By Robert MacAdams on Tuesday, 02 October 2018
Category: IBM QRadar

Cybersecurity AI and SIEM Security Machine Learning

Cybersecurity AI integrated SIEM Security tools accurately identify and prevent attacks in a fraction of the time and cost humans are capable, using security automation. Companies are struggling to identify and keep up with cybersecurity, internal threats and vulnerabilities in a timely manner, which are mainly due to manual processes and human error. Cybersecurity attacks are increasing at an unprecedented pace and becoming harder to detect. Operating System and software vulnerabilities in end point devices due to patches not being applied are another contributing factor to successful cybersecurity attacks. Many companies are working with limited or overwhelmed staff, and others are lacking in the expertise needed to manage their SIEM Security environment. The ever growing costs of managing all of the above, is only compounding these problems.

SIEM Security with integrated cybersecurity AI is the solution for the bulk of these problems. SIEM Security that uses machine learning and user behavior analytics will address internal threats. SIEM Security with vulnerability scanning and patch management software addresses the remaining issues. Even most industry leading SIEM tools do not have these inherent capabilities needed to automate security tasks. If they did, Security Analysts of almost any skill level would be able to quickly identify cybersecurity threats and uncover suspicious activity in event logs and network traffic flows. In fact, an intelligent SIEM could use cybersecurity AI and machine learning analytics to automate security tasks or simply help accelerate Security Analysts searching and reporting, or trigger an alert.

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Knowing which bits of data to look for and where to look for it, is one part of the equation. However, this step cannot be successful if you do not have all your logs present and parsed correctly. QRadar SIEM is able to see all interconnected aspects of user communications in event logs, and able to monitor both host and network changes. QRadar is able to correlate this information with cybersecurity AI and user behavior analytics to make almost real-time security assessments about the origins of the attack, when they occurred, which assets are affected and who is conducting the attack. QRadar accurately inspects all your logs, determines relevancy, severity and impact using an advanced rules engine that correlates with log information to provide actionable intelligence. Compared to a human and a lesser SIEM, the difference is, QRadar knows what it is looking for, how to look for it, can inspect massive volumes of events and traffic with fewer resources. A human is very inefficient in performing these processes, requiring routine research, sampling potential data sets, and many fishing adventures before the fish is brought into the boat. Some people require more fishing trips than others to bring that fish on board.


Ponemon Institute estimates that security breaches caught in less than 100 days saves the company $1 million dollars. If contained in less than 30 days, another $1 million dollars is saved. Finding that needle amongst the millions of pieces of straws in a timely manner is a huge task without the right tools. If your company is ignoring alerts or turning off notifications altogether, it is probably time to admit you have the wrong tools. Wasting human resources on security tasks that can be automated, provide much faster and accurate results, does not make sense.

Today's cybersecurity criminals are much smarter than your employees, and it's only a matter of time before their persistence finds a way past your defenses. Whether it's a link or attachment in an email or from the web, it is only a matter of time before it happens, or happens again and again. How many highly skilled security analysts do you need to hire to search through all your system, device, application, database and network traffic logs to identify when an employee falls victim to a phishing scam, installed ransomware or malware or provided logon credentials to a hacker? Do you have all the logs you need to investigate all IT assets that were affected? Are the logs parsed correctly so your searches and alerts work correctly? Do your security analysts know all aspects of the breach so the correct targets are investigated? Have the devices and or users been isolated from doing any more damage? Is there a known vulnerability that a software patch could have prevented this exploit? How long did it take them to complete all this?

Cybersecurity is a 24X7X365 day job, and threats are occurring at an alarming rate. If your security analysts cannot quickly and accurately detect and stop cybersecurity attacks using their existing tools… your company should look at SIEM Security tool with integrated cybersecurity AI like QRadar SIEM. If your company is having trouble identifying and applying security patches in a timely manner, your company should look at a Patch Management Software package like BigFix.