Whether it’s a data breach, malware attack or targeted ransomware campaign, more and more organisations are falling victim to security incidents in 2024.
Half of businesses and around a third of charities report having experienced some form of cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months according to the UK Government's 2024 Cyber Breaches Survey. This is much higher for medium businesses (70%), large businesses (74%) and high-income charities with £500,000 or more in annual income (66%).
As cyber attacks spike for SMEs and large enterprises alike, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools are crucial to protecting your business from downtime and crash when incidents strike.
What is a SIEM Tool?
A SIEM tool is a software solution that helps organizations manage, monitor and maintain their overall security posture. It helps organisations collect, aggregate, and analyze security data from a variety of sources – including network devices, security appliances, and applications – and use this data to identify potential security threats.
SIEM software can instantly alert your security team in the event of an attack. It collects logs and event data from a wide range of sources across your network, including devices, applications, servers, users, and firewalls, and makes it easy for security to search and analyze all of this data in one place.
SIEM tools also correlate events from different sources to identify patterns and trends that may indicate a security threat. For example, an SIEM tool might correlate a failed login attempt from one source with a successful login attempt from another source to identify a potential brute-force attack.
With this, it can generate alerts when it detects suspicious activity, allowing security teams to quickly investigate and respond to potential threats.
Key features of SIEM tools
1. Log collection and aggregation
SIEM tools collect logs and event data from a wide range of sources across your network, including devices, applications, servers, users, firewalls, and even cloud environments.
SIEM tools also parse this raw log data, extracting relevant information and enriching it with context by adding timestamps, user IDs, or threat intelligence details. This process helps to standardize the format of the data from various devices and applications, making it easier to analyze.
SIEM tools store the collected data in a central repository. This allows for long-term storage, which is crucial for forensic investigations, historical analysis, and compliance purposes. Retention periods will vary depending on the organization's needs and regulations.
2. Event correlation and security analytics
SIEMs use pre-defined rules and statistical correlations to analyze the data in real-time. They search for patterns and relationships between events that might indicate a potential security threat. SIEMs can leverage various analytical techniques like real-time analysis, batch analysis, and even user and entity-based analytics (UEBA) to identify suspicious activity.
3. Alerting and reporting
If the SIEM analysis identifies something suspicious, it triggers an alert for the security team. These alerts typically include details about the event, its severity, and potential impact and SIEM tools can generate reports that summarize security events and trends over time.
These reports can be helpful for identifying trends, tracking down attackers, and demonstrating compliance.
4. Compliance reporting
SIEM tools can also be used to generate reports that help organizations comply with security regulations, providing a central repository for security data to make it easier for organizations to meet the reporting requirements of various compliance standards.
Many SIEM solutions offer pre-built reports that map security events to specific compliance controls mandated by regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR. This simplifies the process of demonstrating that your organization is meeting its compliance obligations.
5. Integration with SOAR and Threat Intelligence Feeds
Some SIEM tools integrate with SOAR platforms to automate incident response tasks. This can help to save security teams time and effort, and it can also help to ensure that incidents are responded to consistently and effectively.
SIEM tools can also integrate with threat intelligence feeds to provide security teams with information about the latest threats and vulnerabilities. This information can be used to improve the accuracy of SIEM alerts and to help security teams prioritize their investigations.
Best SIEM Tools
While there is no perfect, all-size-fits-all solution to incident response, choosing the best SIEM tool for your business can mean the difference between swift recovery and months of disruption.
We're counting down ten of the best SIEM tools in 2024, each of which can help your business detect, investigate, and mitigate security incidents effectively.
Securonix NextGen SIEM
Securonix’s Next-Gen SIEM is a powerful SIEM tool that uses machine learning (ML) and AI to detect any malicious activity or threat indicators. With Next-Gen SIEM, you benefit from extensive threat intel and research from Securonix Threat Labs – which delivers the latest threat data straight to your dashboard so your security operations centre (SOC) always has the latest information. The tool tracks all your users’ network activity, devices and applications, meaning you gain visibility and transparency across your infrastructure and can detect threats coming from any device.
