Create a plan for analysing data from security monitoring

A process for reporting incidents is maintained to help staff report incidents efficiently and consistently.

Things to report as an incident include e.g.:

• unauthorized access to data / premises
• action against security guidelines
• suspected security issue (e.g. phishing, malware infection)
• data system outage
• accidental or intentional destruction / alteration of data
• lost or stolen device
• compromised password
• lost physical identifier (e.g. keychain, smart card, smart sticker)
• suspected security weakness (e.g. on utilized data system or other procedures)

The personnel guidelines emphasize the obligation to report security incidents as soon as possible in accordance with the agreed process. The instructions also describe other operations in the event of an incident (e.g. recording seen error messages and other details).

The organization must:

• identify the connections between technology and the running of business operations
• Build the necessary infrastructure to maintain the necessary technology so that their availability and operational reliability can be guaranteed

The organization must define what technology is needed in order to achieve the information security objectives? And, what technology must be acquired / developed in order to achieve the information security goals?

Organization must describe the baseline of normal behaviour for the use of network and data systems, which is used as a starting point for identifying anomalies.

When defining the baseline, the following must be taken into account:

• monitoring the use of data systems during both normal and peak times
• usual times of use, places of use and frequency of use for each user and user group

Monitoring systems must be configured against the baseline to identify anomalous behavior such as:

• unplanned termination of systems or processes
• traffic related to malware or malicious IP addresses or domains
• known attack characteristics (e.g. denial of service or buffer overflow)
• unusual system use (e.g. keystroke logging)
• bottlenecks and overloads (e.g. network queues, latency levels)
• unauthorized access (actual or attempted) to systems or data
• unauthorized scanning of data systems and networks
• successful and failed attempts to access protected resources (e.g. DNS servers, web portals and file systems)
• unusual user and system behavior

Management shall define responsibilities and establish procedures to ensure an effective and consistent response to security incidents.

Management must ensure e.g.:

• interference management has clear responsibilities
• there is a documented process for responding, handling and reporting incidents

The process must ensure e.g.:

• staff have a clear contact point / tool and instructions for reporting incidents
• the reported security breaches will be addressed by qualified personnel in a sufficiently comprehensive manner

Organization should use tools that support both manual and automated searches, including criteria-based searches. The tool should be able to automatically collate data from different sources to more easily determine whether an incident is genuine, as well as its scope and nature.

These operations and processes can be implemented with SIEM (Security information and event management). SIEM solutions use analytics tools, technology and algorithms (e.g., newer SIEM solutions employ applied machine learning) to help detect unknown threats and abnormalities in the security-relevant data. Also SIEM solutions allow organizations to modify already existing (which usually come pre-configured) and add criteria-based alerts to match known threats. These things will help detect threats earlier.

System logs often contain a wealth of information, much of which is irrelevant to security monitoring. In order to identify events relevant to security monitoring, consideration should be given to automatically copying appropriate message types to another log or to using appropriate utilities or audit tools to review and resolve files.

Security systems are the data systems that are in place to protect the information we have, not so much to process it.

We regularly evaluate the operation of different security systems and the need for new systems.