SIEM 3 The Next Generation
SIEM 3 The Next Generation
SIEM 3 The Next Generation
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2008 TechTarget
Rick Caccia is Vice President of Product Strategy of ArcSight. Caccia spent 15 years designing and managing infrastructure systems with a focus on security and identity management. Prior to ArcSight, he led product management at Symantec for e-mail and Web security products. Prior to Symantec, Caccia was at Oblix, leading product management and marketing for identity management, access control, and Web services policy. He has a master's degree in marketing and technology management from U.C. Berkeley.
BIO
This IT Briefing is based on an ArcSight/TechTarget Webcast, SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring. This TechTarget IT Briefing covers the following topics: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Evolution of SIEM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 SIEM 1.0 - Protecting the Perimeter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 SIEM 2.0 - Protecting the Network. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Impacts of These Changes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 SIEM 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Protecting the Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Example Involving a Contractor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Example Involving Compliance Violation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Example Involving Account Takeover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Evaluating SIEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Broad Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Auto-Learning in SIEM 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Auto-Response in SIEM 3.0. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Scale in SIEM 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Applications in SIEM 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Beyond SIEM 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 ArcSight SIEM Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Event Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Asset and User Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 New Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 IdentityView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Deploying the Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Common Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Copyright 2008 ArcSight. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as allowed under the copyright laws. About TechTarget IT Briefings TechTarget IT Briefings provide the pertinent information that senior-level IT executives and managers need to make educated purchasing decisions. Originating from our industry-leading Vendor Connection and Expert Webcasts, TechTarget-produced IT Briefings turn Webcasts into easy-to-follow technical briefs, similar to white papers. Design Copyright 20042008 TechTarget. All Rights Reserved. For inquiries and additional information, contact: Dennis Shiao Director of Product Management, Webcasts dshiao@techtarget.com
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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vide an early alert for IT as well as indicating which machines need repair.
Changes
This section discusses some of the dramatic changes affecting the IT environment.
Data Changes
More data is online and exposed to the Internet. More and more paper documents have been digitized and more and more forms are online. So more data is exposed to the public network, resulting in more data breaches, which are happening more often with greater impact. More risk brings more regulations, which bring more penalties.
IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Online transactions also include self-service stock trading and wire transfers. As a result of all these online transactions, more money is moving over the network, providing more opportunity for problems.
More Layoffs
More mergers mean more layoffs that, apart from the personal effects, bring increased potential for data loss. An IT World study indicates that 88% of IT administrators said they would take confidential information if they knew they were getting laid off. Even if this number were off by a factor of two, it would still be a serious problem.
SIEM 3.0
These changes and their impacts are causing many organizations to reconfigure their businesses. Security is becoming more challenging; to protect the business, monitoring becomes much more important. SIEM 3.0 can be a significant help with these new challenges.
IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Figure 5
flags. First he has been using his badge to access the workspace after hours. His role in the identity management system is a contractor and generally it is against policy for this customers contractors to come in after hours. Correlating file system logs indicates that he has copied some confidential files from the NetApp filer. Finally, using firewall logs, correlating that information helps determine that he has uploaded files to an unknown site. This monitoring has enabled this customer to identify a contractor engaged in improper activity.
Evaluating SIEM
This section discusses how you can evaluate SIEM products against the issues we have discussed.
IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Broad Collection
First, you need to address the impacts on the business caused by recent changes. Look for software that can collect information from a broad range of sources. Relatively simple sources include firewalls, routers, and switches. More expensive sources include phones, badge readers, servers, and laptops. Even more expensive sources include the identity management and access control systems, the file servers, and the data leakage prevention products, as well as packaged applications. It is important to be able to examine the event information from all those systems.
be automatic, or through some kind of guided workflow, or the administrator can be helped along, but you need to shorten the time between problem detection and resolution. For example, when the SIEM system determines that a companys sales rep is copying confidential data and is about to leave to go to a competitor, it should be able to automatically shut that rep out of the key systems immediately to prevent more loss. It is useful to find the problem, but it is also useful to contain the problem.
Normalization
When you collect information from all those systems, you will notice that the events are logged in a variety of formats, which makes them very difficult to correlate. The login from the firewall, the login from the mainframe, the login from Windows, and the login from the phone systemnone of these events looks the same, so you are comparing apples to oranges to strawberries to something else. Until you normalize the formats, you cannot compare them, so you cannot analyze them to determine whether you have an issue. You need to convert all these formats to a common format, essentially making everything look like an apple. Now you can compare them.
IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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relates information from medical devices during drug trials to learn about drug interactions. Another organization is using the SIEM for biohazard monitoring by correlating shipping manifests and cargo scans and other useful information to discover any issues. The monitoring platform that comes with a good SIEM product can solve a variety of problems beyond just catching worms sneaking past the firewall.
