Companies have to rely on staff to observe reasonable security practice, on partners not to pass on malware, and so on. Just like the financial markets, a big part of security is trust. Because complex networks and security deployments throw out Gigabytes of log data every day.
A recent IBM survey of 700 European IT managers highlighted the scale of the issue. Over 45% received more than 4,000 security events per second.
Although they’re vital, security systems such as IPS, IDS, firewalls and anti-virus also create problems by generating false positive alerts, often hiding emerging threats from the IT team. This volume of data swamps IT teams, and makes it almost impossible to prioritise potential threats. Perhaps the most critical issue is delayed action.
The biggest cause is insufficient alert context. Firewalls and intrusion systems don’t understand the business importance and vulnerabilities of all systems within the organization. For example, an attempted malware infection of a web server may be reported as a high-priority event by the firewall, even if systems have already been patched against it.
This is the ultimate aim of security management: understanding and prioritizing reported activities in context. This gives the IT team the ability to filter the noise, and focus on real threats.
A SIEM solution automates the collection, correlation and contextualization of security log data and events, which puts what’s happening on the network into perspective — removing the irrelevant noise, and enabling focus on the important events.
http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1195&p=1