What is SIEM Software?

Introduction

Security information and event management (SIEM) software provides IT security staff both a track record of and insight into the activities in their IT environment. This technology has been around for more than 10 years, initially starting from the log management field. It combines security event management (SEM) – which analyzes event and log data in real time to facilitate incident response, event correlation, and threat monitoring – with security information management (SIM) which gathers, reports on, and analyzes log data.

SIEM software aggregates log info generated in an enterprise’s technology infrastructure including applications, host systems, and security devices like antivirus filters and firewalls. The platform then identifies and classifies events and incidents, and analyzes them.

SIEM tools deliver reports on security-related events and incidents, such as malware activity, failed and successful logins, and possible malicious activities. They send alerts if analysis indicates that an activity is against predefined rules and thus can potentially impact security.

Features of SIEM Software

Forensics Features

Top SIEM applications can collect added info about security events. This data can be used to identify attacks, investigate incidents, and collect evidence for prosecution or disciplinary purposes. One of the key features is network packet capture in which the SIEM platform tracks network traffic and records the contents and headers of packets of interest. Another useful functionality is supplemental logging, which involves deploying SIEM agents to mobile and endpoint devices, and configuring the agents to document info that the devices’ logging services cannot record.

Compliance Reporting

This includes inbuilt reports for standard compliance requirements and the capability to generate new reports or customize inbuilt ones to meet the specific characteristics and needs of the organization.

Usage of Threat Intelligence Feed

Leading SIEM applications can process threat intelligence info that indicate which websites, domains, IP addresses, and other entities are presently linked to malicious activities. To tackle the latest threats, it has become essential to use a SIEM platform that constantly receives the newest threat intelligence and applies that data to identify potential issues. Organizations should deploy a SIEM tool that supports the use of their selected threat intelligence feeds, instead of utilizing a particular feed, as this gives them more flexibility and allows them to leverage the same feed supplier across company-wide security controls.

Effortless Integration

It is important for SIEM programs to be capable of giving commands to other security controls used by the enterprise. This can help to halt attacks in progress and prevent or reduce damage. First, identify the company security controls that the SIEM tool needs to direct. Then find SIEM solutions that smoothly integrate with all of them.

Benefits of SIEM Software

Efficient Incident Response

You need to properly configure and maintain your SIEM systems to enable them to efficiently handle incidents, which saves time and resources for incident managing staff. Incident handling is important because poor management of this element can deteriorate essential info like evidence against malicious players who breached the host.

SIEM tools offer a single interface to review security logs from several hosts. Modern SIEM technologies are providing new capabilities like User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) that empowers organizations to detect threats from both software and people, and overcome them before they can cause damage.

Streamlined Compliance Reporting

This is an important benefit which makes many organizations use SIEMs only to streamline their compliance reporting through a central logging platform. An enterprise can deploy multiple hosts and each host’s logged security events are transferred regularly to one SIEM server which generates a single consolidated report of all logged security events obtained from all hosts.

Without SIEM software, an organization needs to manually gather info from each host and produce an individual report for every host. Then, they reassemble the reports and data at a central location to generate a single consolidated report. This manual task is laborious and time consuming, and needs several people to edit and customize security logs from disparate hosts.

Another benefit is SIEMs also provide inbuilt support for multiple compliance tasks. Their reporting capabilities enable organizations to comply with the reporting requirements of various important standards including SOX, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

Detects Malicious Incidents

Based on two factors, SIEM solutions can detect incidents that may not otherwise be detected:

Firstly, a number of hosts which log security events don’t possess inbuilt incident detection functionality. Such hosts can only view events and generate audit log entries, but cannot analyze the log entries to spot signs of suspicious behavior.

Second, SIEM tools have the capability to associate events across multiple hosts. They collect events from several hosts, divide attacks into various parts observed by specific hosts, and reestablish a sequence of events to determine if the attack has succeeded or failed.

Additionally, SIEM platforms use threat intelligence feeds to detect malicious activity and terminate connection of the host impacted by the activity to neutralize the attack before it blooms into an expensive breach for the enterprise.