Event Collection
The first strength of the ArcSight SIEM involves event collection, illustrated in Figure 7. ArcSight believes it offers the most comprehensive event collection and normalization on the market, collecting from just under 300 types of data sources out of the box. Each of these is normalized to our common event format. For example, a failed login from Windows, a failed login from a mainframe, and a failed login from a Linux server generate event data that is converted to the same format, allowing for some interesting analysis. The key point of this normalization is that, besides providing a better analysis, it gives you analysis that is future-proof. Many IT organizations want to upgrade pieces of their environment. They want to be able to normalize the data in their analysis even when some equipment has been upgraded. Rip out Cisco and put in Check Point; rip out Check Point and put in Juniperthe ArcSight analysis still works.
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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these monitors and models understand severity, susceptibility to attack, and attack history. This allows you to identify the high-impact assets on the network and enables you to write rules and, when appropriate, raise a warning. In addition to modeling assets, you can also model users, enabling you to relate multiple accounts to understand a users true identity and examine his or her activity. You can do profiling to understand historically what this users patterns are and the result is that you can identify who the highimpact users are. You can now write correlation rules that enable you to know when a high-impact user touches a high-impact asset that may be a risk, and you can take a specific action.
multiple accounts to a unique ID, do compliance reporting and access violation alerts, and perform activity profiling for automatic machine learning. The result is that you get much more in terms of security and compliance.
New Applications
New applications can run on top of the ArcSight platform.
IdentityView
As Figure 9 shows, ArcSight IdentityView is a privileged user monitoring application, which does many of the things described above. IdentityView is a specialized SIEM 3.0 application that can auto-synchronize with identity management systems, roll up
Figure 9
IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Figure 10
Summary
Figure 11 lists several major points. First, although some organizations look at SIEM just to monitor the perimeter, SIEM has evolved from the perimeter to the firewall to the network for compliance. Many organizations have moved all the way to monitoring the business, users, data, and applications, because that is where the biggest risk-reward is. A worm coming through a firewall causes problems, but not as significant as the theft of customer data. No product can monitor the users, data, and apps alone, so the notion of ecosystem becomes impor-
tant. Ecosystem considers not just the SIEM product but related monitoring products, such as database activity products and identity management or identity audit products. Choose a SIEM platform and monitoring products that are compatible. Finally, many organizations have spent money on systems that do not work. Over time the network changes but related technologies need to change with it, so the notion of future-proofing needs to be a key evaluation criterion. Ask whether this product will work in the future. It is difficult to predict what your network will look like in two or three years, but you will certainly want to monitor it, so you want an architecture that allows you to do that.
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Figure 11
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Common Questions
Question: What else is required to do things that you have described? Can SIEM do it all? Answer: Thats a good question. I think SIEM is a good platform for analyzing data. We have customers who dont want to constrain this to the SOC but want to use it for general business analytics. To do those kinds of things you need other technologies. I would be remiss if I said that your SIEM product can do it all. Some vehicles mentioned earlier are the database activity monitoring products and the identity audit products. Also, the data-leakage prevention products can render some interesting verdicts around confidential data. So, if we have learned anything in this market it is that customers have many kinds of moving parts in their networks and the SIEM product needs to be able to work with all of those. Question: Which identity management systems do you support? Answer: We have connectors today for Oracle and Microsoft, and we are just finishing up the phone connector. When I say connectors, these basically synchronize with the user and role modeling in the IT management system, so that you manage your users there. We are able to pull the data out and use it to do identity correlation and then use account correlation and relay all the activity for a rolled-up account. Question: Which is better, SIEM that uses agents for monitoring or agentless monitoring? Answer: That depends on what you are trying to do. In general most organizations look for something that is agentless. They would like to have less of that. And so the way most of the SIEM products work is to pull data out of the log files for the various systems and then convert it to normalized format. Wherever possible we try to do that without agents. In some cases, such as Windows monitoring, specialized agents give you more data than is normally in the log file. So I think it depends on your needs, but I would say the market trend is to try not to use agents. Question: A question about acronyms: Sometimes you use SIEMs, sometimes SEMs or SIM. Which is right? Answer: These acronyms have evolved. Once there was the notion of log management, which involved two separate markets, one called SIM, the other SEM. Then over time, people figured out that these were not really separate. Vendors began combining them and the SIEM acronym came into being. People just pronounce it sim. Question: Do we need an identity manager platform to correlate users or can you do it with Active Directory in Windows alone? Answer: I would say a large portion of the customers I talk to have not yet installed an identity management application. Instead, they use Active Directory and you can actually do quite a bit with that. In Active Directory you have a user, you have perhaps multiple accounts, if you keep them in AD, you have the groups to which that user belongs. We actually have an Active Directory user model import connector, so we can pull that in and with that you can now produce a kind of authoritative list of users and their groups. We can augment that with data we extract from other systems. It is common to do an extract from products like PeopleSoft or SAP and in ArcSight combine the PeopleSoft HR extract with the information we pull out of Active Directory. Now you have a pretty good view of users that you dont have in any of the individual apps and you can start to do some pretty interesting correlations. So, you definitely do not need an IEM system. Probably more than half the customers manage with just Active Directory plus ArcSight. Question: Does ArcSight allow opening Remedy tickets as part of the corrective action? Answer: Yes, we do have an integration with Remedy. So if you have an alert you can have a built-in action to kick off a Remedy ticket and later a follow-up action.
