Elastic SIEM: Speed, scale, and analytical power drive your security operations and threat hunting

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced the arrival of Elastic SIEM.

Elastic SIEM

The initial launch of Elastic SIEM introduces a new set of data integrations for security use cases, and a new dedicated app in Kibana that lets security practitioners investigate and triage common host and network security workflows in a more streamlined way.

Elastic SIEM is available for free as a part of the default distribution. It is being introduced as a beta in the 7.2 release of the Elastic Stack and is available immediately on the Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, or for download.

A journey that started years ago

Over the past few years, the Elastic Stack has become a popular choice with security practitioners for protecting their systems and data from cyber threats. Bell Canada and Slack use the Elastic Stack for security analytics. Cisco Talos has Elasticsearch at the heart of their threat hunting program. OmniSOC, a shared cybersecurity operations center built by the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory chose to use the Elastic Stack as the core of their SIEM solutions. And we’ve seen open source projects like RockNSM, HELK, and others form around the Elastic Stack to support security operators.

Starting with the collection of security information and events, Elastic expanded the set of host-based security data they collect with Filebeat, Winlogbeat, and Auditbeat. They also expanded the range of network-based security event collection by adding integrations with popular network monitoring and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) such as Bro/Zeek and Suricata.

As they broadened the set of data integrations, they realized how important it is to have a common way to represent data across different sources. Elastic spent the last 18 months, along with their community and partners, developing the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) — an extensible field mapping specification that makes it easy to normalize data from disparate sources to enable cross-source correlation, search, and analysis.

With easy ways to collect a number of security data sources and a common schema in which to store them, the next obvious step in their journey was a user interface that brought these pieces together in a single place and delivered a user experience that was tailored to the needs of security practitioners.

Introducing Elastic SIEM

At the heart of Elastic SIEM is the new SIEM app, an interactive workspace for security teams to triage events and perform initial investigations. Its Timeline Event Viewer allows analysts to gather and store evidence of an attack, pin and annotate relevant events, and comment on and share their findings, all from within Kibana — allowing you to easily work with any data that follows the ECS format.

Kibana has always been a wonderful place for security teams to visualize, search, and filter their security data. The Elastic SIEM app takes all the aspects that security teams love about Kibana — interactivity, ad hoc search, and responsive drill downs — and packages it into an intuitive product experience that aligns with typical SOC workflows.

Elastic SIEM

The SIEM app enables analysis of host-related and network-related security events as part of alert investigations or interactive threat hunting, including the following:

Host security event analysis: As a complement to the extensive library of visualizations and dashboards that already exist in Kibana, the Hosts view in the SIEM app provides key metrics regarding host-related security events, and a set of data tables that enable interaction with the Timeline Event Viewer. 7.2 also brings new host-based data collection with support for Sysmon in Winlogbeat.

Network security event analysis: Similarly, the Network view informs analysts of key network activity metrics, facilitates investigation time enrichment, and provides network event tables that enable interaction with the Timeline Event Viewer. They’re also introducing support for Cisco ASA and Palo Alto firewalls in 7.2.

Timeline Event Viewer: As the collaborative workspace for investigations or threat hunting, analysts can easily drag objects of interest into the Timeline Event Viewer to create exactly the query filter they need to get to the bottom of an alert. During the investigation, analysts can pin and annotate individual events, and can add notes to describe the steps taken during the investigation. Auto-saving ensures that the results of the investigation are available for incident response teams.

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