Is Your SIEM Ready for the AI Era? Essential Insights and Preparations – Source: www.databreachtoday.com

Security Information & Event Management (SIEM)
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Security Operations

Joe DeFever

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September 4, 2024    

A head-spinning series of acquisitions and mergers is transforming the security information and event management (SIEM) market. Behind this market shakeup is the ongoing technological shift from traditional, manually intensive SIEM solutions to AI-driven security analytics.

See Also: Introduction to Elastic Security: Modernizing security operations

Legacy systems — characterized by manual processes for log management, investigation, and response — no longer effectively address today’s fast-evolving cyber threats. Now is the time to turn to SIEM solutions propelled by embedded AI and machine learning (ML). The future of SIEM is an AI-enhanced solution that arms the security operations center (SOC) to detect threats proactively and stop them swiftly.

Assessing your current SIEM capabilities

As the cornerstone of your SOC’s technology stack, your SIEM should enable complete visibility across your environment. It should spot attacks without burdensome false-positives, accelerate investigation with context and guidance, and streamline response workflows across teams and tools.

When assessing your current SIEM capabilities, start by defining your security objectives, examining your threat scenarios, and considering whether your business needs have changed since adopting your current SIEM solution.

While auditing your SIEM, keep these questions in mind:

• Does it help the SOC defend your data, infrastructure, and personnel against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats?
• Can you quickly onboard custom data sources?
• Can you efficiently retain and analyze archives — without rehydration?
• Does it power monitoring, detection, and analysis — in real time and at scale — while staying in budget?
• How easy is it to use? Does it empower or hinder your security team?
• How does it streamline investigations? Can it keep up with threat hunters?
• Does it fit your deployment model?

Today’s dynamic threat landscape calls for a transformation of core SOC workflows. Labor-intensive processes, blind spots, and other SIEM shortcomings can hinder your SOC’s capacity to address threats before they cause damage.

AI threats against SIEM systems

Fighting AI-fueled attacks with manual analysis and response is not realistic. Sophisticated attackers can advance from accessing an environment to exfiltrating data or disrupting operations in just minutes . . . meanwhile, security teams are left scrambling.

Detection rules activated with the best intentions can overwhelm the SOC with alerts, wasting precious time and leading to practitioner burnout. What’s more, legacy SIEMs that rely on signature-based alerting are ineffective against novel or emerging techniques such as zero-day exploits.

Key benefits of AI-driven SIEM and security analytics

To put it simply, an AI-enhanced SIEM — the next generation of SIEM solutions — enhances your organization’s overall security posture, ensuring that you have the necessary visibility, insights, and workflows to address threats quickly and effectively.

Here are the top five benefits of an AI-enhanced SIEM solution:

1. Create custom data integrations

No matter the source or scale, an AI-enhanced SIEM can automatically normalize custom data sources, enabling you to jump into analyzing activity in minutes — not days. Ingest all your data, including custom data sources, across cloud infrastructure, applications, databases, network devices, servers, endpoints, and more.

2. Automate initial triage

Triage a flood of alerts into a curated set of attacks, rejecting false positives and pinpointing escalating offensives. Out with alert fatigue, in with holistic analysis — powered by generative AI.

3. Uncover unknown threats

An AI-enhanced SIEM platform goes beyond automated detection. Tackle new use cases and expose unknown threats with machine learning, behavioral analytics, and more. Applying advanced analytics gives your security team a more nuanced and accurate picture of risk.

4. Streamline workflows

Propel investigation and response by empowering security analysts with AI insights and guidance. Go further with AI-enhanced response capabilities to automate repetitive tasks and foster cross-org collaboration. Assist admins, too, by simplifying the conversion and creation of detection rules, queries, and other SIEM content.

5. Adopt AI on your own terms

AI-enhanced SIEM platforms enable public large language models (LLMs) to ground text-generated responses to your own ever-changing proprietary data through retrieval augmented generation (RAG), enriching user prompts with real-time context for more meaningful results. You’ll benefit from a model-agnostic SIEM solution that allows you to choose the public LLM that’s best for your needs — both now and as technological focuses change — helping future-proof your generative AI approach.

Prepare your SIEM for AI integration

More organizations than ever are migrating from legacy SIEM solutions and integrating AI into their security operations programs. Replacing your SIEM is a major undertaking, but fortunately, generative AI makes it easier, too. Onboard custom data sources in minutes — not hours or days — streamlining SIEM deployment. AI guidance lowers the learning curve for analysts and administrators alike, facilitating successful adoption.

Learn more about replacing your legacy SIEM to embrace an AI-driven approach.

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