogSentinel SIEM can be integrated with all systems allowing for full visibility of the entire IT infrastructure and ensuring data breach protection.
With LogSentinel next-gen SIEM your organization can cover many compliance requirements of various standards and regulations including GDPR, PDS2, HIPAA, CCPA, NIST, SWIFT, TAXI, KYC and AML, PCI DSS, NIS, SOX, GLBA, and more. We offer centralized logging, complete visibility of all systems, long-term retention, full privacy, and integrity of the logs. Also, LogSentinel guarantees the security of the sensitive data collected, provides advanced incident detection and response, has two-factor authentication, and can automatically generate reports. In fact, we provide plenty of built-in compliance reports as well as the flexibility to extract and export data based on any criteria and timeframe.
With LogSentinel SIEM, you automatically get compliant with all applicable regulations and standards and ensure that no fines will be imposed, saving your company’s resources and reputation.
Read more: https://docs.logsentinel.com/compliance/
LogSentinel SIEM features: Real security innovation
The majority of SIEMs (if not all of them) do not have good integrity guarantees and they cannot ensure legally sound digital evidence. They usually use hashing and signing but, in this case, any privileged user with some knowledge of the internal structure of the SIEM data can easily delete, backdate, or modify existing logs. Thus, malicious actors will most probably be left unpunished or will even remain unknown.
LogSentinel SIEM is the only Security Information and Event Management system on the market that employs blockchain components such as hash chaining, timestamping, and Merkle trees to guarantee the audit log integrity at 100% and ensure legally sound digital evidence. Thanks to those cutting-edge techniques as well as the unlimited log retention you always keep an unmodifiable audit trail of all actions performed within your entire IT infrastructure. That way you can prove that nobody has tempered with your logs - nothing is deleted, modified, or backdated. This evidence can be used in court during the prosecution of the malicious actors and give the highest level of compliance with integrity guarantees requirements.
Retention is key for achieving compliance but can make a SIEM significantly more expensive. With LogSentinel SIEM you set retention for as long a period as your compliance requirements mandate without any additional charge. Retention periods can also be configured per data source from the data source menu, allowing you to granularly cover compliance needs. By default, each log message is kept for 3 months, but this can be extended.
Read more: https://docs.logsentinel.com/retention/
Some logs contain more sensitive data than others and if you do not ensure their proper protection in the cloud setup, you significantly increase the security risk. By using encryption, you can fully protect your logs and remain safe, while covering some important compliance aspects. We even take it a step further and use end-to-end searchable encryption, so that you and your employees can still search and analyze those logs, so no business process is blocked.
LogSentinel SIEM features: Advanced capabilities
You can define rules that can specify a sequence of events that trigger an alert to detect threats in real-time. The criteria can span logs from multiple data sources in order to flexibly detect threats.?But you can also define rules that detect deviations in the normal flow of data - e.g., more than 2 standard deviations above the normal activity for the past 8 hours, split into 10-minute intervals. These rules can be based on the whole data, or on aggregations - e.g., activities performed by a certain user. Using this feature, we automatically monitor for missing logs over a period that would indicate connection problems or collector problems. To save you valuable time and help you cover all possible threat scenarios, LogSentinel SIEM has more than 650 pre-built rules that you can activate straight away!
Thanks to our rule-based threat detection functionalities, LogSentinel SIEM sends immediate alerts in case of malicious activity enabling proper neutralization of the threat before it can exploit any present vulnerabilities, minimizing the chance of a cyberattack.
Before, you had to rely solely on manual effort to detect threats. But now, you can make use not just of LogSentinel’s rule-based incident detection but also of its advanced machine learning capabilities. Thanks to them you can identify anomalous activity and potentially malicious patterns that the security team would not think of protecting through rules. We utilized the isolation forest algorithm to detect anomalies in time-series data. As data sources are quite diverse, machine learning models are trained on a per-data source basis. The algorithm is specifically designed to avoid many false positives, but you still have the option to define a threshold for alerting. LogSentinel SIEM’s machine-learning module adds a compulsory layer of security that helps you mitigate far more complicated attacks faster.
