It’s time again for another meeting with senior leadership. You know that they will ask you the hard questions, like “how do you know that your detection and response times are ‘good enough’?” You think you’re doing a good job securing the organization. You haven’t had a security incident yet. At the same time, you also know that you have no way to prove your approach to security is working. You’re reading your threat intelligence feeds.

What kind of log information should be reported up the chain? At a certain point during log examination analysts start to ask, “What information is important enough to share with my supervisor?” This post covers useful categories of information to monitor and report that indicate potential security issues. And remember: reporting up doesn’t mean going directly to senior management. Most issues can be reported directly to an immediate supervisor.

It’s mid-morning. You’re scanning the daily news while enjoying a coffee break. You come across yet another headline broadcasting a supply chain data breach. Your heart skips a quick, almost undetectable, beat. You have the technology in the headline in your stack. You set aside your coffee and begin furiously scanning through the overwhelming number of alerts triggered across all your technologies.

Your senior leadership started stressing out about data breaches. It’s not that they haven’t worried before, but they’ve also started looking at the rising tide of data breach awareness. Specifically, they’re starting to see more new security and privacy laws passed at the state and federal levels. Now, you’ve been tasked with the very unenviable job of choosing a compliance framework, and you’re looking at the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Controls.

It was just another day in paradise. Well, it was as close to paradise as working in IT can be. Then, your boss read about another data breach and started asking questions about how well you’re managing security. Unfortunately, while you know you’re doing the day-to-day work, your documentation has fallen by the wayside. As much as people are loathed to admit it, this is where compliance can help.

Many companies are looking to find a source of threat intelligence that can give them better visibility into the risks unique to their technology stack. While some may not be using threat intelligence, others may not be getting the value they could. Choosing and integrating threat intelligence sources into your cybersecurity monitoring is challenging, but you do need to keep some considerations in mind during the process.

Struggling with the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape often means feeling one step behind cybercriminals. Interconnected cloud ecosystems expand your digital footprint, increasing the attack surface. More users, data, and devices connected to your networks mean more monitoring for cyber attacks. Detecting suspicious activity before or during the forensic investigation is how centralized log management supports cybersecurity.

Beginning with v4.3, which is expected to be available within a month, Graylog will add support for OpenSearch v1.1 and v1.2 as the log message and event data repository. We will continue to also support Elasticsearch v6.8 and 7.10 with this release, though Graylog Security v2.0 will require OpenSearch.

As you’re settling in with your Monday morning coffee, your email pings. The subject line reads, “Documentation Request.” With the internal sigh that only happens on a Monday morning when compliance is about to change your entire to-do list, you remember it’s that time of the year again. You need to pull together the documentation for your external auditor as part of your annual ISO 27000 and ISO 27001 audit.

Log messages - also known as event logs, audit records, and audit trails – document computing events occurring in IT environments. Generated or triggered by the software or the user, log messages provide visibility into and documentation of almost every action on a system. So, with all that in mind, let’s explore all the biggest log management challenges of modern IT and the solutions for these problems.