Is Windows Event Collection a problem for you? We hear (a lot) that organizations struggle with collecting Windows Events. It’s not that their SIEM struggles, but rather there is a gap in the technology to deliver Windows Event Collection (WEC) data from hundreds or thousands of machines to SIEM at sufficient speed.

We like to solve problems yet to be solved, and therefore would love to hear from you about your experience with WEC. Would it help you to have a LOGbinder for Windows that could deliver relevant security events to your SIEM? If so, what SIEM do you use?

This issue strikes at the very heart of our core belief that important security event information should be in the SIEM. We love SIEMs and we love solving the little problems so the SIEMs and their security analysts can pay attention to the big stuff.

What your SIEM doesn’t know about endpoints can kill you. If your SIEM (or your security analysts) don’t have the security event information from all those Windows machines in the organization in a timely manner – whether they are remotely connected or not – and if that’s a big problem for you, please tell us. If it’s not a problem, please tell us that, too, and also which SIEM you use. We’ll share that with our audience.

This brings us to another topic related to what SIEMs do (and don’t do).

It’s not your SIEM’s fault that it can’t consume audit logs from Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server or even SAP via normal collection means. No SIEM can do this. Sometimes people forget that a SIEM’s job is to provide the analysis tools; it’s not the SIEM’s job to change hats and perform ad hoc coding to address all the different application audit log frameworks. For that, you need the insight and best effort from a subject matter expert focused on getting the information to a SIEM. Which is exactly where LOGbinder came from, the insight and effort of an application security subject matter expert.

Tech Tip: Manage the audit performance by tweaking the amount of excess information attached to the audit

One of the new features of LOGbinder SP 5.0 is the ability to dial-back internal processing to tweak audit performance.  LOGbinder SP allows the control of how many lookups it should perform in order to obtain additional information while translating raw audit events to easy-to-understand audit entries. Examples of this could be resolving a user ID to user name or an object GUID to the actual name of the object. We include recommendations to help guide you in our LOGbinder SP Getting Started Guide. See pages 8 and 9 for details.

It’s Renewal Time

For many of you, this month is the month to renew your support and maintenance contract. There are good reasons for doing so. For one thing you fix your support costs and get help immediately. For another, you have access to software updates at no additional cost. This year has seen major updates to LOGbinder software and we’re not done yet. We expect to release automatic mailbox audit policy management for Exchange from within the LOGbinder EX application! This is a huge advance, for not just LOGbinder EX but for Exchange Auditing in general, and customers who are current with their support and maintenance contract get it for no additional money.

Where to find information about LOGbinder events

Every month we answer about 150,000 questions about events. But where do you go if you have a specific question about an event reported by LOGbinder? Some of our SIEM Synergy partners have collaborated with us to provide a hyperlink within their application to take you directly to the relevant event ID page. So when you see an event you wish to research, clicking on the hyperlinked Event ID will take you directly to the details page on Ultimate Windows Security’s Online Encyclopedia.

But what if your SIEM doesn’t have a hyperlink to the right page? You can still get the information by browsing to UltimateWindowsSecurity.com and clicking on Security, then Encyclopedia. (https://www.ultimatewindowssecurity.com/securitylog/encyclopedia/Default.aspx) Once there, select the source of the event (All Sources, Windows Audit, SharePoint Audit, SQL Server Audit or Exchange Audit). If you want to narrow the list use the drop-down box on the right, else browse the list of events and click on the appropriate one to get the full details. We list the events in numerical order, so they’re easy to find. (By the way, when you get a chance, send a note to your SIEM’s product manager to ask them to finish their integration so you can save yourself the trouble next time when you need the event information.)

If you still can’t find your answer there then click on the blue “Ask a question about this event” button and post your question in the Ultimate Windows Security forum.  LOGbinder is now sponsoring an Exchange, SQL and SharePoint forum there and you can expect a quick response from one of our technical engineers. 

Tech Tip: How to find the status of Exchange Server 2013 audit log requests

Exchange Server’s audit function is asynchronous. Which makes sense for Exchange but causes security analysts heartburn who have to “wait in faith”. The good news is that you can see the status of those audit requests via a PowerShell cmdlet, but the bad news is that only Exchange 2013 supports it. In Exchange 2013, you can retrieve a list of current audit log searches with the Get-AuditLogSearch cmdlet.

For more tips on application security intelligence, be sure to watch our blog updates at www.logbinder.com/Blog and sign up for the Real Training for Free™ webinars at Ultimate Windows Security’s web site.