Data correlation
There is no doubt that the majority of organizations will be using some sort of SIEM solution to concentrate all of their logs in one single location, and using a custom query language to search throughout the logs. While this is the current reality, as a security professional you still need to know how to navigate throughout different events, logs, and artifacts to perform deeper investigations. Many times, the data obtained from the SIEM will be useful in identifying the threat, the threat actors, and narrowing down the compromised systems but, in some circumstances, this is not enough; you need to find the root cause and eradicate the threat.
For this reason, every time that you perform data analysis, it is important to think about how the pieces of the puzzle will be working together.
The following diagram shows an example of this data correlation approach to review logs:
Figure 1: Data correlation approach while reviewing logs
Let's see how...
