The hybrid workforce is here to stay. With that in mind, you should start putting more robust cybersecurity controls in place to mitigate risk. Virtual private networks (VPNs) help secure data, but they are also challenging to bring into your log monitoring and management strategy. VPN and firewall log management gives real-time visibility into security risks. Many VPN and firewall log monitoring problems are similar to log management in general.

The FireEye breach on Dec 8, 2020, was executed by a “nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” These hackers got a hold of FireEye’s own toolkit, which they can use to mount new attacks globally. What does this mean for you? Mandiant is a leading Red Team/Penetration Testing company with a highly sophisticated toolkit, called the "Red Team tools." These are digital tools that replicate some of the best hacking tools in the world.

Yesterday, FireEye published a report about a global intrusion campaign that utilized a backdoor planted in SolarWinds Orion. Attackers gained access to the download servers of Orion. They managed to infect signed installers downloaded by Orion users who had all reason to believe that the packages are safe and had not been tampered with. With this information out in the world, teams are scrambling to investigate if their environments are affected by this breach.

While all cybersecurity professionals agree that log management is integral for robust proactive and reactive security, managing the enormous amount of data logs can be a challenge. While you might be tempted to collect all logs generated from your systems, software, network devices, and users, this “fear of missing out” on an important notification ultimately leads to so much noise that your security analysts and threat hunters cannot find the most important information.

Security log management is the process of collecting, storing, and correlating the network data that details all activity in your systems and networks. Every action in an organization’s network generates event data, including records produced by operating systems, applications, devices, and users. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) identifies log management as a basic control for detecting malicious actors and software hiding in networks and on machines.

Every day we discover new vulnerabilities in our systems, cracks in the fence the adversaries take advantage of to get into your organization and wreak havoc. Understanding what you have in your environment (e.g., types of devices, systems equipment, etc.) is very important in order to make sure the controls in place are working and more importantly, keeping up with the threat landscape.

As companies responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with remote work, cybercriminals increased their social engineering and ransomware attack methodologies. Ransomware, malicious code that automatically downloads to a user’s device and locks it from further use, has been rampant since the beginning of March 2020. According to a 2020 report by Bitdefender, ransomware attacks increased by seven times when compared year-over-year to 2019.

Monitoring all DNS requests in your network, including those that were blocked by (e.g., by a firewall) is a great way to increase visibility, enforce compliance and detect threats. A common problem with collecting DNS logs is that DNS server logs are notoriously hard to parse. Also, parsing only the logs of your DNS servers leaves a blind spot when it comes to usage of, or the attempt to use, an external DNS server like Google's 8.8.8.8.