How Stellar Solves the Challenges of SIEM Vulnerability Management
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools have been driving vulnerability discovery for a while now: exceedingly popular within security-conscious enterprises, they allow teams to view networks’ and devices’ moment-by-moment activities, and prevent their exploitation by malicious actors. However, despite the popularity of SIEM tools, vulnerability management has gained a reputation for being a relentless manual slog through false positives and thick alert backlogs.
While automation presents a way forward, its application needs to be precise. This is why it’s important to first assess the challenges of SIEM vulnerability management, and then see how automation can be implemented for maximum effect.
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What is Vulnerability Management?
A vulnerability is any security weakness that exists within an endpoint, network, or employee base. Vulnerability mitigation demands a full view of not only every potential weak point, but also a fireproof approach to prioritizing and patching them. As a result, vulnerability management is a continuous and far-reaching process.
Even medium-sized enterprises rely on hundreds of online touchpoints- whether it’s employee workstations, CSM software, or Internet of Things (IoT) devices monitoring a manufacturing floor. since the scope of potential weak points has expanded so quickly since the mid-2010s, SIEM tools were quick to get established, as they allow for the actions of every application, server, and user to be pulled into a central system, where a secondary security risk assessment can then take place.
From there, the vulnerability mitigation process can truly begin: using the alerts, security admins can assess the legitimacy of each by comparing it against the relevant services and accounts’ legitimate activities. However, cybersecurity analysts are increasingly running into an impenetrable mass of backlogged alerts and demanding triage processes. This damages the team’s Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), and can even introduce a gap in the enterprise’s defenses.
Challenges in Traditional Vulnerability Management
The growth of digital services has bloated enterprise attack surfaces far beyond what’s manually reviewable. This means that vulnerability management tools like SIEM are rather essential – but not all tools are built equally. The following challenges are a sign of an outdated or underperforming solution.
The Sheer Scale of Enterprise Networks
At this point, there are very few teams within the enterprise that haven’t seen major improvements in their efficiency through tech. While fantastic for employee output, consider that nowadays an enterprise may have hundreds of thousands of information systems, including endpoint devices, network setups, digital identities, lines of code, APIs, cloud-based workloads, and more.
For the next step in this thought exercise, consider the frequency of software flaws and human errors. (To give you a benchmark, new common vulnerabilities or CVEs were discovered at a rate of about 80 a day in 2023). With numbers like these, it’s reasonable to assume large organizations are facing thousands of potential vulnerabilities on the regular. To gain critical access, attackers only need one full attack path to succeed.
To answer this puzzle, traditional vulnerability management places a focus on discovering every single CVE that lurks in an enterprise’s attack surface. This approach attempts to brute-force threat discovery, and further demands that every single endpoint and device be incorporated into the management platform. A great idea on paper, but as soon as a degree of network complexity is introduced, blank spots can begin to appear. For example, some IoT devices can’t have agents installed, and legacy and third-party software are often entirely incompatible with this model. The resultant security visibility gaps mean that many traditional SIEM tools give analysts an incomplete picture.
Traditional vulnerability management has placed a focus on finding and patching each individual vulnerability. SIEM tools were built to be incredibly good at recognizing a CVE or a misconfiguration within a server or device – and they are. The challenge is now in how this information is translated into action.
Lack of Alert Context
SIEM tools aren’t the defining factor of successful attack prevention: the important part is what happens after a potential threat is discovered. The manual intervention process demands that an admin look at the alert that’s been generated, and either tags it for further investigation, or marks it as a false positive. Last year, the two most common actions that triggered SIEM alerts were copying files to a USB, and uploading files to an internet-hosted server.
If those actions seem familiar to you – you’ve worked in a company! Unfortunately, vulnerability management solutions can’t always tell the difference between an Excel file being shared by someone in marketing, and an attacker trying to exfiltrate private customer data. This responsibility is passed to the cybersecurity admin who is manually reviewing each alert. The same solution also can’t tell the difference between two new CVEs that MITRE lists as high priority. It’s up to the admin team to spot which one is functionally useless against them – and which is part of a newly-exposed attack path. These lists pile up far faster than manual threat detection can deal with them, resulting in overwhelmed and critically slow vulnerability management processes.