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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Question: Does ArcSight have a native mainframe connector? Answer: Yes, we have a couple of different mainframe connectors and work with other ones. Some customers have their own to pull out log files. Some partner products are focused on that and have more functionality than our connectors, but we do have a basic mainframe connector. Question: Is your event data stored in a format that can be verified as not having been tampered with, in case you need to use a collection of events in a court case? Answer: Yes, we have had the product certified as audit-ready or as litigation-quality. I think there is a white paper that addresses that. We also have a variety of different training classes. These are described on our Website. Question: Do you have a new version coming out that has faster processing? Answer: Yes, we do have some product changes coming that have some significant improvements in processing. We have not released anything publicly, so stay tuned. You will see some pretty interesting changes coming. Question: Does ArcSight have an appliance or is it software-based? Answer: All the products are available as appliances now. Some of them are also available as software. For example, our correlation product ESM was originally available as software and still is. We have recently added it as an appliance version. Question: What is the best way to collect real-time events and audit data from DBMS systems? Answer: Great question. I touched on the database activity monitoring products a couple of times. Those are excellent products for pulling data, both audit data and event data, out of DBMS systems. One of the common issues with monitoring databases in particular is the way they are often deployed. An application server may have a Web application running on top of it. The application server multiplexes a lot of requests through a single connection and runs a bunch of database queries so the app server knows who all the users are. But according to the database, there is only one user called App Server, or some-
thing like that. So the logs dont have the user information. Database activity monitoring products are very useful for backing out that information and understanding which users executed which queries. Theyre also good at understanding historical paths to the data. So if someone runs a query thats out of the historical norm, theyre good at understanding this. So, I definitely recommend looking at those products for database monitoring. I know we already have prebuilt integrations with several of the companies. I think Guardian announced a certification at a recent user conference and we have seen that in a lot of our accounts. Great partner. Question: With ArcSight, can you use a GUI to build rules and parsers or does it require professional services or programming? Also, a related question, theres the perception that ArcSight, while its a great product, can be difficult to design. Can you address this? Answer: Yes, I would be happy to do that. Customers run the gamut in their need for functionality. We have been working hard to tune the product to match different needs. So, for some customers wanting to collect logs, do real time alerts, and run reports, ArcSight Logger is a very straightforward way to do that. We have other customers, data financial services or the federal government, who do a very, very complex analysis and are doing fairly heavy programming on top of the system and ESM is great for that. One of the things that we want to do is make it easier to access all the functionality in ESM. We are working on some interesting things that you will see in a product coming up fairly soon, such as simplification in the correlation GUI and correlation technology, including specialized wizards, simplification of database management, and so forth. We are evolving the product to match different users needs. Question: To monitor specific files for changes, would you recommend using a product specialized for this purpose and then have this product monitored by the SIEM? Answer: That is a very interesting question. I would say it depends on what you are trying to do. In some cases we monitor the Windows logs and monitor the file system there, and for some customers thats good enough. For customers who want to see more detail, other products focus just on file system monitoring. They do some things that we wouldnt natively do. So it depends on what you are trying to do. I think in either case we either have a connector to do it or
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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we have partnerships with the people who focus on that. Question: Do you do antifraud today? Answer: A lot of our customers are in financial services and we have seen a trend in many of them, which was that they deployed ArcSight to do perimeter monitoring and network monitoring. In many cases they had a breach of some sort, so they tried to apply the correlation technology they are using for the perimeter to some of their fraud. And it was pretty interesting. In most cases they were able to discover the breach, discover the source of the fraud, and so forth pretty quickly. We had one customer say they basically prevented a $900,000 breach. So people are definitely doing it today. We have wrapped up a bunch of the rules and reports that we have built for these banks for antifraud into a package called the Antifraud Accelerator, which is available today.
Question: How does what you talked about compare to an identity management system? Answer: We dont see what we are doing as replacement for identity management at all; instead, its an adjunct. Identity management products are great for managing the user life cycle: adding new users, provisioning them to applications, managing their roles, managing user changesif someone changes departments or titles or buildingsthings that change access rights. Those products are well tuned to manage that. What SIEM products in general are good at doing is monitoring real-time user activity. And when you put those two products together, you can understand who the user is from the IdM system and what they do by connection to the SIEM tools.
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IT Briefing: SIEM 3.0: The Next Generation of Security and Compliance Monitoring
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