8 Things

Your Next SIEM

Must Do
CrowdStrike eBook
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CrowdStrike eBook
8 Things Your Next SIEM Must Do

Working in security can feel fast and furious — with the fastest observed eCrime breakout time in 2023
clocking in at a mere 2 minutes and 7 seconds1 — yet 70% of incidents still take more than 12 hours to
resolve. 2​Security information and event management (SIEM) tools are hailed as the virtual command
center of the SOC, but they can often feel like a major roadblock in the race against threat actors.

Despite multiple evolutions over the years, most SIEM solutions still have yet to deliver on their

2’ 07”
promise to provide a single pane of glass for all data. Teams find themselves mired in complexity
across sprawling technology estates, spending too many hours trying to get value from their
investment. Modern SIEM tools need to be flexible, scalable and interoperable enough to meet the
demands of today’s environments — and must deliver unprecedented speed and efficiency to help
is the fastest
keep logging costs in check. Let’s look at the factors teams should consider as they rethink their recorded eCrime
security logging strategies. breakout time in
2023

Siloed Tools Limit Visibility

Source: CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report

Those familiar with SIEMs know that they are only as valuable as the data going in, whether it’s
from firewalls, web proxies, email security, endpoints, cloud logs or some combination thereof. As
teams’ respective security stacks have grown, so has the data sent into their SIEMs. In fact, many
teams treat their SIEM as a virtual data dumping ground in an endless quest for a holy grail of “full”
visibility.

Legacy SIEMs have fallen short of the goal to obtain a full picture of risk across the entire
environment. They struggle to effectively correlate disparate tools, often running into issues with
data onboarding or cost-effective storage, especially for high-volume data sources. Siloed tools
create blind spots and obscure potential indicators of attack.

1
CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report
2
CrowdStrike 2024 State of Application Security Report
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CrowdStrike eBook
8 Things Your Next SIEM Must Do

Low-Fidelity Alerts Overwhelm Analysts

Legacy SIEMs are also notorious for noisy alerts and false positives. Security analysts cannot
keep up with the hundreds or even thousands of alerts they see each day, especially when they
need to switch consoles and screens to view them all. Alert noise is usually attributed to static
or signature-based detections with correlation rules. But relying solely on “known bads” is not
enough to find adversaries and stop breaches in the current threat landscape — the CrowdStrike
2024 Global Threat Report revealed that 75% of attacks to gain access were malware-free in
2023. Furthermore, these alerts often do not account for changes in user or entity behavior, which
might be a better indicator of compromise. And, these rules require countless cycles of tuning and
testing, requiring significant resources in detection engineering.
75%
of attacks used to
Triage and Response Are Manual gain initial access
and Repetitive were malware-free
Source: CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report
Detecting advanced threats can be like finding one specific needle in a needle stack. Analysts
and threat hunters must continuously scour through mounds of data to reveal the telltale signs of
an attack. But many teams find themselves with “swivel chair syndrome,” spending precious time
pivoting between consoles, manually correlating events and piecing together context in repetitive
tasks. For instance, many teams often have at least one full-time employee who spends all eight
working hours in the day triaging alerts like phishing and manually checking the reputations of
domains and file attachments against external sources.

Poor SIEM Performance Slows

Down Hunts and Investigations
Traditional SIEMs were not architected for modern environments, rendering them too slow and
unwieldy for today’s threat hunters and security analysts. Many use index-based search, which is
often computationally resource-intensive and negatively impacts performance — analysts report
that some SIEM queries can take hours or even days to return results. As log volumes and the
number of log sources rise, the size of the indexes grows, further compounding the problem.
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8 Things Your Next SIEM Must Do

8 Things Your
Next SIEM Must Do

1
To stay ahead of evolving security and logging requirements, look for a SIEM that can achieve
the following eight objectives.

Unify Security Operations on

One AI-Native Platform to
Overcome Complexity
SIEMs have evolved dramatically over the years. They’ve gone
from mere log management tools to full-fledged threat detection
and response platforms. With the complexity in today’s security
environments, the next step is to further unify the SOC on an AI-native
platform.

The days of siloed security are over. It’s time to take a data-centric
approach to your security operations and consolidate on a platform that
includes critical pillars of your stack — from endpoint, identity and cloud
workload protection to exposure management and data protection.
A platform with native tools and data sources gives you full visibility
while simplifying and enhancing the analyst experience. Though some
solutions may advocate for being data source-agnostic, the reality is
you need rich, high-quality data that can be automatically onboarded,
normalized and correlated to satisfy your most critical use cases.