Read more: https://docs.logsentinel.com/threat-detection/#machine-learning-unsupervised-for-anomaly-detection
As LogSentinel next-gen SIEM displays every log in your environment in the form of an audit trail, it allows for an in-debt analysis of user behavior and risk profile to identify insider threats. It automatically creates a risk score (from 0 to 100) for each detected actor based on behavior parameters like total actions performed by the user, number of different actions performed by the user, distinct IP addresses associated with their actions, countries that are associated with the user activity, distinct computers used by the user, number of error events associated with the user, number of privileged actions performed, number of threat intelligence (IoC) matches for events associated with the user. That way LogSentinel SIEM prevents insider threats, based on data accumulated from all integrated systems and therefore, further increases the level of security.
Threat intelligence is said to be the domain of elite analysts only. But in reality, it can bring value to businesses of all kinds and sizes and is an important asset to cybersecurity as it has the ability to automatically block malicious actors.
LogSentinel SIEM collects threat intelligence from multiple feeds and matches the incoming logs to the threat data. Malicious IP addresses and URLs are the most straightforward threat intel data that can be correlated with firewall or router logs to produce an alert, but we also collect malicious domains, URLs, emails, and file hashes. Whenever an indicator of compromise obtained from a threat feed is matched to one or more events, an alert is created. That way you can ensure that you will not become the next victim of a known cybercriminal.
We understand that every organization has something specific. Therefore, LogSentinel SIEM can be extended with custom code to serve the security needs of every organization.
By executing automated response commands on endpoints in case of a threat, LogSentinel SIEM significantly reduces the time of incident investigation and prevention as well as eases the audits and reporting. The advanced automation features of our product give you an extra layer of security. Thanks to functionalities like automated gathering of evidence, opening of tickets, and sending messages, LogSentinel saves a lot of repetitive tasks for the security team allowing them to concentrate on what really matters.
The LogSentinel Collector supports honeypot functionality that enables it to collect threat information by acting as a fake exposed service and, therefore, allows you to stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals. That way you can collect structured information from communication with malicious actors and get early warnings for upcoming attacks. Once a potentially malicious actor accesses the open ports, their IP is sent to LogSentinel SIEM to include in the threat database, with the assumption that anyone trying to find open ports of popular services by scanning random IPs is doing that with malicious intent. This further reduces the chance of a data breach as it all allows you to explore deeper the way that the malicious actors operate.
Do you know that phishing attacks are among the most common ones? LogSentinel SIEM provides phishing detection by scanning all emails (preferably sent automatically by a shared inbox and deleted after being scanned) for indicators of phishing. We use a set of heuristics to detect phishing, spear-phishing, and whaling attacks, including link inspection, content inspection, and similarity of brands and images to popular ones. Even if you already have a phishing protection solution, chances are it will miss a phishing attempt, so a 2nd layer of protection may save the day and prevent a costly attack.
Recently attackers are increasingly targeting websites that collect cardholder data by injecting malicious scripts into otherwise trusted JavaScript dependencies. LogSentinel SIEM has a dedicated module for detecting such threats, allowing for a quick response by cleaning up the injected script. That way malicious actors would be unable to extract cardholder data from your website.
Read more: https://docs.logsentinel.com/threat-detection/#website-integrity-monitoring-formjacking-detection
LogSentinel SIEM has VPN log monitoring features that allow you to easily collect and analyze your VPN logs to detect any anomalies and threats regarding remote work. In times of pandemic, this is definitely a feature that you cannot allow skipping as it secures your employees' connection and reduces the chance of a cybercrime.
With LogSentinel SIEM you can get alerted whenever the credentials of any employee get leaked online, regardless of which service was used, if there is an email match. Configure which Exchange groups should be monitored in our Collector and we will automatically notify you in case of credential breaches, allowing you to eliminate the threat in real-time.