New threats are discovered daily and the cost to businesses for cyber-attacks is high: the average cost of a data breach in Australia is $3.35 million, an increase of 9.8% year on year.
Although the majority of organisations have implemented some form of security solution to protect their networks and data, the scope and frequency of cyber-attacks continues to expand. To address these challenging circumstances, enterprises must take proactive steps towards cybersecurity practices that will safeguard their company from potential risks.
Microsoft Sentinel provides businesses with thorough, up-to-date threat intelligence that ingests data from multiple sources, and correlates it to generate actionable insights. Read on to discover how Sentinel’s threat intelligence will help better protect your business.
What is Microsoft Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that leverages Microsoft’s global threat intelligence network to provide actionable insights to detect and prevent attacks at the network, cloud, and endpoints. The platform can ingest data from multiple data sources and feeds to enrich, enrich, and correlate data to generate actionable insights.
What is threat intelligence?
Threat intelligence is the process of understanding, managing, and minimising the risks of potential threats to your business. It includes information related to the source of the threat, its method of operation, and the target it intends to attack.
Threat intelligence involves studying and interpreting data from multiple sources to build a bigger picture of potential threats to networks. Such data sources may include network traffic logs, vulnerability scans, malicious code samples, and more.
The goal of threat intelligence is to gain a better understanding of the current cybersecurity landscape. With this knowledge, you can implement security and risk mitigation strategies to safeguard your company from malicious actors and potential data breaches.
Import threat intelligence with data connectors
Microsoft Sentinel allows your enterprise to import threat intelligence by connecting to other tools within your network. This way, you can use other tools to monitor your network for threats and feed this data into Sentinel.
Microsoft Sentinel uses data connectors to collect threat intelligence and integrate it with your existing security solution. This will allow you to use this data as a trigger in your security solution to detect threats.
Data connectors are used to ingest and process data from a variety of sources. Such sources may include threat feeds, SIEMs, IDS/IPS logs, web proxies, and more. Threat feeds collect information about malicious IP addresses, malware, and other data points related to security threats.
SIEMs collect data from various security systems, log files, and network devices. By ingesting and processing data from these sources, data connectors can help you import threat intelligence. Doing so will allow you to use this data in your security solution to detect potential threats.
You can also use data connectors to share information between tools like Microsoft Azure Security Center and Sentinel.
Microsoft threat intelligence matching analytics
Microsoft threat intelligence matching analytics are a core component of Microsoft Sentinel, designed to collect, store, and analyse data related to security threats. Through these components, you can ingest and process data from a variety of sources. By connecting to these feeds, you can get a more comprehensive view of the threats targeting your organisation.
Such sources may include threat feeds, SIEMs, IDS/IPS logs, web proxies, and more. Once you’ve collected and processed data through threat intelligence matching analytics, you can use it as a trigger in your security solution. Doing so will allow you to use this data in your security solution to detect potential threats.
Enabling proactive threat hunting
Sentinel’s threat hunting capabilities leverage threat intelligence to discover risks and respond to existing events. Threat hunting uses data such as network logs, endpoint logs, and asset inventory data to identify potential threats and determine the resources required to respond to existing threats. It can also help to prioritise the response efforts to minimise the impact on the business.
Using Microsoft’s threat intelligence, Sentinel’s threat hunting can extend beyond these data sources to also include external data such as malicious URLs, suspicious IP addresses, and malicious domains. This helps to identify potential threats, while also determining their source, allowing security teams to respond to threats before they become real problems.
Sentinel’s integration with AI and ML
Sentinel is also able to take advantage of Microsoft’s advanced technologies to help protect your business’s networks. One example of this is the ability to integrate Microsoft Azure Analysis Services with Sentinel. By connecting to Azure Analysis Services, you can ingest data from your existing data sources and store them in a highly scalable data warehouse.
By storing your data in Azure Analysis Services, you can also take advantage of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to uncover new insights. These insights can then be used to generate new alerts that are sent to Sentinel.
Protect your business with the threat intelligence experts
Microsoft Sentinel provides better threat intelligence for businesses to protect against malicious cyber-attacks. The platform’s threat hunting capabilities leverage threat intelligence to identify potential threats and respond before they become real problems.
The Microsoft Sentinel specialists at Steadfast Solutions are experts at deploying and managing Sentinel SIEM solutions. Talk to them today and find out how this advanced security platform will defend your business.