Ensure your platform of choice offers best-in-class, purpose-built

capabilities like threat intelligence and behavioral analytics while
delivering on the promise of a unified experience. It should simplify data
collection with a single agent and offer a variety of options for either
robust analysis or long-term retention.
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2
Effortlessly Onboard Data
and Scale Logging Capacity
In addition to native data sources, as SOCs mature, many teams will
need to onboard data from third parties to increase visibility and
unlock additional use cases. However, this process often involves a
dizzying amount of log formats and ingestion methods, resulting in
deployment delays, cost overruns and employee burnout. As a result,
some teams choose not to send certain data to their SIEM or create
further architectural complexity to avoid high ingestion costs, leading to
visibility gaps.

Modern solutions must have an elegant means to filter, route and store
data so teams can scale capacity and control costs without sacrificing
visibility. Consider platforms with out-of-the-box integrations that
drastically streamline the data onboarding process for third-party tools
to rapidly accelerate your SIEM adoption and improve total cost of
ownership (TCO).
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3
Detect Threats Instantly
with High-Fidelity, Real-Time
Alerting
A data-centric approach powers better detections to catch advanced
threats and help teams sift through the noise, and a low-latency
platform that leverages AI from data sources across your environment
delivers high-fidelity, real-time alerts. Analysts can focus on alerts that
are automatically grouped and prioritized based on risk using machine
learning to understand scope and severity.
Out-of-the-box detections ease the process of standing up and tuning
alerts, and a stream of continuously updated threat intelligence that can
correlate trillions of events daily helps identify the latest threats. Your
incident response teams will also want to understand how the SIEM’s
detection coverage maps to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK® or how it
performs in third-party testing and evaluations.

Some SIEM vendors add real-time alerting as an afterthought by

allocating computing resources for a limited number of alerts instead of
architecting a SIEM for real-time alerting. However, advanced SecOps
teams often need to be able to detect hundreds or even thousands
of threats in real time, and this becomes prohibitively expensive to
implement with legacy SIEM products.
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4
Accelerate Incident
Investigation and Augment
with AI
When investigating an incident, connecting all of the dots and
identifying the root cause and scope often require countless queries
and in-depth analysis. If each query takes an inordinate amount of time
to yield answers — or worse, returns incomplete results or times out
altogether — then investigations can stretch on for weeks or months,
wasting resources and potentially increasing the financial impact of an
attack. Moreover, analysts sufficiently skilled in complex query language
are in short supply, and junior staff members can take months to train.

Select a SIEM that can level up analysts of all skill levels with AI and
help them quickly navigate their tools and amass context during an
investigation. Generative AI can translate plain language into full-fledged
queries to answer any question. Graph technology instantaneously
visualizes incident connections and helps analysts perform incident root
cause analysis to understand impacted assets and entities. Your SIEM
should also automatically generate a timeline of events so analysts can
easily understand what happened, including when and where. Analysts
also need to be able to collaborate and perform case management in
a single console that lets them view native alerts and those from third
parties.
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5
Empower Your Threat Hunters
to Cut Through the Noise with
Flexible, Advanced Queries
Your threat hunters must be able to sift through mounds of data nimbly
to find what they are looking for, and this typically means constructing
complex queries that filter out irrelevant data. To do this, your SIEM
should not only scale to collect large volumes of data but also include
a mature query language with rich syntax and support for aggregation,
statistical functions, data manipulation and joining datasets. It should
support regular expressions for advanced filtering and efficient pattern
matching. Your SIEM should also provide free text search to let analysts
of all experience levels quickly scan through your data for a specific
value. In addition to letting your team build, schedule and save queries,
your SIEM should offer a broad set of predefined queries through a
marketplace. When considering solutions, don’t just evaluate query
speed — review the breadth of query functions and the flexibility of the
query language.

Analysts should also be able to investigate and hunt using plain-

language and conversational AI embedded across your platform of
choice. This provides them with a quick and easy starting point for
complex tasks, such as finding lateral movement on certain hosts
or understanding which other hosts in an environment have been
compromised.
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6
Reduce Response Times with
Automation
The SIEM category has evolved to include security orchestration
automation and response (SOAR) tools to help analysts respond to
threats at machine speed. Some SIEM solutions can also use AI to
surface recommended response actions based on similar, previous
incidents.

Your SIEM should include simple-to-use SOAR capabilities for analysts

to easily automate manual, repetitive tasks. Automating response
standardizes your workflows and formally codifies tribal knowledge.
Although many SOAR solutions promise instant time savings, evaluate
which capabilities are included natively and which ones require analysts
to use Python or spend time writing out scripts. These tools should have
graphical interfaces that leverage no-code tools to drastically simplify
the process of building out workflows and should also include some
playbook templates to address popular use cases out-of-the-box.
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Orchestrate Tools to Improve
Efficiency
A major part of response is stringing together actions across multiple
tools, a process commonly referred to as orchestration. For instance, if
anomalous behavior detected on an endpoint like a laptop shows that a
user may have been compromised, you may want to prompt for step-up
authentication. If that fails, you might want to suspend network access
and block a potential adversary from moving laterally while the team
investigates further. This process typically involves a plethora of tools,
from access management and endpoint protection solutions to network
management tools and — of course — your SIEM.

