We all have heard the proverb: One rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel. This also applies to many practical scenarios in our day-to-day life, like finding a stinky sock in a pile of fresh laundry. Similarly, in a security operations center (SOC), one of the tasks security analysts spends most of their time on is identifying and detecting the actual threats from the false positives identified by security intelligence and event management (SIEM) systems.

SIEM solutions collect, correlate and analyze the logs generated by your technology infrastructure, security systems and business applications. The SOC team uses this information to identify and assess suspicious activity for further investigation. However, given the vast amount of data, many of these alerts are false alarms. Moreover, while the SIEM solution provides valuable technical data on each alert, such as IP addresses associated with the incident, type of activity and day/time of the event, the SOC team still needs to spend hours, if not days, identifying and assessing each security event and its potential target.

A SOC analyst needs to be able to quickly and easily sift through multiple suspect alerts. Identifying attacks that are most likely to impact key business processes is essential to quickly take action before those strikes impact the business and, more importantly, its reputation.

A Good Seed

To address this pain point, AlgoSec and IBM Security have launched a new app, the AlgoSec Security Incident Response app on the IBM Security App Exchange. By integrating with IBM QRadar SIEM, the AlgoSec Incident Response App links actual business processes that are (or could be) impacted directly with a security incident. This includes hardware such as servers and security devices, network and traffic flows, and even applications.

After the identification of these potential incidents, AlgoSec can automatically isolate the compromised or vulnerable servers from the network to neutralize the attack. This helps the business by identifying the critical applications affected and automatically isolating compromised servers from the network, if integrated with the AlgoSec Security Management solution. This SIEM integration has the added benefit of identifying network connectivity to and from a compromised server with an interactive visualization, providing a full audit trail to help with compliance reporting and cyberthreat forensics.

The App(le) of Your Eye

AlgoSec is the only Security Policy Management Solution to integrate with IBM QRadar — or any SIEM solution. Moreover, they take a unique, application-centric approach to security policy management that enables the SOC analyst to manage security from both the business application perspective and the network perspective. All of this enables AlgoSec to help clients align their security needs with their business objectives to enhance their business agility while maintaining compliance and ensuring a strong security posture.

The integration of IBM QRadar and the AlgoSec Security Policy Management solution via the AlgoSec app results into multiple key benefits:

1. It assesses the severity, risk and potential business impact of an attack.
2. It provides the information needed to prioritize threat remediation efforts based on business risk.
3. It neutralizes an attack by automatically isolating compromised and vulnerable servers.
4. It reduces the time and cost of mitigating an attack by orders of magnitude.

The App Doesn’t Fall Far From the SIEM Tree

Are you still looking for an efficient technique to identify and detect the actual threats among all the false alarms? Download the new AlgoSec app on IBM Security App Exchange and integrate it with IBM QRadar to spot actual security events before they spoil the whole bunch.

Learn More About AlgoSec Incident Response