Threat hunting with Cloud SIEM

Threat hunting is emerging as a must-have addition to cybersecurity strategies. By enabling organizations to find and mitigate threats before they ever touch their networks or systems, threat hunting provides the basis for a more proactive security posture – and one that delivers higher ROI on security tools and processes.

How can businesses actually add threat hunting to their security arsenals? That’s where solutions like Sumo Logic's Cloud SIEM come in. Although Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM is more than just a threat hunting tool, enabling threat hunting is one of the platform’s core focuses.

Here’s an overview of how Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM enables threat hunting for organizations of all types and sizes.

Threat Hunting, Defined

Threat hunting is the process of actively searching for and responding to cybersecurity threats before they breach your networks or environments.

In other words, threat hunting is the opposite of waiting for an active breach to occur before detecting and responding to it. When you hunt, you identify key threats that your organization faces, and then search for those threats “in the wild,” by finding out where they exist and which specific attack techniques threat actors will use to execute the threats.

With that data in hand, you can then take steps to defend against the threats before threat actors actually launch an attack. You can block endpoints associated with the threat from your networks, for example, and take steps to ensure that whichever exploit threat actors are using won’t work on your systems.

The main benefit of threat hunting is that it makes it possible to defeat threats before a breach occurs. Given that it takes companies 55 days on average to detect an active threat inside their systems, and another 38 days to patch vulnerabilities, the ability to find threats proactively before threat actors are inside your network puts you in a much stronger position to prevent threat actors from causing damage to the business.

Threat hunting is by no means the only strategy that organizations should use to protect against cyber threats. Other strategies, such as traditional security monitoring to detect live breaches and audits that can help identify weak points in your cyberdefenses, are equally important. But for many organizations, threat hunting is a new type of activity that deepens their security strategies and allows them to turn security operations from a passive into a proactive affair.

Threat Hunting Features in Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM

Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM is a cloud-based Security Information and Events Management solution. That means it collects, correlates and analyzes data related to security events in order to help teams understand and react to threats of all types.

Traditionally, SIEM platforms were designed primarily for finding threats that have already breached the network. Using data such as unusual network traffic activity and authentication patterns, legacy SIEMs could detect signs of an active breach inside an organization. They could then alert the security team, which would take steps to stop the breach from spreading to additional systems, remove intruders from systems that were already compromised, and finally, determine how the attack occurred in order to prevent it from happening again.

Sumo Logic can do all of the above to help teams respond to existing breaches. However, unlike some SIEM platforms, Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM is also designed to help security analysts threat hunt by identifying, assessing, and responding to threats that have not yet breached their organization’s defenses. It does this in several ways.

Integrated Threat Intelligence

The Sumo Logic platform integrates with threat intelligence data provided by CrowdStrike which tracks varying types of threats, the motives of the threat actors behind them, and the attack techniques associated with them.

In addition to making threat intelligence readily available to analysts for manual review, Sumo Logic also performs automated security operations workflows and clusters threat activities associated with a single entity for up to 30 days to identify critical threats. In this way, the platform helps identify threats of greatest concern to your organization, which in turn prepares you to go out and hunt for those threats before they target your environment.

Full Threat Contextualization

Because Sumo Logic is not just a security platform, but also a monitoring and analytics toolset that helps teams understand all dimensions of their applications and infrastructure, it is able to provide all of the critical contextual information that analysts need to assess and respond to threats.

By having data—such as the resource consumption patterns of your applications, typical user authentication trends, and the load that different systems and applications support—analysts are in a stronger position to understand the potential impact of threats within their environments.

Automated Alert Triage

Threat intelligence data is vast and is updated constantly, making it impossible to respond manually to each and every new type of threat known to exist. Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM helps security analysts focus on what matters by correlating threats and triaging alerts automatically. Rather than being distracted by low-priority alerts, security teams can home in on the most serious threats their organization faces.

Endless Scalability

Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM can support a limitless amount of data. No matter how much security information you need to store and analyze in order to drive threat hunting activity, Sumo Logic offers an endlessly scalable data lake to accommodate it, along with the analytics tools necessary to make sense of it.

Integration with Response Platforms

Sumo Logic makes it easy to manage threat response by offering Cloud SOAR and also integrating with existing SecOps platforms, which help team members delegate tasks and collaborate as they take steps to block threats from harming their business.

Analyst-Friendly Threat Hunting with Sumo Logic

In short, Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM provides automation features and integrations that form the foundation of a seamless, efficient threat hunting workflow. Rather than having to collect threat intelligence data manually and correlate security information by hand with application and infrastructure data, security teams can use Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM to do it all from a single platform.

Whether you’re responding to an active threat, or actively hunting for threats that have not yet breached your perimeter, Sumo Logic’s Cloud SIEM makes it easy to do it all.