Effective threat management requires security teams to combine security analytics with the abundance of machine-generated data that is prevalent in most enterprise environments. Tools such as network traffic analysis, endpoint detection, security information and event management (SIEM), and user behavior analytics (UBA) harvest this data and reveal who is doing what in the IT environment and when and how they’re doing it. This mix of data can help uncover unknown threats, but it can also confuse some security operations professionals who are not familiar with it when the data is only partially displayed.

For instance, a network link analysis diagram — or, more simply, a list of network connections — can be very informative because it shows critical data sources, but it can also be overwhelming with its thousands of raw connections and IP addresses. Let’s take a look at some common data sources and explore why security teams really need to combine them all to generate a complete picture for detection, investigation and response.

5 Criteria for Advanced Threat Detection

Security analytics sources and methods can be split into three essential security views: who, where and what.

  • Data related to the “who,” often labeled as user and access analytics, provides insights into various identities, related activity, and accessed data or applications. Recently, behavioral monitoring was added to this group to help surface insider threats.
  • The second group, “where,” is best derived from endpoint-based analytics. This data reveals activity and changes on a specific system (client, server, virtual machine, etc.).
  • You can understand the “what” by using network analytics to monitor which applications, machines and users are active on the network and what data they are accessing where.

Register for the Webinar to Learn More About Network Traffic Analytics

Each of these methods offers some advantages from a security operations perspective. Let’s take a deeper look by evaluating five common security operations criteria: deployment, data management, detection, security intelligence for investigation and response.

More from Intelligence & Analytics

What makes a trailblazer? Inspired by John Mulaney’s Dreamforce roast

4 min read - When you bring a comedian to offer a keynote address, you need to expect the unexpected.But it is a good bet that no one in the crowd at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference expected John Mulaney to tell a crowd of thousands of tech trailblazers that they were, in fact, not trailblazers at all.“The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title anymore,” Mulaney told the audience.Maybe it was meant as nothing more than a punch line, but Mulaney’s…

New report shows ongoing gender pay gap in cybersecurity

3 min read - The gender gap in cybersecurity isn’t a new issue. The lack of women in cybersecurity and IT has been making headlines for years — even decades. While progress has been made, there is still significant work to do, especially regarding salary.The recent  ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study highlighted numerous cybersecurity issues regarding women in the field. In fact, only 17% of the 14,865 respondents to the survey were women.Pay gap between men and womenOne of the most concerning disparities revealed by…

Protecting your data and environment from unknown external risks

3 min read - Cybersecurity professionals always keep their eye out for trends and patterns to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals. The IBM X-Force does the same when working with customers. Over the past few years, clients have often asked the team about threats outside their internal environment, such as data leakage, brand impersonation, stolen credentials and phishing sites. To help customers overcome these often unknown and unexpected risks that are often outside of their control, the team created Cyber Exposure Insights…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today