Cyber attacks and system breaches are increasing in number day after day. With more engagements in the cloud and remote environment, the opportunities for the hackers and the breachers have uplifted.
With new technological breaks, hackers have found a way to breach any system without letting the system detect it. As per 451 research, more than 31.9% of the users stated that they are getting more than 80% of the expected value from the SIEM system.
In the SolarWinds attack, the attackers planted malware in the middle of any SolarWinds software update. This enabled them to breach and monitor all the computer networks without being detected for four months. The Government authorities and the public were in shock as to how such malware went unnoticed for so long.
An organization’s inability to detect malware or any kind of cyberattack can have major effects on the organization’s confidentiality and clientele. A primary reason for such attacks going unnoticed today is the traditional SIEM security mechanisms followed by many organizations.
How can traditional SIEM logging cause security problems?
Traditional SIEM security systems are not majorly proactive solutions when it comes to base security compliance. These systems often fail to detect advanced attacks. SIEMs might help you with random alerts when it detects a problem in your network, but they would fail to help you with useful insights regarding any timely issues from those random alerts. At times, SIEMs also create confusion in understanding the problems while detecting a danger. It can tumble you with false positives and negatives, making it difficult to understand any dangerous attack.
The Ineffective points of Traditional SIEMs
- SIEM is hard to deploy
SIEMs might take months after the initial installation process to get fully integrated. The “security intelligence” features offered by the event correlation rules become of no use until the external data sources are streamlined and made perfect.
- SIEM can be too hard to understand
SIEMs do not come ready-made with important functioning abilities. If you employ a traditional SIEM service, you will have to count on yourself or on your service provider to configure SIEM for collecting, aggregating, normalizing, and correlating all the disparate technologies into one common view.
The system administrators will have to engage for multiple hours to manage all the functioning and data sources for tracking and rerouting events on the SIEM. It is not that difficult if it is just for a single or maybe two systems, but when it comes to multiple systems forming a network, it can be highly complicated on your end.
- SIEM can be too noisy
SIEMs may create unnecessary alarms and alerts for any irrelevant or not-so-important items of the organization. These alarms will alert you on almost every event which can also cause major breaks and waste necessary resources such as time and efforts. Moreover, the alert system of the SIEM also lacks in producing actionable intelligence activities that help the security managers to check, respond and investigate.
- SIEM is not so Cloud-Friendly
With the new normal based entirely on cloud and remote functionality, a security mechanism that does not support cloud is absolutely a thumbs down. Today’s corporate assets are majorly based on cloud-based systems. There are high chances that your SIEM integration will not provide any visibility to the cloud-based networks your corporate assets work on. This can cause some serious downfalls on your corporate asset’s sensitive and critical information security. Today’s security mechanism should be robust and should be portable with the cloud, no matter where you move.
- SIEM can be too Expensive
The licensing costs of even the traditional SIEMs are up above the mountains. As SIEM does not bring the capable abilities to manage its functionalities, the organizations would have to hire additional experts, technicians, and consultants to design and carry forward the SIEM’s integration process.
These in-house consultants will also have the responsibility to streamline the data-feeds and schedule important imports across all the external data sources. Also, to streamline the alert systems, these consultants would have to be involved in prioritizing and customizing correlation rules for the relevant events. This would do nothing but pile up consulting costs for their extra services, along with keeping the cost aside of the whole software alone, which you would have to buy separately.
If not traditional SIEM logging, then what?
The problems of SIEM security taking too long to detect and process any problem can be easily countered by the AI-based security program monitoring an effective zero trust solution. These AI-based monitors would not only set security standards for the network baseline but will also monitor the software and the updates as a whole to understand and be tuned to any unusual happening taking place within the system.
This would help you to detect any abnormality faster and save you additional costs. It was also seen as per the IBM Ponem Institute report that the average cost of identifying a breach late is a mammoth $8.70 million, whereas an average cost of identifying a breach on time is $5.99 million.
An AI-based monitoring system like the third-wave AI can help you to detect all the outbound traffic right away. These third-wave AIs are capable of examining the security applications as well as the network traffic at one time as soon as any unusual behavior appears.
In Conclusion
The Traditional SIEM logging mechanisms, by themselves, have now taken a traditional and orthodox approach with the ineffective security mechanism it offers. It has also been difficult for the SIEM to detect any anomaly immediately and to respond effectively. The unattended and undetected attacks can cause a big-time loss to the organizations and might lead them to lose all their reputation and business on a slide. It is important in today’s generation to safeguard and implement robust solutions that are not vulnerable to dangerous hacks and attacks.
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