SIEM, SOAR, and UEBA are three different technologies that are evolving in modern IT.These solutions can often be confusing or challenging to justify which one to implement in order to meet your business needs. Keeping that in mind, this article will explain the differences between these security tools we use, and will also provide insight into their benefits
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) and security, information, and event management (SIEM) are both cybersecurity tools developed to gather data from various parts of our organization (logs, network, endpoint, etc). Using these data, our professionals create various use cases to protect against threats. This might sound similar but the functionality of SOAR and SIEM, are completely different.
Whereas UEBA is mostly considered an extension of any SIEM solution. And this also depends on SIEM to feed the data into it. However, behaviour analytics applied to a specific type of data set that was collected for any user or entity.
What is SIEM?
Security information and event management (SIEM) solution used to aggregate data from multiple data sources into one centralized platform. These data can be logs, networks, or endpoints.SIEM allows businesses to identify potential security threats by correlating all of the information it gathers from various data sources. The alerting mechanism can vary depending on the use cases. It can be multi-events at a specific time or a single event followed by another event over a certain time range etc. Usually, the SIEM solution uses a powerful correlation engine that will alert in real time by comparing the data collected. These correlation rules are combined with real-time analysis of events to help detect threats in any SIEM system.
Any SIEM technology has four main functionalities.
SIEM solutions also can do compliance reporting and obtain compliance with applicable industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS
What is UEBA?
User and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) is a cybersecurity solution that uses algorithms and machine learning to detect anomalies in the behaviour of users. User and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) uses machine learning to monitor the activities of any user. As per this, it establishes a baseline for an activity within a network and then monitors if there are any deviations from this baseline. Depending on the use cases, it assigns the risk score to any user and alerts them.
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What is SOAR?
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), the solution empowers any organisation to respond to any security events and threats faster and in a more efficient way. It allows a security professional to design more robust and automated workflows. So, the threat can be mitigated without any human intervention. SOAR, can be always dependent on a SIEM solution to collect the incidents. That’s why SIAM and SOAR are often used in conjunction. However, SOAR can collect data from variousother external sources as compared to anySIEM technology.
By using this solution, we can design an automated response to any low-priority security events which eventually allows the security team to focus more on the high-priority threats.
Key Differences Between SIEM, UEBA, and SOAR
SIEM and SOAR collect the data from similar sources. While SIEM technology is designed to store the data for a longer duration in a readable format and provides access to report or investigate on them an on-demand basis, SOAR technology works on the processed data or incidents.Somewhere, SOAR technologies meet the need for a missing component of SIEM tools, which is the ability to take action against malicious activity. SIEM tools can alert suspicious activities. However, problems such as false positives and incident prioritization can deter them from their proper use.
If SOAR identifies a threat in the network then it will use the automated process, making it a more efficient response process than SIEM.However, SIEM utilizes a pattern-matching algorithm to generate alerts that security professionals can then investigate more. They can further investigate and fine-tune depending on the use cases to reduce false positives.
UEBA provides more accurate threat detection by analysing abnormal behaviour or misuse of privileged account access. It uses a machine learning algorithm to create a baseline for any users and entities over the historical data analysed. And on real-time, it compares the deviation for any users from the baseline and detects anomalies.
Conclusion:
It's always important to note that SIEM, SOAR and UEBA technologies provide security benefits to your business. The functionality of these technology works very differently. So, it's worth taking some time to understand these technologies and make sure how they can best fit your current enterprise solution.
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