Your SIEM Rules Can’t Keep Up. It’s Time for a Behavior-Based Defense.

Today’s cyberattacks are evasive, fast-moving, and increasingly AI generated. Relying on a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that uses static thresholds, signature matches, and manual tuning leaves your security operations center (SOC) overwhelmed and exposed. You need more than rules. You need detection that learns.

That is the function of Exabeam New-Scale Analytics.

New-Scale Analytics is our next-generation behavioral analytics engine, purpose-built for real-time detection of complex, credential-based, and insider threats. It’s the heart of our modern detection strategy and the future of security operations.

This article will cover:

• Why traditional correlation rules are no longer sufficient
• The role of behavioral modeling and risk scoring in a modern SOC
• How New-Scale Analytics prepares you for emerging threats
• How to combine rules and machine learning for maximum coverage

From Rules to Models: The Evolution of Threat Detection

Stage 1: Signature-Based Rules

Traditional SIEM rules detect known indicators of compromise (IoCs), such as, “Alert if a user has 5 failed login attempts” or, “Flag any file matching a known malware hash.” They work for known threats but require constant tuning and often miss novel or subtle malicious activity.

Stage 2: Behavioral Rules

The next evolution introduced anomaly-based logic, such as, “Flag if a user logs in from an unusual location and accesses sensitive files.” This was an improvement, but it still requires security teams to manually define what’s “unusual,” a variable that changes constantly across users, roles, and environments.

Stage 3: Behavioral Modeling with Machine Learning

New-Scale Analytics automates this entire process. It establishes a baseline of normal behavior for every user, device, and system in your environment and automatically flags deviations. It dynamically assigns risk scores, stitches together related events into timelines, and correlates activity across the attack chain. No static thresholds. No manual tuning.

Why Rules Alone Can’t Scale

1. Exploding Data Volumes

The amount of global data is projected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. For security teams, this means more logs, more alerts, and more noise. Correlation rules amplify that noise; machine learning models help you find the signal.

2. Evolving Adversary Techniques

Credential-based attacks, living-off-the-land techniques, and AI-generated payloads evade traditional defenses. Signature-based rules can’t adapt to these methods, but behavioral analytics can.

3. Analyst Burnout and Fatigue

Security teams can waste thousands of hours annually investigating false positives, leading to burnout and distracting from genuine threats.

4. Manual Tuning Is Unsustainable

Each correlation rule requires manual effort to write, tune, and maintain. Multiplying that effort by hundreds or thousands of rules means your team is stuck in a cycle of maintenance instead of focusing on detection. Automated, dynamic risk scoring is the only scalable path forward.

How New-Scale Analytics Modernizes Detection

1. Automates Baseline Learning

New-Scale Analytics automatically builds baselines for every user and asset, removing the guesswork and hardcoded thresholds required to define normal activity.

2. Detects Stealthy Credential-Based Attacks

Stolen credentials were the initial access vector in 22% of breaches this year, making them a primary weapon for attackers. These intrusions often appear as legitimate activity, slipping past static rules. New-Scale Analytics identifies subtle deviations in behavior, such as unusual logins, unexpected data access, or lateral movement to flag threats that rules-based systems miss.

3. Reduces Noise and Prioritizes Real Threats

Working with your SIEM, New-Scale Analytics prioritizes real threats using dynamic, explainable risk scoring that can be adjusted based on business context. User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) is proven to reduce false positives significantly, allowing analysts to focus on the most critical risks.

4. Delivers Comprehensive Attack Context

New-Scale Analytics provides your team with the full story of an attack. It delivers understandable risk scores, anomaly context, correlated entities, and automated threat timelines that show exactly what happened, empowering analysts to respond decisively.

Combine What You Know With What You Learn

Rules still have a role in detecting known signatures, satisfying compliance use cases, and creating alerts that require deterministic logic. But they can’t do the job alone. Together, traditional SIEM and New-Scale Analytics create a stronger detection foundation.

Use Case	Rules-Based SIEM	New-Scale Analytics
Known malware	✅ Effective	🚫 Not designed for this
Compliance auditing	✅ Required	✅ Supplemental
Novel threat detection	❌ Limited	✅ Behavior-based detection
Insider threats	❌ Very difficult	✅ Designed for it
Credential misuse	⚠️ Requires deep tuning	✅ Self-learns login behavior
Alert prioritization	❌ Static thresholds	✅ Dynamic risk scoring

Defining the Modern, Model-Driven SOC

As security operations mature, SOCs will transition from manually crafted rules to model-driven detection. This evolution delivers:

• Fewer false positives
• Faster investigations
• Self-learning and self-tuning capabilities
• Broader threat coverage
• AI-driven triage and contextual analysis
• Shorter time to detect and respond

New-Scale Analytics is built for this future.

Let Machine Learning Handle What Rules Can’t

Exabeam did not simply add analytics to a legacy SIEM; we built our platform around it.

New-Scale Analytics is:

• Backed by a patented Session Data Model
• Integrated with log ingestion, SIEM, automation, and case management
• Explainable, transparent, and available today
• Deployable to augment any SIEM or as part of the New-Scale Security Operations Platform

If your SIEM rules aren’t keeping up, it’s time for a new engine.

Move Beyond Outdated Correlation Rules

Correlation rules are no longer enough. Learn how to build a more resilient security program with a platform that supports a smarter, more adaptive approach to threat detection, investigation, and response.

Download the white paper, Breaking the Rules: When Static Detection Logic Reaches Its Limits, What’s Next?