One of the major causes of alert fatigue for SOCs is a class of alerts that fall in between false positives and useful detections: when an actual attack has been launched, and the detection is working correctly, but the host on the receiving end is not vulnerable, guaranteeing that the attack will fail.

The idea behind the SIEM (and now XDR!) technologies was to provide a single engine at the heart of the SOC, aggregating data, enabling analytics and powering workflow automation. The SIEM would act as one place to train analysts and integrate a range of complementary technologies and processes. Given the efficiency that comes from centralization, I was surprised to hear that a growing number of defenders are actually using two SIEMs. Why is that?

Given that active cyber warfare has broken out alongside Russia’s active invasion of Ukraine - from Russian wiper malware to Anonymous hacking Russian state TV - CISA’s recent “Shields Up” memo is a timely insight into some of the TTPs defenders of critical infrastructure should be keeping an eye out for. Let’s break down the four key areas outlined in the memo and examine ways they can be detected with network data.

The migration to cloud provides faster time to deployment and elasticity, but often at some cost and complexity to infrastructure control and visibility. A concrete example we can use is a deployment of web servers with rational security group configuration, in light of the recent Log4Shell vulnerability. While limitations are similar in all IaaS environments, consider the following AWS architecture with focus on the web servers running on EC2 instances.