What is SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)?

SIEM is a security solution that can collect and correlate log and data across your cloud and IT systems. It combines Security Event Management (SEM) with Security Information Management (SIM).

SIEM is an acronym for Security Information Event Management. It can detect and respond to threats, streamline investigations, provide detailed log data, and simplify compliance. SIEM solutions are a core component of security operations centers (SOCs) and you can implement them as a part of your hardware, software, or managed security services.

What Are the Primary Capabilities of SIEM?

Modern SIEM can do a lot of things for your organization. For starters, it can collect and analyze your data logs. You can generate real-time alerts with your SIEM solution.

SIEM can perform user activity monitoring, and its dashboards can give you centralized or holistic views of your organization’s systems. SIEM is used for log forensics, mapping event correlations, and application log monitoring. You can also use it for object access auditing and log retention. SIEM can monitor your systems and devices, including their logs.

It can perform file integrity monitoring and generate detailed reports of your log files.

SIEM benefits go beyond just log processing or helping to store log files. You can also query your logs, generate alerts, and review them to minimize false positives.

Essentially, a SIEM solution’s main capabilities include:

• The ability to collect data from multiple sources and work with diverse data types.
• A good SIEM solution should be able to aggregate the data it collects and discover and detect threats.
• Identify potential data breaches and investigate alerts based on its log analysis results.
• Detect patterns in data after mapping out relationships, which can help identify potential threats.
• It can decide whether the data can show any signs of attacks, track movements, and chart attack paths.
• All the insights you gain from it can help you prevent a data breach and future cyber attacks. A robust SIEM architecture will include all these key components of SIEM and features.

How Does SIEM Work?

A Security Incident Event Management solution collects data from multiple sources, including servers, network devices, cloud apps, and firewalls. It maps out correlations and automatically responds to potential security incidents flagged based on alerts generated by analyzing this data. SIEM reporting can streamline your organization’s compliance and assist with forensics investigations.

SIEM also improves network visibility and automates server security. It can collect data in various ways, such as through API calls or directly from devices via network protocols. It can also access log files directly from your secure storage zones. You can also install an agent on your device.

Different types of SIEM are available for today’s modern organizations, such as open-source and enterprise SIEM solutions. While free SIEM solutions are reasonable, they lack many premium features, so the paid versions work much better for threat detection and holistic cybersecurity. SIEM can collect threat intelligence, detect and block various attacks, and set and define rules to help security teams identify and prioritize threats.

Role of AI and ML in SIEM

AI and ML play a crucial role in improving threat detection and automation responses. They help improve overall security posture and together can analyze vast amounts of data. AI and ML can identify patterns, learn from past events, and proactively detect and mitigate threats.

Here are their key roles:

• Behavioral Analysis: AI and ML can spot deviations from regular patterns, they can flag malicious activity.
• Anomaly Detection: AI and ML can catch outliers that are often missed by traditional signature-based detection methods; they can also catch advanced persistent threats (APTs) and sophisticated campaigns.
• IR and Threat Hunting: AI can proactively hunt for threats, attack patterns, and find Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). It can isolate infected systems, block malicious traffic, and accelerate incident response. ML with AI can reduce the number of false positives, focus on real threats, and spot chains of events and signs of coordinated invasion attempts.
• Security Orchestration and Automation: AI-powered SIEM can integrate with other security tools and complex workflows. They improve security efficiency and help organizations adopt a more proactive security stance. AI can analyze real-time threat data, integrate with SIEM, and provide the latest insights. They also help generate up-to-date global threat intelligence.
• Better Visibility and Contextualization: AI and ML can analyze data from multiple and diverse sources. They provide a holistic view of an organization’s security posture and add context. They also help with generating detailed reports and dashboards for AI-powered SIEM systems. Users also get to learn about valuable security trends and key incidents in the process via insights obtained by using them.

SIEM vs CSPM

Here is a list of the key differences between SIEM vs CSPM:

• SIEM is like a detective that constantly monitors your buildings via security cameras. If any unusual activity happens, they can help an organization act fast and stop it. CSPM acts like a checklist that ensures all your doors and windows are secured, closed, and locked up. It prevents criminals from breaching into your premises.
• Security Incident Event Management systems detect and respond to threats that take place inside an organization’s entire IT estate, including cloud environments. SIEM systems cover security logs and events across various sources. They can collect, correlate, and analyze security data to find potential threats and anomalies.
• Cloud security posture management secures cloud environments, can remediate misconfigurations, and addresses compliance violations. CSPM is more focused on the cloud and its security issues. It can continuously monitor cloud resources, apply the best cloud security practices, flag misconfigurations, and address policy violations. CSPM also helps implement the best compliance frameworks and regulatory standards.
• SIEM can analyze data from networks, servers, and apps to detect signs of unusual activities and malicious processes. It helps businesses understand what happens after an attack and how to deal with ongoing issues that can help keep them safe. CSPM gives insights into your cloud resources, their behaviors, and interactions with users. It tells what makes these assets less secure, how they are currently set up, and what needs to be done to make the necessary changes and improvements (including highlighting errors and fixes).