Through the power of ML and advanced analytics, Next-gen SIEM can to create profiles of what is normal behaviour for users or entities accessing your systems. Using this baseline, you can identify abnormal behaviour that may indicate malicious activity seamlessly, reducing the impact when threat actors access your infrastructure.
Logpoint SIEM
By unifying the foundational cybersecurity tech stack, Logpoint SIEM arms your security team with automation and precision to solve complex cybersecurity issues and efficiently mitigate threats before they happen. Logpoint collects real-time feedback on product updates and detection, improving the identification of new threats and improving your security posture.
With Logpoint, you stay in control. Its detection logic in the cloud means Logpoint experts can reach out to customers with feedback on how to improve their current setup, ensuring you have the best defences against external threats. Logpoint is also software-as-a-service, meaning it is its detection and playbook for emerging threats that are easily scalable and ready for use from the get-go.
Netsurion
Promising an easy way to uncover cyber threat intelligence hidden within your business log data, Netsurion helps you to identify the risks and threats to your data and assets at an incredible pace. The platform collects log data from various network devices and security tools, analyzes it for threats, and provides features for investigation and incident response. Neturon's NDR component goes a step further too, allowing teams to deploy deception techniques to lure attackers into interacting with fake environments by analyzing attacker behavior at its core.
The Netsurion managed threat protection system with SIEM comes with real-time analysis baked in for your proactive security alerts, so you can make intelligent decisions and respond faster. You’ll also have access to a range of customizable reporting features, with in-depth insights into behaviour analysis and threat intelligence.
LogRhythm SIEM
Designed to help lean and busy security teams accomplish more in their day-to-day operations, the LogRhythm SIEM can make any business more compliant and secure. As a Gartner magic quadrant leader for 9 years in a row, LogRhythm delivers one of the most reliable and powerful systems for SIEM on the market, with an all-in-one environment for threat detection, prevention, response, and containment.
LogRhythm detects and remediates security incidents quickly and for a lower cost than many of the other entries on this list. Its intuitive, high-performance analytics, enhanced collection, and seamless incident response workflow help you uncover threats, mitigate attacks, and comply with necessary mandates. LogRhythm also offers embedded modules, dashboards, and rules that help you quickly deliver on the mission of your SOC and keep yourself secure.
Solarwinds Security Event Manager
A powerful yet easy-to-use SIEM tool, Solarwinds’ Security Event Manager (SEM) empowers companies of all sizes to get more out of their data analysis. The SIEM tool allows business leaders to quickly identify and respond to threats, with automatic monitoring so you can watch for suspicious activity at all times. The technology comes with virtual appliance deployment and intuitive UI, so you can start seeing the benefits immediately.
While a great SIEM tool in itself, SolarWinds SEM stands out for its SIEM log management capabilities. The platform is built with a SIEM log collector tool that helps you automatically collect and aggregate logs from multiple devices and applications across your network in an agentless environment. It’s also got audit report templates already built-in along with various tools for PCI DSS, HIPAA, and more, allowing you to take your compliance strategy to the next level.
Rapid7 InsightIDR
Rapid7 InsightIDR is a powerful, cloud-based SIEM solution designed to identify and mitigate modern security threats and keep businesses secure. The software goes beyond traditional SIEM by offering Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities, leveraging AI and ML to analyse data to detect threats in real time. It also includes pre-built detection rules and behavioural analytics, along with a rich set of investigation tools such as timeline visualizations, data pivoting, and forensics capabilities. This allows security teams to quickly investigate and understand the root cause of security incidents and prevent them before they strike.
InsightIDR leverages Rapid7's expertise in threat intelligence to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest threats and vulnerabilities, curating threat intelligence feeds and translating them into actionable detection rules for security teams. These pre-built rules come pre-configured within InsightIDR and automatically scan your data for indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as malicious IP addresses, URLs, domains, and file hashes. InisghtIDR also allows you to subscribe to threat intelligence feeds from the security community. This enables you to leverage the expertise of other security professionals and gain insights into the latest threats targeting specific industries or regions.
