This week the US government as well as many enterprises were hit by a cyber attack, dubbed Solorigate, via the SUNBURST backdoor. Fireeye (also a victim of the attack) has done a great analysis of how the attack works, and we recommend reading it. But we’ll focus on a couple of takeaways instead of the precise details of how it worked. What we can learn from it in order to improve our cybersecurity posture.

The events of 2020 brought us unprecedented challenges that no one was prepared for, changing the way we live, work, and communicate, impacting the global economy, all geographic regions, and every single industry. In such a downturn cybercrime flourishes, especially when organizations move most of their operations and processes online.

Many people, when reviewing their security strategy, ask the question “is SIEM suitable for my organization”, or simply “is SIEM right for me?” And for a long time, the answer was “no unless you are a large multinational”. The price, the complexity and the hard-to-get value made SIEM a category suitable only for the big corporations with large security teams and budgets.

There’s an unwritten rule that every machine that becomes visible on the internet is under attack in under 5 seconds. We recently deployed our LogSentinel SIEM honeypot with one of our customers and that rule proved correct – immediately malicious requests from all over the world started pouring in, on almost all the protocols that we support – SSH, RDP, SMB, HTTP, and they haven’t stopped since.

We have built our LogSentinel SIEM around some core principles and we’d like to share and explain them.

PSD2 is the new EU Directive that aims to open up the banks and allow non-banking institutions to provide payment services. It is a great thing but it comes with many requirements. They are in the form of implementing and delegated acts of the European Commission as well as guidelines of the European Banking Authority. The directive, the implementing acts, and the guidelines are mostly best industry practices with regard to security and risk management.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are vital to each organization. They transform simple event logs from various applications to detailed, in-depth behavior analysis thanks to advanced visualizations and analytics and sometimes machine learning and AI. They contain a palette of aspects covering the most crucial information security issues.

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems have a reputation for being expensive. And that’s generally correct – they can cost hundreds of thousands per year or have huge upfront costs. But why is that? There are several main reasons: All of this is changing. According to Gartner, SIEMs are going to the mid-market and these things don’t hold true there.

The number of cyberattacks has increased five-fold after COVID-19, as the pandemic brought new opportunities to cybercriminals. At this rate, cybersecurity threats are estimated to cost the world US $6 trillion a year by 2021. Since remote working became “the new normal”, it also became a growing gateway to new forms of data theft and as a result, companies face significantly increased risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches.