As the attack surface continues to expand and adversaries constantly advance their techniques to bypass traditional security measures, it has become essential for organizations to invest in solutions that offer both real-time monitoring and proactive threat awareness. This is where security information and event management (SIEM) and threat intelligence intersect.

A SIEM is a real-time monitoring technology that aggregates and analyzes log data from various sources within an organization’s IT infrastructure. It provides a centralized interface that enables security teams to visualize their environments, surfaces alerts for potential attacks, and provides workflows that help analysts detect, investigate, and respond to threats.  

A threat intelligence platform (TIP) aggregates threat intel from various sources, such as open source (OSINT) feeds, industry reports, and internal analysis, to provide insights into emerging threats and potential attack vectors’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). It is an approach that utilizes evidence-based knowledge about existing and emerging threats to make informed decisions about responding to advanced threats.  

A TIP offers valuable foresight to enhance the SIEM’s ability to analyze data purely based on past events. Working together, they offer a proactive and comprehensive strategy for strengthening defenses and reducing risk.

Creating Synergy Between SIEM and Threat Intelligence

A SIEM is a tactical correlation engine based on rules-based detections from previously known threats, whereas threat intelligence provides insight into emerging threats. Threat intelligence enhances an organization’s detection, investigation, and response capabilities by improving alert accuracy, shortening investigation times, and providing contextual insight into emerging threats and adversaries.  

Incorporating the two technologies provides:

• Advanced threat detection: Identify, analyze, and mitigate sophisticated attacks that may evade traditional security measures. Real-time threat intelligence feeds help security teams recognize emerging threats with contextual insight into adversaries’ TTPs. ‍
• Accelerated investigation and response: Early detection of cyber threats from risk scores derived from both rules-based detections and diverse threat intelligence sources. Analysts can easily triage and prioritize alerts, assessing potential intrusions based on criticality.  ‍
• Dynamic threat hunting: Real-time threat hunting evolves based on emerging threats, anomalies, and changes in an IT environment. Instead of traditional, static methods that rely on pre-defined patterns or known indicators of compromise (IOCs), analysts can continuously monitor and investigate live data, enabling quicker response to anomalies that may signal a potential threat outside of traditional tactics.  

Unified SIEM and Threat Intelligence: Staying Ahead of Evolving Threats

Most solutions are integrations between a SIEM and a TIP, wherein threat intelligence feeds are funneled into a SIEM. They still operate as two distinct tools that rely on connectors (and a lot of work and maintenance by IT and SOC teams) and sync points. This can introduce data silos, latency, and gaps in visibility, not to mention operational overhead.  

The Anomali Security and IT Operations Platform is a unified AI-Powered Threat Intelligence and SIEM solution that provides a cohesive data set across the IT environment and the threat landscape. It provides a single pane of glass that gives security teams:

• End-to-end visibility: Unify threat intelligence and log data in one place to gain immediate contextual insights. By merging ingestion, correlation, and real-time monitoring, security teams receive immediate, actionable results without having to switch between multiple solutions or manually correlate two sets of data. ‍
• Streamlined investigation and response: Enrichment, threat detection, alert prioritization, and incident response are all orchestrated within a single workflow. Ensure consistency and accuracy across every stage of the incident lifecycle with a cohesive, intuitive experience. ‍
• Simplified operations and enhanced scalability: Scale without worrying about compatibility or re-architecting a security stack. A unified Data Lake and analytics layer minimizes the management of multiple integrations, helping organizations manage overhead. ‍
• Increased efficiency: Focus efforts on critical threats by automating and consolidating your approach to known threats and emerging TTPs. A single pane of glass improves collaboration across different security teams and boosts an organization’s overall security posture.  

A unified threat intelligence and SIEM platform increases security maturity by strengthening defenses, reducing risk, and improving overall operational efficiency. It’s a proactive security strategy that combines the raw data processing power of SIEM with enriched, actionable insight from a TIP within one streamlined workflow, reducing time to resolution and minimizing potential economic, operations, and reputation damage.

To see how a cohesive modern SIEM and TIP can uplevel your security posture, schedule a demo of Anomali’s Security and IT Operations Platform.

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