ManageEngine Log360
ManageEngine’s Log360 is a unified SIEM tool with integrated DLP and CASB capabilities that are designed to detect, prioritise, investigate, and respond to a range of security threats. The platform combines threat intelligence, ML-based anomaly detection and rule-based attack detection techniques to detect sophisticated attacks and offers an incident management console to remediate detected threats. To do this, it collects log data from various devices and applications across your network, centralizing this data, analyzes it for security threats, and provides security teams with the tools they need to investigate and respond to incidents. Log360 goes beyond traditional SIEM too, offering Data Loss Prevention, and Cloud Security Posture Management pre-built into the solution.
Log360 leaves no log unturned, providing holistic security visibility across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid networks with intuitive and advanced security analytics and monitoring capabilities. You can collect logs from various sources including end-user devices, servers, network devices, firewalls, and antivirus and intrusion prevention systems You can then seamlessly analyse logs with intuitive dashboards that help with discovering attacks, spotting suspicious user behaviours, and stopping potential threats.
IBM QRadar
The QRadar suite is a modernized all-in-one SIEM solution designed to help your security teams outsmart threat actors with speed, accuracy and efficiency. The platform unifies the security analyst experience with an intuitive user interface that empowers analysts to work more quickly and efficiently throughout their investigation and response processes. By using unique, enterprise-grade AI capabilities, QRadar automatically contextualises and prioritises threats, providing analysts with insights and automated actions across products.
Delivered as a service on AWS, QRadar products allow for simplified deployment across cloud environments and integration with public cloud and SaaS log data. The platform also includes a new, cloud-native security observability and log management capability optimized for large-scale data ingestion, rapid search and rapid analytics.
Datadog Cloud SIEM
Datadog Cloud SIEM is a powerful, cloud-native SIEM solution built on top of Datadog's log management platform. It provides comprehensive security monitoring and threat detection for organizations operating in dynamic cloud environments, unifying developers, operations, and security teams through one platform to deliver easy and flexible access to threat detection and protection in scaling environments. The solution goes beyond traditional SIEM too, integrating seamlessly with Datadog's existing monitoring and analytics capabilities to allow security teams to analyze security data alongside infrastructure metrics, application traces, and business data - all within a single platform. This unified view provides a more holistic understanding of security posture and streamlines investigations.
Datadog’s cloud SIEM is one of the best SIEM tools for giving security, operations teams, and developers more access to observable data so they can accelerate the outcomes of their security investigations. It has hundreds of vendor-backed integrations to explore, and a very convenient single dashboard display for all the data insights you need. It also offers a library of pre-built security rules that are aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework. These rules help to detect a wide range of threats, including malware, phishing attacks, and insider threats.
Splunk Enterprise Security
Promising early detection and lighting-fast incident response speeds, Splunk’s Enterprise Security is one of the best all-in-one SIEM tools available today. The software excels at collecting, analyzing, and visualizing machine-generated data from a vast array of sources across your IT infrastructure, including security logs, application logs, server activity, and user behaviour. This helps security teams combat threats and mitigate risk at scale, turning data silos into actionable insights by ingesting data from multi-cloud and on-premises deployments and gathering all the context you need to stay resilient. Splunk's powerful search engine also allows you to easily query and analyze security data for threats and anomalies. You can leverage pre-built searches or create custom searches using Splunk's Search Processing Language (SPL).
Like many leading SIEM offerings, Splunk empowers business leaders with automated actions and workflows intended to enable a faster response to threats. It also comes with a rich ecosystem of security apps that extend its functionality. These apps provide pre-built dashboards, reports, and searches for specific security use cases, and allow developers to build and customize their own custom dashboards, reports, and searches to meet their specific needs. Splunk meets you where you are on your SIEM journey, and integrates across your data, tools and content so that your organisation is ready when threat actors strike.