Benefits of Implementing SIEM

Here are the benefits of implementing SIEM for organizations:

• Consolidated Security Data: A typical organization has logs pouring in from endpoints, servers, applications, and cloud environments. SIEM aggregates all this data so your teams can monitor and analyze activity from a single vantage point. This holistic view minimizes the risk of missing critical events.
• Fast and Effective SecOps: Advanced correlation rules and analytics let your security teams rapidly identify threats and minimize false positives. With a SIEM, you can uncover attacks in progress, respond quickly to contain them faster, and mitigate potential damage.
• AI-Driven Automation: Modern SIEM solutions use machine learning to fine-tune alert accuracy. SIEM can identify deviations that indicate malicious activities by continuously learning standard behavior patterns. It helps your analysts prioritize the most critical alerts.
• Threat Detection Accuracy: Different SIEM solutions utilize diverse threat recognition methodologies, such as signature-based detection, behavior analytics, and threat intelligence feeds. These methodologies target different threat vectors, so one solution provides multiple layers of defense.
• Streamlined Regulatory Compliance: Most industries must comply with PCI DSS, NIST, CIS Benchmarks, HIPAA, and GDPR, among others. SIEM platforms provide centralized log archiving, real-time event monitoring, and audit-ready reporting, essential for satisfying regulatory demands and proving compliance during audits.
• Improved visibility in cloud environments: SIEM solutions offer built-in integrations with leading cloud service providers as more applications move into the cloud. This cloud-delivered support ensures that public, private, or hybrid security events are correctly logged, monitored, and analyzed.
• Pain Point Resolution: Overworked SOC teams, fragmented tools, and high alert volumes strain organizational resources. SIEM automates repetitive processes and combines disparate alerts to make your teams more efficient. It improves their threat hunting capabilities and organizations can derive their benefits further by applying these SIEM best practices.

Challenges Faced in SIEM Deployment

SIEM systems are highly versatile tools used to help organizations respond to multiple security challenges. Here are the top ten use cases where SIEM solutions prove invaluable:

1. Intrusion Detection and Prevention: SIEM systems play a vital role in monitoring and analyzing network traffic and system activities to detect unauthorized access and potential intrusion attempts. By correlating data from various sources, SIEM solutions can identify suspicious patterns or behaviors that indicate an attack. As soon as a possible intrusion is detected, a SIEM solution can trigger alerts and automated responses—such as blocking malicious traffic or isolating affected systems—to prevent unauthorized access and stop threats in real time.
2. Malware Detection: Another significant use of the system is for malware detection and response. SIEM systems detect malware using pattern and behavior analysis across networks and endpoints. SIEM can monitor if there are indicators of infection, like strange modification of files, suspicious network communications, and other kinds of anomalies. It can initiate containment measures, such as isolating devices, triggering antivirus scans, and can prevent infections from getting worse.
3. Insider Threat Detection:  SIEM systems solve the problem of how to detect threats that are coming from inside the user base. The SIEM solution does this by monitoring the activities of each user and identifying patterns that may indicate insider threats or other policy violations. The system could spot a sudden change in some patterns regarding data access or log-on times that might indicate signs of bad or inadvertent behavior by employees. Such SIEM systems can generate alerts and give insights to help security teams research and mitigate the possible insider threats that may lead to any harm.
4. Compliance Monitoring: Nearly all businesses must comply with certain industry and regulatory compliance standards. The SIEM systems perform a crucial function in this case. SIEM solutions feature the organization’s logging and reporting capabilities to comply with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. With full records of security events and activities made with an SIEM, audits are easier, and organizations can ensure that they are able to show their compliance with such rules and standards, turning down the risks of paying penalties due to failure in compliance.
5. Phishing Attack Detection: Phishing has remained a constant threat, and SIEM has come into the field for the detection and prevention of these attacks. Using fingerprinting on email traffic and user behavior, most of the phishing characteristics, like suspicious email content and strange link patterns, can be fingerprinted through the SIEM platform. Security teams will be alerted about a possible phishing campaign, and mechanisms to block malicious emails can be enforced by the SIEM solutions, significantly reducing the risk of successful phishing attacks that might lead to the compromise of sensitive information.
6. Data Exfiltration Prevention: Stopping unauthorized data transfers becomes important to ensure that sensitive data is kept protected. The SIEM system needs to keep track of data flow in the network so as to detect and prevent potential data exfiltration efforts. The SIEM platform carries out an analysis of patterns and access to data flow that is either unusual in nature or unauthorized for data movement, for example, huge volumes of data sent to external locations. In case of identification of such activities, they can raise an alarm and act accordingly to prevent any possible data breach and loss of well-prized information.
7. Account Takeover Prevention: By keeping a record of the login activity and access to an already compromised account, the SIEM systems minimize such potential threats. Those platforms will also discover abnormalities like too many failed logins, logins from unknown locations, or alterations of the user permissions. By being able to identify symptoms of account takeovers, SIEM solutions can raise an alarm for security teams over the possibility of breaches and allow them to take corrective action.
8. Network Anomaly Detection: An example of network anomaly detection is that SIEM systems have this primary function to monitor network traffic against unusual patterns. SIEM platforms monitor deviations from norms in network behaviors and identify threats or attacks ranging from DDOS to network scans. These SIEM tools will alert and provide intelligence on the nature and extent of the anomaly to facilitate an appropriate response from the security team to avert potential risks.
9. Log Management and Analysis: Log management helps with understanding security events, troubleshooting, and incident analysis. SIEM systems aggregate logs from diverse sources such as servers, applications, and network devices for analysis, presenting a holistic view across the entire organization. They provide better visibility of security incidents, support root cause analysis, and incident investigation and response. They also support log aggregation and analysis.
10. Endpoint Protection: SIEM systems, when integrated with endpoint security systems, will provide more comprehensive protection against threats aimed at endpoints. The correlation of endpoint data with other network and system event logs will help SIEM enhance threat detection and response. SIEM systems help spot malware infections, unusual behaviors of processes, and unauthorized access attempts across endpoints.

