Australia’s premiere SIEM Tool and Cyber Security Specialists, Loop Secure, provide you with best-practice industry techniques to utilise USM Anywhere SIEM technology in your organisation. These tips will help you to effectively manage, secure and monitor all your devices & applications to prevent cyber-attacks affecting your daily business activities.
Over recent years, businesses all over Australia have been transferring their data from traditional infrastructure and systems, into the cloud, with seamless integration into their network. Taking advantage of the endless possibilities that cloud provides to an organisation enables the business to reach critical objectives. However, it can all come crashing down with one malicious attachment from a phishing email, malware installed on a server, discovery of a bitcoin miner, DDOS, or a ransomware attack. Suddenly an organisation’s day-to-day operational activities come to a screeching halt. Taking the necessary steps to avoid becoming a victim of these attacks means ensuring that your cybersecurity team must be skilled and aware of possible threats hidden in plain sight.
Placing security controls and technology across your environment, such as a SIEM tool, is just a tiny step towards securing your organisation’s environment. To effectively prevent current and future cyber-attacks from targeting your organisation, skilled cybersecurity specialists, analysts and effective processes are needed to utilise the technology. Fortunately for you, our qualified Loop Secure cybersecurity experts in SIEM security and our partner, AT&T Cybersecurity, has given 7 of their most effective tips to utilising USM Anywhere.
USM Anywhere is an all in-one-platform designed to provide and guarantee complete defence to your organisation against current security threats, with the right knowledge and skills, your IT team could proactively retain the right information to prevent attacks and be the first line of defence against threat actors. Here are the seven best-practice tips on how to detect threats using USM Anywhere:
1. Plan your SIEM strategy
Before implementing AlienVault SIEM, establish the requirements and get a clear picture of the requirements of your SIEM deployment strategy. Know your goals and prioritise targets for those goals, as well as an overall framework. Each organisation has different objectives for a SIEM deployment, so think about the use cases for your business particularly. Evaluate what the solution will do for your organisation and proceed onwards. Careful mapping of events, incorporating all systems, servers, applications, and devices need to take place for USM Anywhere SIEM to be effective in security incident management.
2. Understand Your Threats
It is critical to your organisation that you understand the current environment and possible threats that could occur, for a SIEM implementation to be a success. Analyse every event in your environment, evaluate and critique what’s normal and ask yourself, what’s the timeframe of responding to a threat and magnitude of impact towards your operation?
3. Collect Valuable Data. It is about quality, not quantity.
To take absolute advantage of AlienVault SIEM capabilities, make sure to feed your SIEM system ‘valuable data’, data that matters, data that may be targeted by cybercriminals. Overstuffing your SIEM with useless data without context means your SIEM will become an alarm generator, providing little value to the organisation and security team. Set limitations when collecting data and prioritise high value environments, devices and applications that have potential to be targeted by your next adversary.
4. Conduct a Purple Team – Test Use Cases and Visibility
When purple teams are conducted, your organisation will gain greater benefit of the SIEM tool, by identifying gaps in real-time with security logs. This approach greatly reduces the possibility of complex and sophisticated threat attackers accessing your environment, due to the knowledge of both teams working together, to simulate real-life attack scenarios that test the SIEM. The USM Anywhere SIEM benefits from having purple teams conducted, to create a constant improvement approach to incident response and vulnerability procedures.
5. Dedicated and Trained Staff
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is an obvious point to make but having a dedicated and well-resourced security analyst team is essential to making a SIEM a valuable investment. Without specialists viewing the alarms being generated through a SIEM, no security outcome can be achieved. The benefits of having a team of security analysts in your organisation go beyond responding to alarms – they respond when an incident is occurring to mitigate the business impact.
6. Security Incident Response Plan
An incident is a high-stress situation that has an emotional impact on those involved, and without a plan, those involved may make a decision that results in further compromise. Ensuring that your organisation has a tried and tested security incident response plan ensures you can respond with confidence, utilising USM Anywhere. The incident response plan outlines the role of each person in the team, and actions needed to be taken during an event, and communication with customers, stakeholders, and law enforcement.
7. Have a program for Continual Improvement
Your team should have a continuous improvement program, designed to tune the SIEM tool to improve incident response capabilities. Refinement and alert tuning will guarantee prevention, more accurate detection and threat intelligence. Remember, cybercriminals are always coming up with different methods to breach your organisation through complex and sophisticated forms of attacks, so by creating a culture of constant development through your security tools, policies and procedures, you are staying one step ahead against cyber-attacks.
For more information about AT&T USM Anywhere and Loop Secure’s Managed Detection Response, click here.
