Five SIEM Tools That Every SOC Analyst Should Know

A cursory look at 2021’s cyberattack statistics shows that organizations need the help of trained, certified security operations center (SOC) analysts who know how to effectively use the latest tools and techniques, including security information and event management (SIEM) platforms.

Take a look at the following data recently published by TechJury (Bulao, 2022):

◉ Malicious actors on average introduce 300,000 pieces of new malware each day.

◉ Ransomware cases grew by 150% in 2020 compared with the previous year.

◉ By 2021, a business was hit by ransomware every 11 seconds, compared with every 40 seconds back in 2017—an increase of approximately 360%.

◉ Approximately 94% of malware infections come from email, indicating that employees do not have the proper training to spot suspicious emails.

These trends highlight the value of SOC analysts for businesses, as an effective SOC can help mitigate the various cyberthreats faced by businesses today. To get started, let’s define SOC and SIEM before reviewing the most effective SIEM tools that SOC analysts can use to improve efficiency.

Defining SOC and SIEM

A SOC is a centralized department within an organization or data center that consists of security analysts, who use a variety of processes, tools, and technologies to monitor and improve the organization’s cybersecurity infrastructure (LogDNA, 2022).

“SIEM” refers to a specific management tool that SOC analysts and other cybersecurity professionals use. A SIEM platform typically includes a range of tools that aid SOC professionals, including:

◉ Forensic tools for investigating cyberattacks

◉ Threat hunting features to locate vulnerabilities

◉ Threat intelligence and security analytics features

◉ Advanced analytics visualization

The core difference is that SOC refers to an entire centralized department, including SOC analysts and their processes and tools, whereas SIEM refers to specific software used by a SOC analyst or team. SIEM platforms facilitate a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity by giving SOCs the ability to monitor data in real time and establish security policies that improve overall network safety.

To avoid confusion, it’s worth noting that the abbreviation “SOC” has two meanings. In addition to the definition of SOC outlined above, SOC can also refer to System and Organization Controls, a set of compliance standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (Imperva, 2022). SOC auditing helps ensure that all institutions using financial data employ methods to keep that data secure.

The Top SIEM Tools for SOC Analysts

SOC analysts need a broad set of tools to diagnose potential vulnerabilities, proactively secure networks, and find innovative solutions for evolving malware threats.

1. Splunk

Splunk pulls information from all aspects of a network, making it easier for SOC analysts to locate pertinent data and act quickly in on-site, cloud, and hybrid database environments (Splunk, 2022). When an anomalous event occurs that suggests a potential breach, SOC analysts will have easy and efficient access to database information so they can respond appropriately.

2. SolarWinds Security Event Manager

SolarWinds’ Security Event Manager provides SOC analysts with a tool that improves security through advanced threat identification, forensic analysis, and automated incident responses (SolarWinds, 2019). In addition to offering an intuitive dashboard, the Security Event Manager integrates with many compliance reporting tools to aid businesses that must conform to HIPAA, PCI DSS, and other regulations.

3. LogRhythm

LogRhythm’s SIEM platform offers a reliable way to improve an organization’s security posture in light of challenges associated with the rise in remote work and cloud migration (LogRhythm, 2022). LogRhythm applies a zero-trust model while optimizing security infrastructures against emerging cybersecurity threats. LogRhythm provides additional training that helps all types of IT professionals use its features correctly.

4. Trellix Platform

The Trellix platform provides real-time visibility into system activity. The tool allows SOC analysts to see real-time system, network, application, and database activity and performance (Trellix, 2022). When fully integrated into a system, analysts can examine specific events to identify potential issues, from suspicious activity to slow speeds. Trellix users can also add content packs to customize the tool for relevant industry compliance regulations.

5. AlienVault OSSIM

AlienVault OSSIM is an open-source SIEM product by AT&T designed to help security professionals in asset discovery, assessing vulnerabilities, intrusion detection, behavior monitoring, and SIEM event correlation (AT&T Business, 2020).

Source: eccouncil.org

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What is SIEM? Why is SIEM important than ever before?

For organizations, data security has become come crucial than ever before. With each passing day, IT environments within the organization are growing even more complex, distributed, and difficult to manage. As a result, the use of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) technology has become more important in today’s digital-first era.

More Info: 312-96: EC-Council Certified Application Security Engineer (CASE) - Java

In this article, we will discuss SIEM, the working of SIEM, and the reasons why SIEM is more important than ever before.

What Is SIEM?

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management tool is a software program that helps in aggregating and analyzing various activities from multiple sources across the organization’s IT infrastructure.

SIEM collects data from servers, network devices, domain controllers, and more. Security Information and Event Management stores, aggregates, normalizes, and applies analytics to the collected data for discovering trends and detecting threats to the organization. This enables the security team within the organization to investigate alerts for a potential data security breach.