SIEM Use Cases Across Industries

Here are some popular SIEM use cases across different industries:

• The Bank of Wolcott faced so many challenges in handling their massive data volumes. It couldn’t keep track of what was modified, changed, or deleted daily. The bank adopted a SIEM solution to keep track of data flows and movements across file servers. It would send the organization automated alerts and detect and respond to data exfiltration attempts across channels like USBs, emails, printers, and more.
• Another example of where SIEM was effectively used is the case of VMware customers across multiple domains. They had challenges in identifying attacks inside networks and couldn’t get visibility into endpoints. SIEM helped monitor endpoints for spotting unusual activities like suspicious file processes, unauthorized privilege escalation attempts, and identified anomalous network connections. It also assisted in isolating compromised endpoints and enabled their real-time monitoring.
• SIEM helped SolarWinds detect insider threats. It pulled data from external threat intel feeds, applied correlation rules, and verified user identities and access details. SIEM systems were used with UEBA to find deviations from normal user behaviors (like unknown working hours or unfamiliar login locations).
• RCO Engineering had limited visibility into IT and security events. It used SIEM to unify log management, network security, and set customizable alerts. SIEM systems also helped with security auditing, monitoring, and helped ensure better compliance.
• Government regulators in Pakistan had issued new guidelines. Banks used SIEM systems to improve their existing security management and threat detection measures. SIEM consolidated logs for them from multiple sources to centralize monitoring. It reduced the number of daily security incidents and dropped the average time taken to remediate them.

Also, read top 10 SIEM use cases.

Limitations of SIEM

Here are the limitations of using SIEM:

• SIEM systems can be too difficult to integrate. They may have compatibility issues, data format discrepancies, and not be able to handle the sheer volumes of data, especially when it comes to data finetuning and customization.
• Depending on the size of the organization, SIEM systems may require huge capital investments. The ongoing costs for maintenance and updates can go up.
• SIEMs can generate false positive alerts and increase alert fatigue. They are also hard to set up, configure, and can be resource-intensive. Traditional SIEMs lack security automation and provide limited endpoint visibility.
• Some SIEMs have a difficult time managing data coming from multiple sources. They may do inaccurate data analysis, face challenges such as giving incomplete data, and miss threats hidden within complex datasets.

Best Practices for SIEM Implementation

Here’s a list of the best SIEM implementation practices to follow:

• Understand what your organization needs. Define your SIEM use cases, goals, and prioritize specific security requirements. Assess the volumes and types of data your SIEM system will need to handle. Check your infrastructure demands, categorize them, and plan for scalability and data growth.
• Choose the right SIEM deployment strategy. There are many kinds like cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid SIEM deployments. SIEM can help collect logs from multiple sources like intrusion detection systems, servers, firewalls, and user activity logs.
• Ensure that all your incoming data can be cleaned up for consistency and reliability. This will help in threat detection, so normalizing incoming data is a must when implementing SIEM. You should have the ability to create correlation rules and link them with related events for different data sources. This way, SIEM can detect complex attack patterns and behaviors. You also need to fine-tune alerts and reduce alert noise to nail genuine threats and weed out the false positives.
• Use SIEM automation where possible and automate repetitive tasks. Integrate threat intelligence with SIEM to detect advanced attack patterns. Regularly test your incident response plans with SIEM and see if they work well. Train your security staff on how to use SIEM, its different features, and threat detection techniques. Review the reports, data, and audits done by SIEM and ensure it doesn’t miss anything.
• Look for SIEM solutions that can integrate well with your current security infrastructure and other SOAR platforms. Try cloud-native and AI-powered SIEM solutions because they are scalable and more flexible.

