SIEM Alerts: Common Types and Best Practices
When cybercriminals gain access to a network, device, or account, damage control becomes a race against time. However, the number of apps and accounts that make up the average tech stack can make attacker behavior a very sharp needle – buried in acres of hay.
By continuously monitoring and analyzing security events, SIEM technology can detect abnormal patterns or behaviors as they happen – and alert security personnel to the attacker’s precise whereabouts. These events include activities like unauthorized access attempts, unusual network traffic, or system vulnerabilities. Once a potential threat is identified, the SIEM system can generate alerts or notifications to prompt timely investigation and response by security personnel.
However, ensuring your solution is fit for threat detection – without spewing endless SIEM alerts at your security team – is critical. This article will cover the ins and outs of SIEM alerts – what attacks they can help foresee and prevent; and how to best set your SIEM up for success.
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What is a SIEM Alert?
Event Generation
Event Collection
Normalization
Event Storage
Detection
Correlation
Aggregation
Different Types of Alerts In SIEM
- Anomalous User Behavior: Security alerts may be triggered when a user exhibits unusual activity, such as multiple unsuccessful login attempts, unauthorized access to resources, or irregular data transfers.
- Monitoring System or Application Errors: SIEM systems meticulously examine logs, promptly alerting on critical errors or failures in systems or applications, revealing potential vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
- Data Breaches: In response to unauthorized access or the exfiltration of sensitive data, alerts are generated, empowering organizations to react promptly and minimize the resulting impact.
- Compliance Violations: Configurable within SIEM systems, monitoring mechanisms issue alerts in cases of regulatory violations or breaches of internal policies, ensuring adherence to established standards.
Types of Alert Triggers
Rule-based Triggers are frequently employed in SIEM alerts, relying on predefined conditions to identify specific events. Security teams leverage these triggers to establish various rules based on diverse aspects, such as known attack patterns, indicators of compromise, or suspicious activities. These rules function as filters, enabling the SIEM system to generate alerts when observed events align with the specified criteria.
Similarly crucial for SIEM, threshold-based triggers involve establishing specific thresholds or limits for events or metrics. When these threshold values exceed or fall below the set parameters, the system generates an alert. This type of trigger proves
valuable in detecting abnormal behavior or deviations in patterns.
Anomaly Detection constitutes another vital component of those SIEM alert examples, aiming to identify deviations from anticipated behavior. This process entails analyzing historical data to establish baseline profiles for routine activities. Incoming events are then compared to these baselines, with the system flagging any noteworthy deviations as potential anomalies. Anomaly detection is effective in detecting previously unknown or zero-day attacks, as well as identifying elusive insider threats or unauthorized activities.
Each of these triggers combine to create an adaptive layer of ticketing that fits in nicely with pre-existing ticketing platforms. Some solutions go even further, with AIOps filtering, deduplicating, and normalizing alerts from diverse systems, utilizing AI/ML to identify correlation patterns across the plethora of alerts.
Best Practices for Managing SIEM Alerts
In hopes of stopping malware before it gets too deep into the network, SIEM wields a huge scope of alerts, events, and logs – but like a motion-sensor light, sometimes the alert catches a rat instead of a Remote Access Trojan.
One reason for this ongoing barrage of alerts is a lack of cohesivity between prior security solutions. While IPS, NIDS, and HIDS offer network and endpoint protection respectively, the low quality of alerts issued can rapidly spiral – particularly as integrated security appliances fail to work together, and instead pelt every alert at an overstimulated security team.
SIEM alerts best practices provide a salve to alert noise by consolidating and refining all these alerts – but best practices are essential to keep it fit for purpose, rather than contributing to chronic burnout.
Set Your Own Rules
Check Your Alerts Before Issuing New Ones
Be Precise When Choosing What to Flag
Keep Regulations In Mind
Rely on Both Simple and Composite Rules
Test
Set and Tune Thresholds
Define Your Anomalies
Alongside set rules, behavior models profile a user, app or account based on their standard behavior. When the model identifies abnormal behavior, it then applies rules to evaluate and then issue the alert. Make sure to set up models with different classes of behavior types – this allows them to produce distinct alert profiles and drastically speeds up remedial work.
Similar to correlation rules, a solitary model evaluation typically does not prompt an alert. Instead, the system assigns points to each session based on the models applied. When the accumulated points for a session surpass a predefined threshold, the system then triggers an alert. Establishing and defining this risk tolerance for each model is a critical aspect in managing and controlling the volume of alerts generated.
Next-Generation SIEM Alerts
SIEM solutions are expensive and can be difficult to deploy and configure. However, the success of your SIEM tool is defined by its ability to tightly integrate with your current tech stack.
Delivering over 400 integrations out-of-the-box, Stellar Cyber’s SIEM switches your approach from reactive to proactive. Stop your security personnel from wading through endless mismatched alerts, and flip the script on attackers with next-gen capabilities such as automated threat hunting and AI-driven analytics. Next-gen SIEM alerts take ultra-flexible data sources and transform them into scalable analytics.
Discover More About Our Next Gen SIEM Platform Capabilities and start focusing on incidents rather than alerts.
