Augment Your SIEM to Get Complete Visibility to Your Infrastructure

Comprehensive protection and a robust cybersecurity posture revolve around one fundamental, but simple, concept – obtain, and maintain, all-inclusive visibility of your organization's infrastructure and user activity. A security information and event management (SIEM) platform is an approach that allows companies to integrate event management and information management within a centralized platform. It uses historical analysis and real-time events to identify and respond to adverse security problems.

While a SIEM is a crucial component for preventing nefarious cyber incidences, using legacy technologies may not provide the full security capabilities required by today’s mid-enterprise business. In this case, augmenting your SIEM can enhance how you detect and respond to attacks.

Expanding traditional SIEM tools with technologies, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, can enable you to realize complete visibility of all user events and anomalies throughout the IT infrastructure. This type of SIEM augmentation can be an effective way of monitoring, detecting and responding to suspicious events in real-time.

Limitations of Legacy SIEM Tools

Legacy SIEM technologies can present challenges to a security operation center's (SOC) ability to monitor and identify attacks.
Some of the challenges include:

• Lack of scalable and flexible architecture since legacy SIEM tools are built on relational database management systems (RDBMS) or flat file databases.
• They cannot analyze complex sets of data, which may hinder attack detection and response efforts.
• Legacy SIEMs have limited or zero intelligent threat searching and hunting capabilities.
• Legacy SIEM applications rely on predefined correlation rules such that their threat detection logic is incapable of adapting to emerging risks and threats.
• Event data in legacy SIEM systems is not enriched. As such, the information does not add the required context for detecting and responding to cyber incidences in dynamic cyber environments.

Top Reasons Why SIEM Augmentation Increases Visibility

1. Identify Compromised Credentials
Anyone with the right combination of credentials can gain legitimate access to protected sensitive data. Stolen credentials provide malicious individuals with unauthorized access to critical accounts, networks or computers. A traditional or legacy SIEM cannot detect unauthorized access instances, enabling a hacker to access a company's internal information and confidential resources. The consequences of unauthorized access can be devastating, which is why you should consider augmenting your organization's SIEM with artificial intelligence and data analytics capabilities.

Extending SIEM capabilities with modern technologies enhances the ability to identify unauthorized access instances by monitoring factors like device IP addresses used to access a resource. Augmented SIEM permits a business to monitor access and block attempted cases of unauthorized access.

2. Monitor and Identify Privileged-User Compromise
A privileged system user has access to confidential and high-value resources, including authentication systems, user-right management systems, and sensitive databases. Upon obtaining privileged-user credentials, attackers can steal or cause severe damage to protected high-value IT and data assets. Hackers are aware that legacy SIEM platforms cannot detect privileged-user compromise effectively or initiate follow-on actions to mitigate threats. As a result, privilege abuse is among the rifest cybersecurity threats today.

Traditional SIEM systems are usually unable to detect privileged-user compromise since a privileged user's patterns are not regular and, therefore, unpredictable. Integrating advanced AI analytics in modern SIEMs enables them to accommodate the various privileged-user variables to identify their access patterns and flag down privileged-user compromise cases.

3. 24/7/365 Monitoring of Executive Assets
Executive computing IT assets, such as the CFO or CEO login credentials to their mobile devices, are top targets for attackers because of obvious reasons. Administrative information assets definitely contain sensitive information regarding pertinent organizational operations, including competitive information, services or product planning, mergers and acquisitions, budget planning, and earnings.

An augmented SIEM platform with User Behavior Analysis can monitor critical executive assets to detect unauthorized access. Augmented SIEMs are designed to automatically build behavior and asset models that identify crucial assets and monitor them continuously, 24 X 7, for unusual usage or access.

4. Identify Compromised Devices, Hosts and Systems.
It is a common scenario where attackers compromise and control devices, hosts, or systems in a network remotely and operate them undetected for months on end. Such a timeline provides hackers with ample opportunity to commit various crimes, including spying, data exfiltration and phishing other business partners.

Detecting compromised devices or hosts in real-time underscores the essence of augmenting your SIEM with artificial intelligence technologies and advanced behavioral analytics. An augmented SIEM can monitor multiple vectors, such as user accounts, to detect and flag unusual activities.

5. Distinguish Malicious Behavior from Normal Behavior
Although external threats and malicious insiders have been blamed for most renowned data breaches, insider threats are equally as dangerous. Insider threats are tough to detect because of their trusted behaviors, which puts the majority of deployed security tools, including legacy SIEM, at a great disadvantage to spot unusual access or activity.

An augmented SIEM will be capable of identifying insider threats, irrespective of whether the users are privileged or not. For instance, a SIEM based on artificial intelligence and advanced behavior analytics can help cybersecurity teams identify malicious user behavior as they occur. These include correlating threat intelligence with network traffic to identify malware under a hacker's remote control, sudden privilege escalation or changes, and detecting login credentials recorded from unusual locations, hours, or devices.

Boost Security with Securus360

Securus360 extends your SIEM solutions with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and behavior analytics to address information security's top-most challenges.

Our security experts have discovered that traditional SIEM tools are incapable of detecting complex and advanced threats, which can lead to a business being exposed to multiple attacks unnecessarily. Therefore, the essence of deploying other security controls with existing SIEM tools cannot be underscored.

Securus360 delivers an award-winning, AI-driven, cloud-native approach that combines machine learning, security automation and human intelligence to enhance your attack detection capabilities. Identifying security challenges in real-time is a proven way of protecting your enterprise from the most advanced and complex cyberattacks.

The Securus360 approach complements your internal security efforts to provide you with full visibility and monitoring of all your assets and user events 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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