Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Re: SIEM Tools


From: Jeannine Shantz <jshantz () SJU EDU>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 12:03:18 -0500

Thank you.
Jeannine

-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Collyer, Jeffrey W.
(jwc3f)
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 11:40 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] SIEM Tools

Ok I’ll bite.

I do love Splunk.  I’m not anti-ELK, but I know what works for me.

Schema-on-search is a huge huge win to me.  I do not know all the fields I
may care about in all my data prior to ingesting, and we’re adding more
every day. We can argue about needing to know everything in your data prior
to indexing, but thats not a Splunk failing if you consider it one.  Splunk
solves that problem for me.

Having a company with paid support behind the product and a large community
of supporters is invaluable.  I’m one guy.  I stood up a 2 search head, 3
indexer, 2 forwarder cluster by myself.  Managing it is not a full time job.
ELK is much more intensive.  Support from Splunk itself has always been top
notch when I’ve needed it.  At a .conf2106 (the splunk conference) the
documentation group had a booth. I complained a them about something I had
found unclear.  They took notes and actually thanked me for the feedback.
The docs were updated to be more clear the Monday following the conference.
They take feedback seriously.

Dashboards/saved searches/alerts - Our analysts write their own.  They don’t
need to come to me to build something in Kabana for them.  Maybe thats not
the hurdle it used to be, but I’ve not revisited ELK lately.  Do they
sometimes break thing or write searches that are too broad. Sure.  But their
accounts are limited to the resources they can consume and when their search
falls over, its generally just their search and not the whole cluster.

Does Splunk have its warts, sure.  Is it expensive and you pay for what you
ingest - yes.  Is it worth it?  To me it is.

Ultimately it comes down to paying to be able to do more, faster with Splunk
or devoting manpower/time to managing ELK.  You pay either way its just
comes down to what you want to pay with.

Jeff






On Jan 22, 2018, at 11:01 AM, Kevin Wilcox <wilcoxkm () APPSTATE EDU> wrote:

Obscene licensing, schema-on-read architecture, massive learning curve for
data enrichment (that can kill performance due to the schema-on-read
architecture)...I can think of a couple of reasons to be anti-Splunk. Some
of those can be architected around (and why I've started seeing people
front Splunk with logstash and even nifi) but they're still problematic.

Not that schema-on-write doesn't have its flaws -- reindexing data when
you want to make a field "type" change retroactive to 20TB of log data
isn't exactly for the faint of heart -- but the performance is
night-and-day different for "well-tuned" systems.

Invariably, the people I talk to who LOVE Splunk either had syslog-only,
WEF-only or nothing before they did their deployments and it's not
*Splunk* that they really love, it's the benefits of log aggregation and
unified search that have them so enamoured.

kmw

On 22 January 2018 at 15:42, Frank Barton <bartonf () husson edu> wrote:
Robert, other than the cost, I'd be very interested to know what they
don't like about splunk. Since we implemented it a couple months ago, it
has proved itself extremely useful to us, almost on a daily basis. Not
only from a security perspective, but also from a troubleshooting
perspective.

Thank You
Frank

On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Bridges, Robert A. <bridgesra () ornl gov>
wrote:
All, I’m a researcher and not an operator, but I interact w/ SOC operators
regularly.



Splunk ES has gotten bad reviews from the folks I know (that’s not to say
they don’t like/use Splunk)



Stucco is an open-source R&D project (less mature) for correlating
internal and external data: https://github.com/stucco







--

Robert A. Bridges, PhD, Research Mathematician, Cyber & Information
Science Research Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory



From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
<SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU> on behalf of Rob Milman
<rob.milman () SAIT CA>
Reply-To: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
<SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU>
Date: Monday, January 22, 2018 at 10:26 AM
To: "SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU" <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU>
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] SIEM Tools



+1 for Splunk



From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Madl, Michael
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 7:49 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: [SECURITY] SIEM Tools



I am currently reviewing several SIEM products [QRadar, Alien Vault, Log
Rhythm etc.].



Can anyone share any success stories with the product they are utilizing.
I have utilized Alien Vault in the past and the correlation functionality
is pretty good.  Threat detection is also done well.



Gartner has been a great tool for review but wondering if anyone had any
strong feelings/experiences with certain tools.





Thank you in advance,





MICHAEL MADL

INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER

UNIVERSITY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY



INDIANA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

4201 SOUTH WASHINGTON STREET

MARION, IN 46953



765.677.2688   |   765.677.2020 FAX

michael.madl () indwes edu



INDWES.EDU/IT



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--
Frank Barton
Security+, ACMT
IT Systems Administrator
Husson University


Jeffrey Collyer
Information Security Engineer
University of Virginia


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