SIEM Optimization: How to Overcome 3 Common Challenges

Today, organizations like yours face a constant barrage of sophisticated cyber threats. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions play a vital role in detecting and responding to these threats, but many organizations struggle to optimize their detection efficacy. This blog explores three common SIEM challenges you may face and discusses how Picus Security can help you to overcome them.

Challenge 1:
Alert Fatigue and Information Overload

SIEM platforms generate a massive volume of alerts. This can be overwhelming and cause alert fatigue. It can also cause important alerts to get buried amidst the noise, making it difficult for you to identify ongoing attacks and respond effectively. This is especially true if your SIEM is generating many false positives.

Having well tuned SIEM rules is crucial to being able to generate accurate alerts. Detection rules may underperform due to reasons such as misconfigurations, changes in configurations, broken log sources, and more. 

Picus evaluates each of your SIEM rules and the factors that impact their performance, and does so automatically. Automation simplifies the evaluation process, which is essential given the large number of rules and potential issues in a typical SIEM. This fine tuning allows you to streamline your alert generation processes. You also significantly reduce false positives so you can respond more effectively to important security threats.

Challenge 2:
Lack of Coverage

Keeping pace with the ever-changing landscape of adversarial techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) is a significant challenge for security organizations. Without comprehensive visibility into the threat landscape, it can be challenging for you to detect emerging threats and accurately evaluate your detection capabilities.

At Picus, we strongly believe in the importance of simulating real-world attacks to continuously validate your ability to prevent and detect the latest threats. With attack simulations, you can take the attacker’s perspective to get clear insights into the gaps in your detection capabilities. Picus allows you to run simulations to validate the performance of your SIEM rule base against genuine threats. This validation includes log validation, which verifies whether your SIEM correctly ingests the required log data to detect the simulated malicious actions and whether it possesses the necessary level of data granularity to detect specific threats. The validation also assesses your SIEM’s ability to alert on attacks, and measures any delay between the simulated malicious action and the generated alert. 

In addition, Picus allows you to do one-time assessments of your overall SIEM coverage. Picus uses artificial intelligence (AI) to map your existing SIEM rules to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to highlight your SIEM’s existing detection coverage and surface critical gaps. In doing so, you learn about where your detection rule base is, and is not, aligned with adversary TTPs covered in the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Challenge 3:
Time and Resource Constraints

You may lack the time to keep up with your existing detection rules, let alone to develop and test new ones. Limited resources and time constraints can hinder you from maximizing the value of your SIEM systems and prevent you from proactively improving your security controls.

Picus can save you the effort of manually auditing your detection rules. Instead, Picus continuously and automatically runs simulations that assess whether your SIEM is running effectively. Even better, Picus has thousands of vendor-specific and SIGMA-based detection rules at your disposal, so that when you need to make a fix you can significantly reduce the time required to fine-tune your SIEM solution. Your security engineers can then put their time and energy into tasks elsewhere.

Unlock Your Security Potential with Picus 

Don't let alert fatigue, lack of coverage, or resource constraints hold back your security operations. Use Picus to unlock the potential of your SIEM and stay one step ahead of cyber threats.

Ready to optimize your SIEM? Schedule your Picus demo today.