Six Advanced Cloud-Native SIEM Use Cases

You already know that a security information and event management (SIEM) offers crucial benefits like scalability and reduced management overhead. But how do those platform advantages translate into stopping sophisticated threats? The answer lies in moving beyond simple log collection to leveraging powerful, behavior-based analytics.

This article dives into six advanced, real-world use cases that demonstrate how you can use a modern SIEM to solve your most complex security challenges, from proactively hunting insider threats to preventing data exfiltration and securing your IoT landscape.

Proactive Insider Threat Detection

Your organization’s biggest threats can often come from within. Cloud-native SIEM solutions are uniquely positioned to discover indicators of insider threats by continuously analyzing user and entity behavior. With integrated user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and machine learning (ML), your SIEM can quickly and accurately identify subtle, unusual patterns of activity that may indicate:

• Compromised credentials or anomalous privilege escalation
• Unauthorized command and control communication
• Suspicious data exfiltration or rapid encryption attempts
• Unexpected lateral movement within your network

Preventing Privileged Access Abuse

Privileged accounts are prime targets for attackers and a major source of internal risk. Your cloud-native SIEM helps you identify and stop privileged access abuse by:

• Monitoring for unwanted activity or deviations from established baselines for privileged users
• Detecting third-party violations or unauthorized access
• Flagging activity from departed employees or human errors
• Identifying overexposure of sensitive data due to misused privileges

By correlating events across multiple data sources and applying advanced analytics, your SIEM can pinpoint potential misuse of privileged access and enable your security team to take swift action.

Detecting Trusted Entity Compromise

Attackers often compromise trusted entities (user accounts, servers, or network devices) to gain a foothold. Cloud-native SIEM monitors these critical assets for signs of compromise or malicious behavior. By aggregating and analyzing data from various sources, it provides a holistic view of your security posture, enabling your teams to:

• Identify vulnerabilities that could lead to compromise.
• Detect unusual activity on seemingly trusted accounts or devices.
• Prioritize your response efforts to critical alerts.

Enabling Advanced Threat Hunting

For security analysts, cloud-native SIEM is an indispensable tool for proactive threat hunting. It allows your team to go beyond automated alerts and actively search for hidden threats by:

• Detecting environmental anomalies that indicate unusual system states
• Organizing data around new vulnerabilities to quickly identify affected assets
• Comparing current data to known attack patterns and behaviors
• Integrating threat intelligence to enrich your search parameters
• Testing hypotheses based on known risks
• Searching for similar incidents in your historical data

With advanced analytics and data visualization capabilities, your cloud-native SIEM empowers your security analysts to proactively search for threats and accelerate incident response times.

Comprehensive Data Exfiltration Detection

Protecting your sensitive data from leaving your organization is paramount. Your cloud-native SIEM helps prevent data exfiltration through multiple methods, including:

• Detecting backdoors, rootkits, and botnets that facilitate data theft
• Monitoring FTP and cloud storage traffic for unusual transfers
• Examining Windows events like unexpected remote desktop protocol (RDP) usage or secure message block (SMB) activity
• Overseeing web application usage for suspicious downloads or uploads
• Detecting unauthorized email forwarding and other communication anomalies
• Identifying lateral movement that often precedes data staging for exfiltration
• Ensuring mobile data security by monitoring access patterns

By examining unusual behavior, observing unusual service starting and stopping, and correlating events with advanced analytics, your cloud-native SIEM can quickly identify potential data exfiltration attempts.

Securing Your IoT Environment

The proliferation of IoT devices introduces new attack surfaces. Your cloud-native SIEM can help mitigate IoT threats by:

• Identifying denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting IoT devices.
• Managing IoT vulnerabilities and monitoring for exploits.
• Overseeing access control to IoT devices and their data.
• Monitoring data flow to identify anomalies.
• Identifying devices at risk and spotting compromised devices.

By integrating IoT security data into a centralized platform, your cloud-native SIEM provides comprehensive visibility and control over your IoT environments, safeguarding against emerging threats.

Strengthening Your Security Posture

A modern SIEM moves your security operations from a reactive function to a proactive defense. The use cases detailed here—from detecting subtle insider threats to hunting for novel attack patterns—demonstrate this shift in action. By applying advanced analytics to these complex challenges, you do more than just improve your security posture; you equip your team to systematically dismantle threats before they result in a major incident. This strategic adoption of analytics-driven security is how you gain and maintain an advantage over sophisticated adversaries.

The Ultimate Guide to Cloud-Native SIEM

Ready to simplify and streamline your security operations? Download our comprehensive eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Cloud-Native SIEM, to uncover how this technology can transform your organization’s security posture.

Read More

• Embracing the Future of Security With Cloud-Native SIEM 
• Legacy vs. Cloud-Native SIEM: Weighing the Pros and Cons 
• Finding the Perfect Fit: Hosting Models for Cloud-Native SIEM Solutions 
• Making the Switch: A Step-by-Step Guide to SIEM Migration