The only truly workable network solution must bridge the inherent gaps that exist throughout [infrastructure] systems. It must also be capable enough to root out hidden vulnerabilities ripe for hacking.
The transition from office to remote environments was abrupt and one of the most defining moments that the cybersecurity industry and professionals faced in 2020. We wrote about the top issues CISOs were facing throughout the year but also doubled down on sharing insights about the evolution of next-generation SOCs, the failure of SIEM platforms as organizations are experiencing them today, and how self-supervised AI fits into the equation.
SIEM has failed to meet the needs of enterprises in the modern threatscape. One huge reason for this is that over time, most organizations will come to the sad realization that they will never achieve a full enterprise deployment of their SIEM. By its very nature, SIEM is always “in process.” It’s not unusual for an organization to have an SIEM in process for a full decade.
A large utility company approached MixMode with the following scenario: The enterprise SOC was utilizing a shared SIEM application that was being utilized by several stakeholders: the networking team, the SCADA team, the dev-ops team, the compliance team and cybersecurity teams for “basic search and investigation of log files to meet regulatory compliance requirements”.
Despite a three-year SIEM deployment and a two-year UBA deployment, government personnel needed an alternative to better detect and manage threats in real-time, as well as an improved platform for gathering comprehensive data.
Because the fundamental nature of SIEM requires infinite amounts of data, security teams are forced to constantly wrangle their network data and faced with an unmanageable number of false positive alerts. This means they have to devise efficient ways to collect, organize and store data, resulting in an incredible investment in human and financial resources.
The cybersecurity market has, simply put, been cobbled together. A tangled web of non-integrated systems and alerts from siloed systems. Enterprises are now being forced to utilize a “Frankenstein” of stitched together tools to create a platform that might cover their security bases.
Despite its inherent flaws, today’s SIEM software solutions still shine when it comes to searching and investigating log data. One effective, comprehensive approach to network security pairs the best parts of SIEM with modern, AI-driven predictive analysis tools. Alternatively, organizations can replace their outdated SIEM with a modern single platform self-learning AI solution.
MixMode teamed up with Ravenii to host a webinar focused on the history and evolution of SIEM platforms, their ideal role in a SOC today, and how they fall short as a threat detection tool in today’s modern cybersecurity environment.
The fundamental SIEM flaws lie in the platform’s need for continual adjustment, endless data stores, and a tendency to create an overwhelming number of false positives. When organizations instead turn to a next-generation cybersecurity solution, which predicts behavior with an unsupervised (zero tuning) system, they are poised to save on both financial and human resources.
Complying with privacy regulations requires all organizations to have access to data on demand, wherever it lives on a network. With the unfathomable amount of data managed by most organizations operating in the finance space today, it can become a significant challenge to locate specific data across legacy systems and networks with countless connections online and off.
The Security Operations Center (SOC) of today is fundamentally flawed. Currently enterprise cybersecurity spend is higher than ever, but despite multi-million dollar cybersecurity investments, organizations remain vulnerable to attacks. One of the major reasons for this is legacy SIEM deployments. More spend does not equal more security.
Handling and managing data today has become unwieldy for IT teams on multiple fronts, but the security impact is especially troubling.
The time required for data processing, transition, aggregation, and the normalization does not allow real-time threat detection using today’s SIEM solutions. The only beneficiary of security through log aggregation is the SIEM vendor.
The very nature of data is its infinite capacity for growth. For security teams at large, highly integrated and complex enterprises like financial services institutions, that growth can quickly become unwieldy when the approach is to store, normalize and prepare all of this data in order to extract value.
Geoff Coulehan, MixMode’s Head of Strategic Alliances, joined Secrutiny’s “Magnify Podcast,” to discuss the priorities CISOs should focus on to better protect their now-remote team of employees.
Most cybersecurity vendors today tout some form of “Artificial Intelligence” as an underlying mechanism for the differentiation of their product among the market. But if everyone is saying they have AI, and everyone is also claiming theirs is the “best,” how can they all be telling the truth?
One thing is clear: more spend does not equal more security and the next generation of cybersecurity tools will route out these inefficiencies.
A recent WhiteHat Security survey revealed that more than 70 percent of respondents cited AI-based tools as contributing to more efficiency. More than 55 percent of mundane tasks have been replaced by AI, freeing up analysts for other departmental tasks.
One of the most prevalent issues impacting the effectiveness of security teams who use SIEM as their primary means of threat detection and remediation is the fact that data logs are an attractive medium for modern hackers to exploit.
