When modern businesses began embracing digital transformation at the beginning of this millennium, they soon encountered a problem that is as evident today as it was then: the attack surface is too large and diverse for each element to be monitored individually. Security teams have too many things to look at and not enough people to look at everything; and even if the team were to be significantly expanded, which is usually not possible due to budgetary and talent availability constraints, no individual could obtain a big picture view of cybersecurity across the entire organisation as knowledge of individual elements was spread across many people.

SIEM was created to solve this problem.

What is SIEM?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a solution that gathers cybersecurity event data from across the enterprise. Security teams need not manually obtain logs from individual devices and applications and integrate them. The SIEM significantly reduces the effort involved in data gathering and moves the focus to real-time analysis of the data. This allows security teams and the enterprise to move from a reactive to proactive posture and eliminate security gaps, improving both cyber defence and compliance.

Cloud-based SIEMs further increase the potency of SIEMs, enabling seamless cybersecurity management across continents for enterprise with branches and operations distributed across geographies and jurisdictions.

What All Does an SIEM Integrate?

The power of an SIEM depends on the variety of IT assets it can integrate, as anything that it does not integrate will need separate monitoring which increases cybersecurity effort and complexity and decreases effectiveness. Modern SIEMs, therefore, cast a very wide net over the organisation and will usually integrate

• Endpoints
• Applications
• Networks
• Firewalls
• Endpoint Protection
• Cloud
• Users

SIEMs provide extensive and continuous visibility into all aspects of the business’s IT ecosystem with centralised monitoring.

The SIEM Challenge

When SIEMs integrate the entire enterprise digital ecosystem and enable real-time monitoring, a proactive cybersecurity posture is maintained – in theory. In practice, SIEMs can generate a very large number of alerts with many false positives and without relevant information, overwhelming security teams and placing them in the position of being unable to see the wood for the trees. Alert fatigue sets in quickly and security team members do not know what to prioritise, resulting in a return to a reactive security posture and firefighting after an incident occurs takes the place of preventing security lapses.

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat Intelligence (TI) is threat signals gathered from around the world and enriched with context to add intelligence to threat information. From being overwhelmed with alerts, security teams can use threat intelligence to gain abstracted information on malicious digital activity to prioritise responding to the most concerning digital events. Threat intelligence enables security teams to verify that a pattern of digital activity in their organisation matches digital activity of an emerging threat.

Consider a situation where, within an ocean of alerts, the SIEM indicates that employees are using a new software tool. Threat intelligence indicates that a threat actor is targeting organisations in this industry and region by exploiting vulnerabilities in an older version of the software tool. The security team can now prioritise creating rules to automatically block installation or execution of the vulnerable version of the software tool, pre-empting attacks that have a high probability of targeting their operations.

SIEM Alerts Are Made Actionable By Threat Intelligence

The volume of SIEM alerts can make the alerts indistinguishable from noise. Threat intelligence adds the knowledge that makes them actionable. Threat intelligence provides multiple benefits to SIEM solutions that enable security teams to act quickly and decisively.

1. Proactive Threat Defence – By cross-referencing security events with threat data from around the world, security teams can act to repel attacks at the emergent stage rather than waiting for signs of operational disruption
2. Elimination of False Positives – The fatigue from alerts is caused by the need to investigate all alerts, many of which may eventually be resolved as benign activity. Threat intelligence allows alerts to be filtered through threat information for removal of false positives, enabling the team to direct energy and attention to confirmed threat activity
3. Alert Prioritisation – Threat intelligence informs security teams of the severity of threats, allowing them to quickly prioritise alerts for high severity threats and deploy protective measures before an attack can initialise
4. Enhanced Compliance – Threat intelligence makes security teams aware of vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited in their industry/region, ensuring patches are installed before exploitation and avoiding non-compliance penalties
5. Automated Incident Response – SIEMs can ingest threat intelligence feeds and automate response to suspected malicious activity, such as isolation of potentially compromised devices to prevent threat propagation within the enterprise network, giving security teams time to investigate the event and decide on appropriate remedial action
6. Reduced MTTR – SIEMs enhanced with threat intelligence enable security teams to quickly gain information relevant to the encountered threat and launch informed mitigation measures, shrinking the Mean Time To Respond (MTTR), enhancing cyber defence effectiveness, and improving the ROI on cybersecurity investment

K7 Threat Intel Feed Service

More than just an Indicator of Compromise (IOC) feed, the K7 Threat Intel Feed Service provides a 30,000-foot view of enterprise threats and delivers contextual, actionable threat intelligence for enhanced threat detection and incident investigation. Security teams gain a big picture view from where they can drill down to specific events or activities that require additional monitoring or response.

Data Sources

The K7 Threat Intel Feed Service aggregates threat-related metadata from globally distributed sources, ensuring comprehensive intelligence on all cyberthreat activity. Data sources include

• Telemetry data from endpoints
• Open and closed darknet forums
• Honeypots
• Industry collaborations and alliances

Types of Feeds

The K7 Threat Intel Feed Service provides threat-related information in various forms:

• Strategic Reports – High-level campaign overviews, and emerging trends
• Tactical Indicators – IPs, domains, file hashes, CVEs, phishing URLs
• Operational Alerts – Streaming via STIX/TAXII/JSON, for automated ingestion

The K7 Threat Intel Feed Service, backed by K7 Labs which analyses hundreds of thousands of cyberthreat samples every day, enables SIEMs to deliver, superior cyberthreat prediction, detection, prevention, and response. Contact Us to learn more about how K7 can help your organisation identify and mitigate cybersecurity risk with threat intelligence.