SIEM Monitoring

The Limits Of SIEM Monitoring

Security information and event management, or SIEM, provides a real-time view of an organization’s security posture and the threats it faces. By aggregating and analyzing data from a wide range of internal sources, SIEM monitoring solutions can spot abnormal behavioral, detect threats, pinpoint security breaches, and issue alerts for IT staff to follow up on.

However, SIEM solutions alone can’t provide organizations with comprehensive approach to improving security performance or managing risk. To augment the valuable insight produced by SIEM monitoring solutions, organizations need additional tools that can strengthen their security programs with objective, independently validated information. They need tools for benchmarking performance, and solutions that can help organizations better manage third-party risk. That’s why, when seeking a clearer view of their security posture, a growing number of organizations around the world are turning to Security Ratings from Bitsight.

SIEM Monitoring VS. Security Ratings

Many organizations are unsure whether they need both a SIEM monitoring solution and a security ratings solution. Both offer significant value but provide very different perspectives on security.

SIEM software collects log and event data from a wide range of sources: applications, network devices, domain controllers, servers, firewall logs, and other sources. Combining vast amounts of data on a centralized platform, SIEM technology performs analysis to identify threats and enable security teams to follow up on alerts.

The intelligence produced by SIEM solutions is based solely on internal sources and provides no external data that can offer context. SIEM monitoring can’t show an organization what its attack surface looks like from the outside, or how its cybersecurity posture has measurably improved over time. And SIEM technology can flood IT teams with alerts without offering any help to prioritize them for remediation.

That’s where security ratings can help. Providing an objective, verifiable view of an organization’s security posture, security ratings are designed to provide greater visibility into an attack surface and reveal vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure. Security ratings enable organizations to easily benchmark their performance over time. And where a flood of alerts from SIEM monitoring can easily overwhelm an IT staff, security ratings help to provide context and clarity that lets teams to easily prioritize remediation efforts on areas of greatest risk.

Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight Security Ratings provide a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’s cybersecurity performance. Like credit scores, Bitsight ratings are an outside-in view of security posture – they’re based solely on information that is externally available, and they require no internal information from the rated organization.

Updated daily, Bitsight Security Ratings can serve as a tool for continuous monitoring of an organization and its third-party network. Ratings are calculated on objective data that details an organization’s security performance in relation to 25 risk vectors in four general categories: compromised systems, user behavior, security diligence, and publicly disclosed data breaches. Ratings run from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – higher ratings indicate that an organization is more effective at implementing good security practices.

Most important, external research shows that Bitsight security ratings correlate to data breaches, providing organizations with extraordinary insight into their own vulnerabilities and those of their vendors. For example, companies with a Bitsight Security Rating of 700 or higher are nearly 5 times less likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 500 or lower.

Solutions to Complement SIEM Monitoring

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform provides organizations with a number of solutions that help to solve complex cyber risk challenges when implemented alongside SIEM solutions.

• Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables security teams to continuously monitor, measure, and communicate the efficacy of cybersecurity controls they have in place to secure the organization. With Bitsight, organizations can rely on continuous cyber security monitoring to gain clear visibility into the performance of their security program and align investments and actions to deliver the highest impact over time. Bitsight for Security Performance Management enables security teams to efficiently allocate limited resources to the areas of highest cyber and cloud security risk, and to support data-driven conversations with key stakeholders around issues of cybersecurity governance. Bitsight also offers the capability to financially quantify the risk living on an organization’s network to help prioritize risks that would cost an organization the most if acted upon.
• Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management provides the automated tools risk managers need to continuously measure and monitor the security posture of all vendors connected to their network. Bitsight immediately exposes cyber risk within a supply chain, helping risk management teams to work with vendors to achieve measurable risk reduction. With Bitsight, organizations have clearer insight into the most significant risk issues impacting each vendor, enabling an adaptive and tiered approach to prioritizing remediation within an organization’s third-party cyber risk management program.

Why Trust Bitsight for Monitoring Security Performance?

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains. Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.

FAQs: What Is Attack Surface Monitoring?