How Does SIEM Work?

SIEM tool works by collecting event and log data generated through the organization’s security devices, applications, and host systems. All of this data is brought together into a single centralized platform. Moreover, SIEM gathers data from firewall logs, antivirus events, and other locations and then sorts the data into different categories.

SIEM serves two primary capabilities to the incident response team. First, reporting and forensics about security incidents, and second, offers alerts by analyzing data which matches certain rule set. For the security team, the SIEM provides the needed analysis at their fingertips so that the SOC team can evaluate data breaches with as much information as possible.

3 Reasons Why SIEM Is Important Than Ever Before

1. Operations Support

Along with the size of IT teams, the size and the complexity of today’s IT environment are growing exponentially. Operations within the organization are often divided into several groups: Security Operations Center, Network Operations Center, Desktop Team, Server Team, and many more, wherein all of these different teams have their own tools for monitoring and responding to events.

It is because of this reason, collaboration and information sharing become difficult within the distributed team environment. However, for efficient, cross-team collaboration, SIEM can help in pulling data from various systems into a single place.

2. Compliance

Certain regulations bind businesses. These regulations include HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and Sarbanes-Oxley. However, complying with these regulations can become a daunting task for organizations.

SIEM tools can help organizations comply with different regulations’ requirements directly and indirectly. For instance, almost all kinds of regulations require companies to have some log management. Therefore, SIEM provides a seamless way to deploy the log collection requirement easily and provides instant access to log data. Moreover, SIEM also offers audit support to ensure that certain requirements are met.

3. Threat Detection

One of the primary roles of SIEM tools is to help detect and prevent threats before they cause irreparable damage to the organization.

However, do not confuse yourself. SIEM helps in detecting the activity associated with the attack rather than the attack itself. For instance, a phishing attack using the zero-day exploit has a high likelihood of making it through the antivirus, spam filters, and firewalls and being opened by a target user. Security teams can configure the SIEM for detecting activity surrounding such an attack.

Source: eccouncil.org

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Are you the right choice for a SOC team?

The technology landscape is improving very rapidly. However, it is also closely followed by the growing threat of cyber threats. Thus, resulting in the growing demand for talented cybersecurity professionals who can join the SOC team.

Read More: EC-Council Certified Encryption Specialist (ECES)

The SOC team continuously monitors and analysis the security measures implemented by the organization. Moreover, it also helps in defending against security breaches and mitigating security risks. In this article, we will discuss the skills required to join the SOC team and the basic responsibilities of a SOC team.

Skills Required to Join a SOC Team

The security operations center usually assigns security analysts to work at one of the three levels depending on the experience. Tier I analyst receives and looks into alerts daily. Tier II analyst addresses real security incidents, and Tier III analysts, who are more experienced deal with critical incidents. The following are some of the skills to join the security operations center team.

1. Networking

To maximize damages, cyber threats are largely dependent upon computer networks. It is very rare to have a cyber-attack on a system that is not networked. Therefore, it is crucial that you are skilled and experienced with the fundamentals of networking if you have to join the SOC team. More often than not, security analysts are given information from network device logs. Therefore, you have to know which information means what and how it will impact your analysis.

2. Security

After having an understanding of networking, it is crucial to understand the security fundamentals as well. Having a good understanding of cyber threats allows you to identify behaviors and patterns during your analysis. As you go through the log data, you must quickly identify dangerous or suspicious activities. This is only possible if you have mastered security fundamentals.

3. Incident Response

Working within a SOC team is crucial for the security analyst to have knowledge and know-how of the incident response and handling process. Of course, not all security analysts are involved in the incident response, but most are involved to some extent. Therefore, it is important to know the best practices of incident response and handling.

4. Documenting Incidents

Another important skill for the security analyst who is working with the SOC team is to document incidents. Moreover, incidents are often escalated and passed around within the team. Therefore, it is also good to have good communication skills. Any actions that are taken during the incident response have to be documented properly. It is because this information might be used in legal proceedings.

Responsibilities of a SOC Team

1. Implement Security Tools

SOC team is responsible for implementing and managing security tools to gain insight into the organization’s security environment. Some of the basic tools that the SOC team members work with include intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, and data analytics platforms.

2. Detect, Contain, and Prevent Threats

Another basic responsibility of the SOC team members is to detect, contain, and prevent cyber threats from happening and causing damage to the organization. SOC team members look into various suspicious activities taking place on the network inside the system using the monitoring tools. The team members also perform triage on the alerts received and then respond accordingly.

3. Ensure Business Continuity

Organizations must ensure that their systems are running with no or minimal downtime. Therefore, during a data breach, it is the responsibility of the SOC team to ensure business continuity. It is their responsibility to contain the breach before it reaches key business infrastructure.

