What is
- SIEM library
- What is TDIR
- What is TDIR?
- Evolution of traditional threat detection
- The modern TDIR engine
- How can TDIR help your organization?
- How does Log360's TDIR stand out?
What is TDIR?
Threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) is the process of identifying, understanding, and responding to security threats faced by organizations. As the name suggests, this risk-based approach can be divided into three parts: Threat detection, investigation, and response. Let's explore each of these.
- Threat detection:This capability identifies potential threats in an organization's IT environment. Threat detection can be achieved by obtaining clear visibility into an organization's network by correlating and making sense of the log data collected from across the network. Once you get this visibility, it becomes easy to identify malicious processes going on in the network, otherwise known as threats.
- Investigation: Practically, it is impossible to give time and attention to all the security alerts that are raised in your IT environment. It is important to validate them by gathering additional context, investigating, and understanding their nature and scope. This helps you reduce false positives or take necessary action in case of a true positive.
- Response: If a threat is confirmed to be a potential incident, it will require immediate response to mitigate an attack. The root cause of the incident has to be immediately identified and eradicated. If any devices in the network are already affected by the threat, they must be isolated as soon as possible.
Evolution of traditional threat detection
Traditional threat detection methods have several limitations that make them less effective in addressing the evolving and sophisticated nature of cyberthreats.
- 1
Signature-based detection:
This approach relies on identifying threats using known patterns and signatures. However, zero-day attacks and polymorphic malware remain invisible, leaving networks vulnerable.
- 2
Limited context awareness:
Traditional security solutions lack the ability to analyze the context of alerts, making it challenging to differentiate between critical alerts and false positives.
- 3
Alert fatigue:
Traditional tools generate a deluge of alerts, overwhelming security teams. This alert fatigue makes it difficult to distinguish real threats from harmless activity, leading to missed attacks and wasted resources.
- 4
Inability to handle advanced persistent threats (APTs):
Traditional methods often struggle to detect and respond to APTs that employ sophisticated techniques.
- 5
Slower incident detection and response:
Inability to connect the dots between seemingly unrelated events delays detection and response, prolongs attacker dwell time, and increases damage potential. Traditional incident response is also not coordinated and streamlined since it is not integrated with the threat detection system.
As you can see, conventional security tools struggle to keep up with the rapid exploitation of newly discovered vulnerabilities, necessitating a proactive stance that involves continuous vulnerability assessments and prompt patching. Insider threats, often overlooked by traditional methods, require proactive measures such as user behavior analytics (UBA) to identify and mitigate potential risks from within the organization.
And, with the shift towards cloud services and remote work, the dependency on perimeter defenses in traditional security models has become obsolete, leading to the adoption of a proactive Zero Trust security model that prioritizes verification and authentication for every user and device, irrespective of their location within the network.
The modern TDIR engine
To address these challenges and face the threats in the modern digital landscape, threat detection and threat response solutions have evolved into the modern TDIR engine, which incorporates ML-based UEBA, threat hunting, and continuous monitoring.
Let's better understand how TDIR's way of tackling threats differs from traditional threat detection. Take an organization whose VPN faces frequent connectivity issues. This problem can increase when there is a spike in remote work during specific times of the year, like around the holidays. In this case, the traditional threat detection system will struggle to differentiate routine connectivity hiccups from critical threats. As a result, it will generate an enormous amount of alerts that overwhelm the security team. A DDoS attack can easily go unnoticed under this level of alert fatigue. Chances are that the security personnel will miss the alert, and consequently, the threat may slip through.
With a modern TDIR engine in the picture, UEBA can identify the common pattern of connectivity issues throughout the organization. Using the smart threshold feature, the alert threshold value is dynamically reduced, and the number of alerts generated can come down. However, if the VPN logon requests comes from the same IP range multiple times, like in the case of a DDoS attack, it is immediately detected as an anomaly and an alert is raised. This way, security teams can avoid alert fatigue, generate meaningful alerts, and increase the chances of addressing the alert and taking immediate action.
1. Data collection
Log data is collected from all the devices in a network, like routers, firewalls, servers, end points, and applications.
2. Normalization and correlation
The aggregated data is normalized to a consistent format and correlated to identify patterns and links that can point to a potential threat.
3.Threat detection
Known threats can be identified through rule-based detection, and unknown threats through anomaly-based detection.
4. Applying adaptive thresholds
Alert thresholds can be dynamically adjusted using ML and behavioral analysis to account for normal variations in user behavior, network traffic, and system activities.
How does TDIR work?
Let's walk through the different steps involved in TDIR.
5. Alert generation
Once this threshold exceeds the set value, an alert is triggered to warn the security personnel.
6. Contextual analysis and alert triage
More data is collated to validate a particular alert. An attempt is made to understand the situation better by examining all relevant logs and network traffic.
7. Incident confirmation
If all the analysis points to an active security incident, an attack is confirmed.
8. Incident response
The issue is immediately addressed by finding the root cause and correcting it. Simultaneously, damage control is also taken up if needed.
How can TDIR help your organization?
A TDIR platform is instrumental in making an organization's defenses strong and resilient. It minimizes the exposure to risks by integrating a range of features and tools. These include:
- Threat intelligence: This allows you to utilize all the data concerning the threats that an organization is exposed to. Threat intelligence blocks all possible malicious sources and reduces the chance of a data breach. By combining both open source and commercial threat feeds, it expedites threat detection and response.
- Threat hunting:Identifying threats as they come cannot fully guarantee the network's safety. Threat hunting proactively searches for threats before they appear by looking for IoCs and anomalous activities.
- Real-time monitoring: Although traditional solutions also perform real-time monitoring, there are notable differences in how this feature is implemented in a TDIR engine. Modern TDIR employs continuous, adaptive monitoring, leveraging ML and behavioral analysis to detect both known and emerging threats dynamically. This approach contrasts with traditional periodic scans, static rule sets, and limited behavioral analysis. Additionally, this feature is integrated with the TDIR engine in modern SIEM solutions, ensuring early detection and swift response to potential security incidents
All these features work together in a TDIR platform to facilitate threat detection, threat investigation, and incident response. They also enhance incident preparedness by allowing organizations to learn from past incidents. This iterative process helps refine the incident response plan, improve security posture, and build a proactive cybersecurity culture.
How does Log360's TDIR stand out?
Vigil IQ is Log360's inbuilt TDIR engine. It works together with every other module of the SIEM involved in threat detection and response, like the correlation engine,MITRE ATT&CK® framework, UEBA, and incident response console.
This advanced threat detection and response tool encompasses a unique, industry-first feature called adaptive threshold. This feature uses ML to analyze the usual occurrence of events based on their alert criteria and automatically sets up a suitable threshold value for alerts. Once the value is set, the ML model keeps training itself with time, including dynamically adapting to changes in the network's size and configuration.
UEBA and the adaptive threshold feature form a dual-layered threat detection system in Vigil IQ. While UEBA identifies outliers using behavioral analytics and pattern detection, adaptive threshold points out suspicious events using count-based anomaly detection.
This smart approach does the heavy-lifting of setting up the alert thresholds, which is otherwise a hectic task for security analysts. Once the suspicious events in the network are detected, Log360's automated incident response system steps in with predefined workflows.
This is how Log360 saves time and still ensures safety from threats to your network.
