Log Management Best Practices for SIEM
14.06.2019
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Undoubtedly, log management is the heart of any SIEM solution. The more access to logs your SIEM has the better it will be able to perform. Logs help in identifying who attacked your organization and how these malicious actors penetrate your corporate network. By logging all the vital information related to network devices and other critical systems, you will be able to get a deeper insight into your organization’s cybersecurity posture.
In this article, you will know log management best practices for your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. These practices will help you better identify threats and improve the performance of your SIEM.
Log Management Best Practices
Effective log management is not only valuable for SIEM but also helps in meeting compliance standards. If you want to really extract the best out of your SIEM tool, you need to have an effective log management system in place. However, merely having the right log management system is not adequate. Instead, the proper implementation of log management is indispensable. Below are some log management best practices for your SIEM system and they certainly assist in achieving maximum through logs.
Accurate Log Collection:
One of the best starting points when it comes to log management is to have a clear idea of what you want these logs for. For example, logs can be collected to pinpoint areas of poor performance, diagnose and identify the root cause of applications installation and runtime errors, and assessing application health and troubleshooting. Needless to say, in this article, we are collecting log data to optimize a SIEM solution. Moreover, you should not feed unwanted logs to your SIEM. Doing so can help you to prevent overburden your SIEM and reduce the chances of false positives. In most cases, you will be collecting logs from servers, workstations, web servers, databases, IDS, endpoint security software, VPNs, and other systems, as well as gathering logs from network devices such as routers, domain controllers, switches, application servers, wireless access points and so forth.
The Best Log Analysis and Auditing Practices
Logs are very powerful. They are key to security as they contain valuable security information such as attackers' IP address; attacking time and location, and so on. Effective log analysis and auditing is a crucial element to make your SIEM tool result-oriented. With SIEM, you can expedite a log collection and generate audit reports in a graphical format to visualize security information. Once you have been acquired a report, you will have the right information in hand you are looking for. With this meaningful information, you can also check your security compliance with regulatory rules such as PCI or GDPR.
Event Correlation Using Logs
Event correlation using logs is one of the most important functions of a SIEM solution because it helps in identifying the security red flags across your organization. You may have a huge number of different logs. These logs are injected in the SIEM to perform a correlation. There is a possibility of having several abnormal actions happening in the system. These abnormal actions do not necessarily mean a security threat when they are happening randomly. However, if these actions happen in a specific manner, one after the other, then it may be an indication of an imminent threat. To detect a potential threat effectively, you need to recognize the cyber attack pattern or the pattern in which these events are happening. For proactive defense against security threats, you need to have a strong correlation engine that can establish correlation rules for different events happening in your network.
The Bottom Line
Most of the SIEM deployments in the 1990s failed mainly because of the fact that there was no log management in place. Many organizations do not have log management as one of their top priorities because they are unaware of its advantages. For any cybersecurity system to work effectively, you need a well-organized log management system to provide essential logs to SIEM.
