While all cybersecurity professionals agree that log management is integral for robust proactive and reactive security, managing the enormous amount of data logs can be a challenge. While you might be tempted to collect all logs generated from your systems, software, network devices, and users, this “fear of missing out” on an important notification ultimately leads to so much noise that your security analysts and threat hunters cannot find the most important information.

Security log management is the process of collecting, storing, and correlating the network data that details all activity in your systems and networks. Every action in an organization’s network generates event data, including records produced by operating systems, applications, devices, and users. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) identifies log management as a basic control for detecting malicious actors and software hiding in networks and on machines.

Every day we discover new vulnerabilities in our systems, cracks in the fence the adversaries take advantage of to get into your organization and wreak havoc. Understanding what you have in your environment (e.g., types of devices, systems equipment, etc.) is very important in order to make sure the controls in place are working and more importantly, keeping up with the threat landscape.

As companies responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with remote work, cybercriminals increased their social engineering and ransomware attack methodologies. Ransomware, malicious code that automatically downloads to a user’s device and locks it from further use, has been rampant since the beginning of March 2020. According to a 2020 report by Bitdefender, ransomware attacks increased by seven times when compared year-over-year to 2019.