Organizations today may have a false sense of security when it comes to the security of their own environments. In fact, there are numerous ways companies make it easier for threat actors to gain access into their systems undetected. To complicate matters even further, the sheer volume of threats companies face makes it impossible to uncover security events quickly—even if many are benign.

By better understanding what and where the challenges are, organizations can be better equipped to find solutions that help them combat these threats. This blog will explore some of the common security challenges that exist within organizations today and then examine how Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions can enable companies to prioritize, prevent, and address ongoing cybersecurity threats.  

How Are Companies Unintentionally Putting Themselves at Risk?

In today’s dynamic landscape, there are a number of cybersecurity threats organizations regularly face that they may not even be aware of, including malicious insider attacks, inadvertent insiders, excessive access, misconfigurations, and brute force attacks. Let’s take a brief look at each of these:

  • Malicious Insider Threats: This type of threat occurs when an individual, like a disgruntled employee or someone who has recently been let go, still has access to data and applications within an organization. The person may then try to steal information on behalf of outsiders or for personal gain.
     
  • Inadvertent Insiders: Insider threats from inadvertent insiders typically happen through phishing, poor passwords, spear-phishing, and orphaned accounts. This means someone in the organization has made a mistake doing something that they did not intend to, but has caused some form of threat or damage.
     
  • Excessive Access: This type of challenge occurs in organizations when individuals have more access than they need, caused through rubber stamping access approvals, overprovisioning, or changing job roles in the organization. Frequently, this occurs when organizations do not adhere to the principle of least privilege and there are privilege access violations of policies. It is critical to monitor the organizational environment for changes to user profiles, invalid login attempts, and other intrusion detections.
     
  • Misconfigurations: Misconfigurations are a common threat within organizations and can pose a serious security threat. In fact, according to Gartner, 95 percent of firewall breaches are caused by firewall misconfigurations, not firewall flaws themselves. Simple configuration changes can allow significant access to systems if they are not done correctly.
     
  • Brute Force Attacks: This type of threat is occurring more and more often. Not only does it occur when threat actors are simply jamming passwords until they guess the correct one, it also happens when an automated tool is used to crack passwords. Many automated password crackers can generate billions of guesses per minute. So if individuals are not creating complex passwords, limiting the number of times people can log in, or locking out users who exceed the number of failed log in attempts, it can open your organization for potential breaches that you may not be aware of.
     

How Does a SIEM Solution Address These Major Cybersecurity Threats?

The types of cybersecurity threats described here represent major challenges for organizations that have limited visibility into their environments. So how do you really know what could be the biggest threat to your infrastructure? And how can you more easily recognize what you need to address out of the thousands of potential events that happen each day?

The answer is through a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution that provides real-time threat detection and prioritization. With all the data sources coming in, whether it’s from hardware, from a software application, from an operating system, or from a database engine, an effective SIEM solution gathers all this relevant data, brings it into a single system where the data can be centralized, and then provides it in a view that is easy to see and easy to understand.

Prioritize and Remediate

Let’s face it, companies today are unable to manually validate the thousands of alerts they receive each day, so they need to have intelligence to help prioritize and make decisions. With a SIEM, you can tailor and personalize alerts that are most important to you. And if you find something that is not relevant, you can remove it from alerting you again in the future.

Being able to compare data also makes it easier for security teams to understand how things are progressing inside of their environments, and gives them a better way to manage and maintain those systems and solutions over time. This means you get an instant warning with critical information you can use to protect your environments, enabling your organization to investigate and remediate.

What does this actually look like? With automated escalation, notifications are rapidly sent to exactly the right security team members when a threat requires action, allowing them to quickly prevent or neutralize risks. This means your security teams and analysts can determine in real-time if they need to go and investigate further. If it’s determined an event was bad, a course of action can be taken to work the issue to resolution.
 

Take Your Next Step

If you are ready to understand where your greatest challenges are and prioritize potential threats across your organization, then it’s time to take the next step and learn about the right SIEM solution for you. Event Manager from Core Security identifies, records, and prioritizes incidents across your organization, reducing alert fatigue by only generating alerts when needed. Start protecting your business against common cybersecurity threats using SIEM today.