How SIEM Integrates with Other Security Solutions: SOC, SOAR, and EDR

SIEM integrates with other security solutions like SOC, SOAR, and EDR in various ways. Here is how that goes:

1. SIEM and SOC

A Security Operations Center (SOC) is a centralized facility where security teams monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity incidents. SIEM solutions often serve as a critical component of a SOC, providing the necessary tools and data for threat detection and response. While a SIEM solution focuses on aggregating and correlating security event data, a SOC encompasses a broader range of functions, such as vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and incident response.

2. SIEM and SOAR

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms are designed to streamline and automate security operations by integrating multiple security tools and automating routine tasks. While both SIEM and SOAR solutions aim to improve the efficiency of security operations, their primary functions differ. SIEM focuses on event management, correlation, and threat detection, whereas SOAR emphasizes process automation, security orchestration, and incident response. Many organizations implement SIEM to detect threats and SOAR solutions to remediate said threats essentially allowing organizations to achieve a comprehensive and efficient security posture.

3. SIEM and EDR

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions focus on monitoring, detecting, and responding to security threats at the endpoint level, such as workstations, laptops, and servers. In contrast, SIEM solutions provide a broader view of an organization’s security posture by aggregating and analyzing event data from various sources, including EDR. While EDR solutions offer advanced endpoint protection and threat-hunting capabilities, SIEM solutions serve as a central hub for event management, event correlation, and threat detection across the entire network. A SIEM can correlate data from an EDR with other events to generate deeper investigations.

Choosing the Right SIEM Tool: Your Buying Guide

There are so many things to consider when choosing the right SIEM tool. Here are a few notes:

• Assess your regulatory compliance expectations (like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDR, and other standards). See if your SIEM system offers pre-built templates and reporting capabilities.
• Good SIEM solutions can integrate with threat intelligence feeds and give you updates on the latest cyber threats. SIEM should also consider the volume and velocity of the data generated in your organization.
• You should look for licensing options based on the number of devices and assets you are working with. Also look for features like advanced analytics, machine learning-based threat detection, and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) integration for your SIEM.

Check out our guide on the latest SIEM tools to learn which ones are the best in the industry.

SentinelOne’s AI SIEM | The AI SIEM for the Autonomous SOC

SentinelOne’s Singularity™ AI SIEM gives you everything you need to secure your entire infrastructure. It is built on the Singularity™ Data Lake and is powered by the industry’s fastest AI-powered workflows. SentinelOne AI SIEM for the autonomous SOC can grant real-time AI powered protection for the entire enterprise.

Here’s what it can do:

• Helps enterprises migrate into cloud-native AI SIEM
• Rebuilds your security operations; you get the benefits of its limitless scalability and endless data retention
• Speeds up security workflows with Hyperautomation
• Provides significant cost savings and real-time AI-based data protection
• Can ingest all excess data and keep your current workflows
• Get more actionable insights with AI-driven detection. Move from rulesets and queries to more efficient algorithms
• Never lock you into any vendor. Opt in or out whenever you want.
• Ingests both structured and unstructured data. It is OCSF natively supported and can Ingest first-party data and third-party data from any source with 10GB per day included for free.
• Augments and integrates SentinelOne into your SOC. It filters, enriches, and optimizes the data in your legacy SIEM.
• AI SIEM offers advanced analytics and detailed reporting. It gives organizations valuable insights into their security posture and helps make data-driven decisions to improve defenses. SentinelOne AI SIEM supports various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides in-depth security coverage and provides rapid and accurate threat responses.

Singularity AI SIEM is more than just this. It can protect endpoints, clouds, networks, identities, email, and more. You can stream your data for real-time threat detection and get machine-speed protection. Get greater visibility for investigations and detection with the industry’s only unified console experience. Create custom workflows to meet your unique security requirements.

Conclusion

You can implement a robust SIEM solution and position your organization to quickly detect threats, meet compliance requirements, and unify diverse data streams into one centralized platform. It does more than just log collection; SIEM contextualizes events to show malicious activity before it can impact your business. Modern SIEMs also use AI to automate threat response workflows and reduce the burden on your security teams.

SIEM provides deep visibility by correlating information coming from endpoints, cloud, and network devices. It provides the ability to defend against constantly evolving cyberattacks. As digital risks keep growing, a well-deployed SIEM will serve as a foundational pillar that keeps your organization cyber resilient and secure. Try SentinelOne today.