Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Nearly all security experts agree that event log data gives you visibility into and documentation over threats facing your environment. Even knowing this, many security professionals don’t have the time to collect, manage, and correlate log data because they don’t have the right solution. The key to security log management is to collect the correct data so your security team can get better alerts to detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster.

In the last six months, multiple major cyber attacks have severely impacted hundreds of organizations in both the public and private sectors, and disrupted the daily lives of tens of thousands of their employees and customers.

With more people working from home, the threat landscape continues to change. Things change daily, and cybersecurity staff needs to change with them to protect information. Threat hunting techniques for an evolving landscape need to tie risk together with log data. Within your environment, there are a few things that you can do to prepare for effective threat hunting. Although none of these is a silver bullet, they can get you better prepared to investigate an alert.

For logs and tracking insider threats, you need to start with the relevant data. In these turbulent times, IT teams leverage centralized log management solutions for making decisions. As the challenges change, the way you’re monitoring logs for insider threats needs to change too. Furloughs, workforce reductions, and business practice changes as part of the COVID stay-at-home mandates impacted IT teams.

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.