How Stellar Cyber SIEM Addresses Those Vulnerability Management Challenges
Universal Sensors for Peak Security Visibility
Every vulnerability management system needs to have complete visibility into the events occurring around any sensitive resources. Stellar’s visibility comes from the sensors that collect information from key points within each monitored network. The variety of sensors reflects the scope of integration: Linux server sensors run within a compatible Linux environment, and silently collect logs and command execution events. Granular controls over each sensor’s resource usage help keep server throughput high.
The Windows server sensors handle all events and actions being conducted via Windows environments. Useful for securing endpoints and communications, this interface provides a wealth of threat visibility. Alongside both the Linux and Windows agents, Stellar Cyber offers modular sensors: these can be customized to forward logs, ingest network traffic, sandbox malware, and scan for vulnerabilities or undiscovered assets.
This visibility into an enterprise’s own networks runs in parallel with Stellar’s connectors: these collect information from external data sources – like threat databases – and Stellar’s simplified data collection allows for hundreds of built-integrations. These different types of sensors aren’t just for universal visibility: they also initiate the data categorization that defines Stellar Cyber’s Next-Gen SIEM.
Intelligent Case Investigation
If you’ve used a SIEM tool before, you’re familiar with alerts. They are basic indicators of a potentially suspicious event. You might not be familiar with Stellar Cyber’s form of alerts, though. When suspect or unexpected activity occurs within a protected network, Stellar Cyber generates a base-level alert, and then feeds it into an analysis engine that aims to determine its legitimacy. This process incorporates the log data surrounding an alert to generate context, and examines the behavioral profile of that endpoint or user.
This is made possible through a mix of supervised and unsupervised machine learning models. Unsupervised ones learn the data distribution of your network automatically, and different types of models are employed to assess an action from every possible angle. The rare event model looks for events that suddenly appear; time series analytic models detect anomalous spikes in activity, low values, and rare values. Even more exciting are population-based time series analytic models: these look at historical peer data and detect deviations from there – allowing for previously uber-stealthy compromised accounts to be discovered and stopped, as well as new high-privileged accounts to be just as well-monitored as older genuine ones.
This analysis process occurs for every suspicious action or event that is logged: if multiple events occur, this analysis engine seeks to establish whether they are related – and therefore part of an attack chain. This is what Stellar Cyber offers on a day-to-day basis: rather than spitting out two-dimensional alerts, it correlates them into cases. From there, cases are ranked with a severity score that indicates the potential attack path’s severity.
This is the core of how Stellar Cyber addresses old-school SIEM vulnerabilities. Accessible right on the dashboard, cases offer a powerful new way of cutting through alert fatigue and giving cyber security teams the rapid and powerful analysis they require.
Unified & Automated Vulnerability Management
So we’ve covered how Stellar Cyber offers in-depth visibility, and how it streamlines all of this data into actionable information. But remember, the important part is what happens after the suspicious events are identified. This is why Stellar doesn’t just take information in from other security tools, but can act on the analyzed cases through those same tools. This means that vulnerabilities identified by these tools can be monitored, managed, and responded to in real-time through the SIEM dashboard itself. Not only does this drastically reduce MTTR, but it also lays the foundation for automated responses.
Stellar’s platform includes over 40 pre-built threat detection automation playbooks, covering a wide range of attack surfaces such as Windows login failures, DNS analysis, and Office365 exploits. These playbooks enable a baseline of continuous threat hunting, and you are free to create custom playbooks alongside them. For more complex orchestration, Stellar Cyber integrates seamlessly with leading automation solutions like Phantom, Demisto, Swimlane, and Siemplify, enhancing its response flexibility.
See How Stellar Revolutionizes SIEM Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability management needs to stay apace of rapidly changing environments: knowing when and how to apply AI – and where to retain human input – is key to a precise, sustainable approach. Stellar Cyber’s case-driven analytics drive efficiency far beyond legacy SIEMs, and allow analysts to cut triage time-wasters.
Try a demo today and discover why Stellar is the intelligent choice for your vulnerability management.