A SIEM that consolidates multiple tools allows teams to orchestrate all

of these actions using native platform capabilities without requiring any
additional configuration. To extend response across even more third-
party tools, do your diligence on how much integration work is needed
and understand the availability of out-of-the-box integrations.
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8
Ensure Predictable Pricing
and Costs without Sacrificing
Visibility
Due to the aforementioned complexity and exploding data volumes,
high costs force security teams to limit the types of log data they collect
or periodically age out log data. As a result, blind spots can multiply,
making it easier for advanced adversaries to penetrate IT systems,
traverse networks and avoid detection. If organizations aren’t able to
log everything, launching investigations can resemble a quest for the
proverbial needle, without knowing if the needle even exists.

When evaluating SIEM platforms, compare the subscription price as well

as the overall TCO — including infrastructure, deployment and operating
costs — to determine which solutions meet your budget and data
retention requirements. Though some vendors offer creative options
beyond ingest-based licensing plans, they often result in surprise bills
and unanticipated fees due to overruns from API or query consumption.

To avoid future unforeseen expenses, choose a product that offers

predictable licensing and imposes minimal maintenance costs.

Data volumes are growing

faster than budgets
DATA – Exponential
IT BUDGET – Linear
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Power the Converged, AI-Native SOC

with CrowdStrike Falcon
Next-Gen SIEM
If your current SIEM is falling short in terms of addressing key security and logging
requirements, then it’s time to consider alternative solutions.

Join leading organizations around the world and choose CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen
SIEM. CrowdStrike is pioneering the future of the AI-native SOC by providing a complete SOC
platform to stop breaches, achieve compliance and solve any security challenge. Extending
the industry’s leading endpoint detection and response (EDR), world-class threat intelligence
and expert services to all data sources, Falcon Next-Gen SIEM gives you complete visibility
and protection.

Built from the ground up around a modern security analyst experience, Falcon Next-Gen SIEM
amplifies the speed and efficiency of incident response so you can swiftly root out adversaries
while slashing SOC costs.

“Remediation used to take us weeks …

now it takes only 53 seconds.”
Tahir Ali, CTO and CISO, Montage Health
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Unify Operations on One AI-Native SOC

Platform
Falcon Next-Gen SIEM delivers a complete, AI-native SOC platform that spans all data and
infuses AI, automation and intelligence into every aspect of threat detection, investigation
and incident response to stop threats faster than ever. Falcon Next-Gen SIEM empowers
organizations to:

• Find evasive threats with AI-powered detections and world-class threat intelligence from
the company that understands adversaries better than any other
• Investigate threats quickly with contextual insights all in one place and blazing-fast search
that’s up to 150x faster than legacy SIEMs
• Elevate analysts of all skill levels, enabling them to ask questions, get answers in plain
language and quickly respond through native workflow automation
• Cut complexity and costs by unifying security operations in one AI-native SOC platform
• Accelerate deployment with a growing array of out-of-the-box integrations and the key
endpoint, cloud and identity data already built into the platform

“Our logs appear

instantly. It’s not a
visible delay where
we’re waiting minutes,
like before. Now we can
search 3 billion events in
under a second.”
Sumit Bhargava, Divisional Assistant VP,
Great American Insurance Group

Falcon Next-Gen SIEM helps pinpoint threats with 360° visibility and high-fidelity detections
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One Platform. Complete Protection.

Next-Gen SIEM
Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is a key part of the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. Powered by
cloud-scale AI, the Falcon platform delivers superior protection and performance, reduced
complexity and immediate time-to-value through a range of threat detection, threat
intelligence, endpoint security and orchestration modules.
benefits
In addition, you can augment your team with continuous expertise from CrowdStrike Up to
Falcon® Complete. With industry-leading managed detection and response, Falcon
Complete gives your team insights to proactively identify threats and keep your 150x
organization secure. faster search to accelerate
investigations3
Falcon Next-Gen SIEM drives the convergence of security, data, automation and AI to cut
complexity and stop breaches.
1PB/day
data ingestion at massive
scale4

<1 sec
latency, the time required
to process incoming data5

Up to

80%
savings per year versus
legacy SIEM solutions6

Ready to learn more about Falcon Next-Gen SIEM?

Watch the 3-minute demo.

3
Performance measured against two leading security logging platforms evaluating the speed to query DNS requests to top abused domains
4
Based on a benchmark report conducted by GigaOm
5
Sub-second latency measured across all Falcon LogScale customers
6
Estimated savings based on real Business Value Assessments for individual customers
 About CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike (Nasdaq: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern
security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical
areas of enterprise risk — endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.

Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike
Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving
adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver
hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat
hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.

Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the

Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and
performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.

CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.

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