Regardless of economic conditions, IT usually operates under an axiom no one in business ever likes to hear: “We have to do more with less.” Doing more with less is essentially the default position for IT, but when it comes to security operations, that position can have real consequences.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology has become a fundamental part of identifying and guarding against cyber attacks. It is one of the essential technologies powering the modern security operations center (SOC). SIEM is an umbrella term that includes multiple technologies, including log management, security log aggregation, event management, event correlation, behavioral analytics, and security automation.
I think we’ve all been there before – you log on to a server remotely via RDP, and do the needful – but don’t immediately log off. But then you get distracted by a phone call, an email, a chat, or a good old-fashioned physical interaction with another human being. So when it comes time clock out for the night, you shut down your computer or log off. Or maybe you’ve been working on a laptop and your VPN got interrupted.
Since joining Cribl in July, I’ve had frequent conversations with Federal teams about observability data they collect from networks and systems, and how they use and retain this data in their SIEM tool(s). Cribl LogStream’s ability to route, shape, reduce, enrich, and replay data can play an invaluable role for Federal Agencies. Over several blogs, we will walk through the power that we bring to these requirements.
It is commonly believed that once data is collected and ingested into a system of analysis, the most difficult part of obtaining the data is complete. However, in many cases, this is just the first step for the infrastructure and security operations teams expected to derive insights.
Just when the Microsoft Exchange exploit CVE-2021-26855 thought it would win the “Exploit of the year” award, it got unseated by the – still evolving – Log4J exploit just weeks before the end of the year! Had somebody asked Sysadmins in November what Log4J was then I suspect that the majority would have had no idea. It seems that the biggest challenge the Log4J exploit poses for Sysadmins is simply the fact that nobody knows all the places where Log4J is being used.
We see unfriendly customer practices all around in the SIEM space. For example, some major SIEM vendors use an Events Per Second (EPS) license model to monetize access to their tools. Typically, these vendors will drop data above the EPS license or stop data ingestion to incentive license compliance if you run over your EPS license. These license controls disrupt operations and risk enterprise security posture, which can cause chaos.
Making security an intrinsic part of a DevOps pipeline is a “must-have” for organizations looking to secure their applications earlier in the development process. The combination of JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Xray enables organizations to build security into all phases of their software development lifecycle, so they can proactively detect and mitigate open source software (OSS) security vulnerabilities and license compliance issues that impact their software.