4. Audit and Compliance Support

The SOC team members are also responsible for auditing the systems to meet the compliance requirements set by corporate, industry, and government regulations. The SOC team uses security tools such as SIEM, which collects data from across the organization to generate compliance audits and reports.

Source: eccouncil.org

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What are Host Attacks? How to Avoid Host Attacks Successfully?

Web servers are configured in a way that allows them to host a number of different web applications and websites on the same IP address. It is the reason why the host header exists. The host header specifies which web application or website is responsible for processing the incoming HTTP request. The web server then makes use of the header value for dispatching the request to the specified web application.

More Info: 312-38: Certified Network Defender (CND)

But what would happen when someone specifies an invalid host header? It can lead to host attacks. In this article, we will discuss host attacks and what are the different host attack vulnerabilities.

What are Host Attacks?

HTTP host attacks look to exploit the vulnerability of websites that handle the host header’s value in an unsafe manner. For instance, if the webserver trusts the host header implicitly and does not validate it properly, the attacker might inject harmful payloads, which will manipulate server-side behavior. Attacks that involve the process of injecting harmful payloads directly inside the host header are referred to as host attacks.

Attackers can also use the header value in several different interactions between various websites’ infrastructure systems. Because the header is controllable, this can lead to a wide range of issues. If the input is not validated accurately, the host header can become a potential vector for exploiting many different vulnerabilities. Some of these vulnerabilities include web cache poisoning and password reset poisoning, among others.

Host Attacks Vulnerabilities

1. Web Cache Poisoning

Web cache is one of the techniques used by cyber attackers looking to manipulate web cache so that they can serve poisoned content to anyone who is requesting the web page.

For this to occur, the cyber attacker will have to poison a caching proxy run by the website itself, content delivery networks, downstream providers, or any other caching mechanism between the server and the client. After this, the cache will serve the poisoned content to anyone who is requesting the web page, with the victim of the attack having no control whatsoever over the infected content that is being served to them.

2. Password Reset Poisoning

One of the most common ways to implement the password reset functionality is to generate a secret token and then send the link through email containing the token. What will happen if the cyber attacker request a password reset with the host header controlled by the attacker?

If the website uses the host header value when composing the reset link, the cyber attacker gets the ability to poison the password reset link sent to the victim. Therefore, when the victim clicks on the poisoned password reset link in the email, the cyber attacker will be able to access the password reset token and then change the victim’s password without any troubles.

How to Mitigate Host Attacks?

The following are the different ways to mitigate the risk of host attacks from taking place at your organization.

1. Do a proper validation of the request. Make sure if the request came from the original target or not.

2. Ensure that you whitelist all of the trusted domains in the initial phase of the web application.

3. Try to mitigate the host attacks in Nginx and Apache by creating a dummy virtual host that catches all requests from unrecognized host headers.

4. Ensure that your organization is making use of secure server configuration.

Tools to Find Host Header Vulnerability

The following are the two different tools used by SOC Analysts to find the host header vulnerability.

1. Brisk InfoSec’s BHHIT

2. XFORWARDY

Source: eccouncil.org

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What Is Alert Triage? Do You Know How It Is Carried Out?

With cybercriminals always on the lookout for a vulnerability in an organization’s system, analysts need to be on their toes at all times. Their role is to stop these cybercriminals from getting into the system; otherwise, the entire organization will be ruined.

Security Operations Centers face an overwhelming amount of security alerts every day. It becomes almost impossible to look into all these threats with limited tools and technology. Where most of the threats are false positives, some of them are accurate too. This is why it becomes important to look into every one of them.

What Is Alert Triaging?

The term “triage” was introduced on the battlefields of France. Due to the overwhelming number of patients that required urgent treatment, the top surgeon of the facility categorized patients into three parts and prioritized them according to this list.

1. Those who will live regardless if they are treated right away.

2. Those who will not live regardless of any medical treatment they receive.

3. Those who will probably live if treated right away.

This process was introduced to utilize resources in the maximum amount. The process was then termed “triage.” The process is still used during emergencies. Triage analysis is where threats are prioritized based on the triaging process.

Similarly, in the cyber world, alert triage is a process that allows analysts to prioritize threats and then decide if those threats should be deeply analyzed. The problem is that without following a lengthy triage process, analysts have no way of figuring out which threats can turn into breaches. Sometimes due to this lengthy process, these threats convert into breaches.

What does triage mean in cybersecurity?

Like a medical emergency, cybersecurity becomes an emergency too when it faces several threats. The process of triaging used by analysts is similar to the process given above. In triaging, analysts first determine what threats are serious enough to harm the system and what only seem like threats but are not. After analyzing what threats to look into and what threats to discard, analysts turn to examine the remaining threats.

