As I look over my experience in Information Security since 1999, I see three distinct eras with respect to the motivation driving technical control purchases:

  • Basic (mid-90’s to early 2000’s) – Organizations implemented basic host-based and network-based technical security controls, i.e. anti-virus and firewalls respectively.
  • Compliance (early 2000’s to mid 2000’s) – Compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI drove major improvements in security.
  • Breach Prevention and Incident Detection & Response (BPIDR) (late 2000’s to present) – Organizations realize that regulatory compliance represents a minimum level of security, and is not sufficient to cope with the fast changing methods used by cyber predators. Meeting compliance requirements will not effectively reduce the likelihood of a breach by more skilled and aggressive adversaries or detect their malicious activity.

I have three examples to support the shift from the Compliance era to the Breach Prevention and Incident Detection & Response (BPIDR) era. The first is the increasing popularity of Palo Alto Networks. No compliance regulation I am aware of makes the distinction between a traditional stateful inspection firewall and a Next Generation Firewall as defined by Gartner in their 2009 research report.  Yet in the last four years, 6,000 companies have selected Palo Alto Networks because their NGFWs enable organizations to regain control of traffic at points in their networks where trust levels change or ought to change.

The second example is the evolution of Log Management/SIEM. One can safely say that the driving force for most Log/SIEM purchases in the early to mid 2000s was compliance. The fastest growing vendors of that period had the best compliance reporting capabilities. However, by the late 2000s, many organizations began to realize they needed better detection controls. We began so see a shift in the SIEM market to those solutions which not only provided the necessary compliance reports, but could also function satisfactorily as the primary detection control within limited budget requirements. Hence the ascendancy of Q1 Labs, which actually passed ArcSight in number of installations prior to being acquired by IBM.

The third example is email security. From a compliance perspective, Section 5 of PCI DSS, for example, is very comprehensive regarding anti-virus software. However, it is silent regarding phishing. The popularity of products from Proofpoint and FireEye show that organizations have determined that blocking email-borne viruses is simply not adequate. Phishing and particularly spear-phishing must be addressed.

Rather than simply call the third era “Breach Prevention,” I chose to add “Incident Detection & Response” because preventing all system compromises that could lead to a breach is not possible. You must assume that Prevention controls will have failures. Therefore you must invest in Detection controls as well. Too often, I have seen budget imbalances in favor of Prevention controls.

The goal of a defense-in-depth architecture is to (1) prevent breaches by minimizing attack surfaces, controlling access to assets, and preventing threats and malicious behavior on allowed traffic, and (2) to detect malicious activity missed by prevention controls and detect compromised systems more quickly to minimize the risk of disclosure of confidential data.

18. October 2011 · Comments Off on Practical SIEM Deployment | SecurityWeek.Com · Categories: blog · Tags: , ,

Practical SIEM Deployment | SecurityWeek.Com. Chris Poulin, from Q1 Labs, has an excellent article in SecurityWeek on practical SIEM deployment.

Chris points out that SIEM is more challenging than say Anti-Virus because (1) there are so many possible use cases for a modern SIEM and (2) context is a factor.

Chris describes the general use cases that apply to most organizations and are mostly ready to deploy using out-of-the-box rules, dashboard widgets, reports, and saved searches:

  • Botnet detection
  • Excessive authentication failures
  • Traffic from darknets
  • IDS alerts that a particular attack is targeting an asset that the VA scanner confirms is vulnerable to that exploit
These cover many of the controls in compliance mandates and provide a good foundation for your log management program, not to mention they’re the main log sources used by default rules in most SIEMs. 
It surely makes sense that Phase 1 of a SIEM project should focus on collecting telemetry from key log sources and implementing the general use cases itemized above.
Chris points out that while IPS/IDS is core telemetry, it should not be part of Phase 1 because there can be a lot of tuning work needed if the IPS/IDSs have not already been tuned. So I will call IPS/IDS integration Phase 2, although Phase 1 includes basic IPS/IDS – Vulnerability matching.
If the IPS/IDSs are well tuned for direct analysis using the IPS/IDS’s console, then by all means include them in phase one. In addition, if the IPS/IDSs are well-tuned, it’s been my experience that you ought to consider “de-tuning” or opening up the IPS/IDSs somewhat and leverage the SIEM to generate more actionable intelligence.
Chris says that the next phase (by my count, Phase 3) ought to be integrating network activity, i.e. flows if the SIEM “has natively integrated network activity so it adds context and situational awareness.” If not, save flow integration for organization-specific use cases.
Network activity can automatically discover and profile assets in your environment, and dramatically simplify the tuning process. Vulnerability Assessment (VA) scanners can also build an asset model; however, VA scanners are noisy, performing active probes rather than passively watching the network, and only give you a point -in-time view of the network. To be sure, VA scanners are core telemetry, and every SIEM deployment should integrate them, but not as a replacement for native network activity monitoring, which provides a near-real-time view and can alert to new assets popping up, network scans—even low and slow ones—and DDoS attacks. And if you’re monitoring network activity and collecting flows, don’t forget to collect the events from the routers and switches as well.
At this point, with the first three phases complete, the security team has demonstrated the value of SIEM and is well down the product learning curve. Therefore you are ready to focus on organization-specific use cases (my Phase 4), for example adding application and database logs.