What Is Log Management and Why you Need it

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Thanks to the burgeoning supply chain, a host of IoT and work-from-home devices, and an expanding cloud presence, organizations are constantly ingesting new hardware into their IT environments. With each new line of code comes a fresh chance for a hidden vulnerability.

With each unfound weakness, attackers gain one more opportunity to gain a foothold in the organization and compromise sensitive assets. In order to stop this, companies can leverage security configuration management (SCM) and file integrity monitoring (FIM) tools, but to truly create a preventative approach, they need full visibility. This visibility is found within enterprise-level log management.

Understanding the Basics of Log Management Tools

Here’s a high-level overview of how logs work. Each event in a network generates data, and that information makes its way into the logs and records that are produced by operating systems, applications, and other devices. Logs are crucial to security visibility. If organizations fail to collect, store, and analyze those records, they could open themselves to digital attacks.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) agrees with this sentiment. That explains why the non-profit entity included log management in Version 8 of its Critical Security Controls (CSC). It also explains why CIS included three of the 12 Safeguards associated with CIS Control 8: Audit Log Management in its first Implementation Group (IG1), a means of prioritization by which organizations can achieve basic cyber hygiene.

Organizations put their threat detection efforts at risk if they don’t invest in log management. As an example, CIS puts the threat of insufficient log management into context here:

Log collection and analysis is critical for an enterprise’s ability to detect malicious activity quickly. Sometimes, audit records are the only evidence of a successful attack. Attackers know that many enterprises keep audit logs for compliance purposes but rarely analyze them. Attackers use this knowledge to hide their location, malicious software, and activities in victim machines. Due to poor or nonexistent log analysis processes, attackers sometimes control victim machines for months or years without anyone in the target enterprise knowing.

Log management is also critical to incident response. Nowadays, digital attackers can use the complexity of organizations’ network environments to move laterally to different assets so that they can exfiltrate sensitive information. Such activity makes it difficult for security teams to figure out exactly what happened in a security incident and determine its full scope without the ability to analyze complete log records.

The Log Management Process

There are five elements of a complete log management process. They are as follows:

1. Collection

Organizations need to collect logs over encrypted channels. Good log management tools should come equipped with multiple means to collect logs, but they should recommend the most reliable means of doing so. In general, organizations should use agent-based collection whenever possible, as this method is generally more secure and reliable than its agentless counterpart.

2. Storage

Once they have collected them, organizations need to preserve, compress, encrypt, store, and archive their logs. Companies can look for additional functionality in their log management software, such as the ability to specify where they can store their logs geographically. This type of feature can help meet their compliance requirements and ensure scalability.

3. Search

Organizations need to confirm that they can find their logs once they’ve stored them, so they should index their records in a way where they are discoverable via plaintext, REGEX, and API queries. A comprehensive log management solution should enable companies to optimize each log search with filters and classification tags. It should also allow them to view raw logs, conduct broad and detailed queries, and compare multiple queries at once.

4. Correlation

Organizations need to create rules that they can use to detect interesting events and perform automated actions. Of course, most events don’t occur on a single host in a single log. For that reason, companies should look for a log management tool that lets them create correlation rules according to the unique threats and requirements their environments face. They should also seek out a tool that allows them to import other data sources, such as vulnerability scans and asset inventories.

5. Output

Finally, companies need to be able to distribute log information to different users and groups using dashboards, reports, and email. Enterprise-ready log management tools should facilitate the exchange of data with other systems and the security team.

How Tripwire LogCenter Can Help

Fortra’s Tripwire LogCenter is designed with these five elements at its core. Among other things, it enables companies to create customized log rules, collect and store all data, customize dashboards according to noteworthy events on the network, and reduce noise by filtering out data.

To learn more about Tripwire’s log management solution, click here.

Log management is just one of five security controls with which organizations should concern themselves when purchasing a new security solution. To learn more, download this whitepaper.