Read More: EC-Council Certified Encryption Specialist (ECES)

The effectiveness of threat analysis depends on the tools and resources analysts have. If they have good enough tools that support them by thoroughly investigating threats and sending them high alert to look into them immediately, their job will not be that hectic. But most of the time, software and tools fail to do a good job, which leaves analysts alone with a long process of looking into every threat.

Analysis of SIEM Incident Detection in Security Operations Center

When the system shows a threat, it does not reveal much information about it. General software shows very little data that can hardly be used to prevent breaches. For example, if an employee’s credentials have been stolen are being used to access files and other data, the software will only flag it as a suspicious activity instead of showing you the details of the threat. Security information and event management (SIEM) analyze and correlate every available business information and network activity to detect incidents in real-time.

Understanding SIEM Deployment

◉ Log correlation: A single login can not show suspicious activity but analyzing the pattern of failed and successful login attempts can flag the activity as a threat.

◉ Threat intelligence: SOC SIEM tools help early threat detection by identifying incidents in advance. Security Operations Center SIEM tools give the most reliable and latest threat information.

◉ Anomalous user behavior analytics: To prevent breaches, it is important to analyze user activity. It involves analyzing their login and log-out times, user privileges, and accessible data.

Handling Alert Triaging and Analysis

◉ Identify: The first step is to analyze if a threat is malicious or not. It requires network security monitoring and deeper investigation. Before taking action, figure out how did it enter the system? What harm has it caused? Where is it? Have you detected all of it?

◉ Contextualize: Prioritize the alert based on its solution and discovery, if there is external intelligence available for it, what information you have of threat, and what damages it has caused till now?

◉ Contain: Analyse what risks this threat possesses. According to the threat level, you can plan a response with proper SOC SIEM tools.

Source: eccouncil.org

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What do you need to apply for a SOC Analyst job?

Given the growing number of cyberattacks, many organizations prioritizing hiring a SOC Analyst. Generally, though, the cybersecurity industry depends on the strength of a diverse field of security teams and analysts working together, including technical, legal, finance specialists, and beyond, to keep an organization’s digital propriety and data secure. But most importantly, SOC Analysts are in the first line of defense, without which other security operatives cannot function, exposing the organization to constant attack. Therefore, An SOC Analyst plays a particularly important role in ensuring that cyber threats are solved and prevent future incidents from attacking the security network of the organization.

The growing number of security issues has increased the demand for SOC Analysts in different areas. The career path of becoming a SOC Analyst requires gathering sufficient knowledge and skills in critical security-related areas to be able to counter all forms of threats at any given time. So, we now take a look at some of the things that make a SOC Analyst a crucial part of every IT organization.

Who is a SOC Analyst?

SOC stands for Security Operations Center, which represents the team comprising of multiple analysts working together on security issues. They are cybersecurity professionals that help in monitoring a company’s network for malicious activities. The SOC Analyst is the job title given to a skilled and knowledgeable cyber/network security analyst who analysis, monitors and responds to and incidents. It is possible to have a single cybersecurity analyst in a company, but SOC Analysts form part of a large security team. They work hand-in-hand with other departments of an organization to fight against hacks, and their job is to ensure sensitive information is secured.

What does a SOC Analyst do?

The job role and responsibilities of SOC Analysts require great attention to detail and general awareness for all things cyber. Overall, their responsibility is to ensure that an organization is safe from security breaches. They are always vigilant and belligerent to filter out cyber-attacks and mitigate risks before they occur. It is essential to know that when a security incident occurs, SOC Analysts are the first to counter these attacks and make sure an organization is safe.

In addition to the above, as a SOC Analyst, your sole responsibilities are:

◉ Analyze the root cause of a security breach
◉ Fight and monitor suspicious cybersecurity threats in an organization
◉ Access security systems and put up improvements to a network.
◉ Document security incidents for a security response plan
◉ Perform risk examinations, vulnerability testing, security analyses.
◉ Execute security audits, internal and external
◉ Ensure security systems in an organization are up-to-date.
◉ Manage security plans with important vendors.

What skills do you need to be a SOC Analyst?

SOC jobs are in high demand, but each organization has its preferred degree, work experience, and skill requirements for its candidates. However, most companies do require that SOC candidates possess a CSA certification and, or a bachelor’s degree in computer science or any relevant field. Also, candidates should have undergone CSA training and have at least one year of IT work experience.

Some other SOC Analyst skill requirements are:

◉ Knowledgeable in all security policies

◉ Ability to teach and educate network users on security risks and protocols.

◉ Noting security areas that need improvements

◉ Troubleshooting and problem-solving skills

Technical knowledge requirements for a SOC position are:

◉ SQL

◉ CEH, SCA, Security+, CISSP, and CEH certifications

◉ Firewall detection and prevention protocols

◉ C, C++, C#, Java or PHP programming languages

◉ Antivirus and antimalware

Source: eccouncil.org

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