Security information and event management (SIEM)

A security system called security information and event management, or SIEM, assists organizations in identifying and addressing possible security threats and vulnerabilities before they have a chance to impair daily operations. Enterprise security teams can identify unusual user activity with the aid of SIEM systems, which also employ artificial intelligence (AI) to automate many of the manual procedures involved in threat detection and incident response.

How Does SIEM Function?

The ability of SIEMs to compile data from more organizational sources and use AI approaches to determine whether activity qualifies as a security event is improving.

Data collection

The majority of SIEM systems deploy collection agents on user devices, servers, network hardware, or other security systems like firewalls and antivirus, or they employ the syslog forwarding, SNMP, or WMI protocols to gather data.

Data storage

As a result, just a portion of the log data was kept. Modern data lake technologies like Amazon S3 or Hadoop, which enable practically infinite storage scalability at a minimal cost, are the foundation upon which next-generation SIEMs are created. This enables the retention and analysis of all log data across a wider range of platforms and systems.

Policies and rules

They can then establish guidelines and cutoff points to specify what kind of anomaly qualifies as a security event. More and more, SIEMs use automated behavioral profiling and machine learning to automatically detect anomalies and dynamically construct rules on the data to find security events that need to be looked into.

Data consolidation and correlation

An incorrect password attempt on an enterprise portal and a connection being denied by a firewall can both be related to error messages on servers. Security events are created from many data points and given to analysts via dashboards or notifications. The ability of next-generation SIEMs to identify "real" security events that require attention is advancing.

SIEM Capabilities and Features

Although SIEM is an established technology, the newest SIEMs offer new functionalities.

Alerting

Analyzes events and assists with alert escalation to send email, other forms of messaging, or security dashboard notifications to security employees informing them of urgent issues.

Retention

Archiving historical data over a lengthy period of time to provide analysis, monitoring, and reporting for compliance needs. crucial in forensic investigations, which can take place a considerable time after the occurrence.

Dashboards and Visualizations

The creation of visualizations enables staff to examine event data, spot trends, and spot activity that deviates from expected workflows or processes.

Threat Hunting

Allows security employees to sift and pivot the data from SIEM, execute queries from various sources, and proactively find risks or vulnerabilities.

Compliance

Automates the collection of compliance data, resulting in reports that may be customized to meet the security, governance, and auditing requirements of standards including HIPAA, PCI/DSS, HITECH, SOX, and GDPR.

SOC Automation

Allows security employees to specify automated playbooks and procedures that should be executed in response to specific situations and integrates with other security systems utilizing APIs.