The incident response tools are vital in enabling organizations to quickly identify and address cyberattacks, exploits, malware, and other internal and external security threats.
Usually, these tools work alongside traditional security solutions, such as antivirus and firewalls, to analyze, alert, and sometimes assist in stopping the attacks. To do these, the tools gather information from the systems logs, endpoints, authentication or identity systems, and other areas where they assess the systems for suspicious activities and other anomalies indicative of security compromise or breach.
The tools help to automatically and quickly monitor, identify, and resolve a wide range of security issues, thus streamlining the processes and eliminating the need to perform most repetitive tasks manually. Most of the modern tools can provide multiple capabilities, including automatically detecting and blocking threats and, at the same time, alerting the relevant security teams to investigate the issue further.
Security teams may use the tools in different areas depending on the organization’s needs. This could be to monitor the infrastructure, endpoints, networks, assets, users, and other components.
Choosing the best tool is a challenge for many organizations. To assist you in finding the right solution, below a list of incident response tools to identify, prevent, and respond to various security threats and attacks targeting your ICT systems.
Top Incident Response Tools in 2024
ManageEngine
The ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer is a SIEM tool that focuses on analyzing the various logs and extracts various performance and security information from them. The tool, which is ideally a log server, has analytical functions that can identify and report unusual trends in the logs, such as those resulting from unauthorized access to the organization’s IT systems and assets.
Target areas include the key services and applications such as web servers, DHCP servers, databases, print queues, email services, etc. Also, the ManageEngine analyzer, which works on both Windows and Linux systems, is useful in confirming compliance with data protection standards such as PCI, HIPPA, DSS, ISO 27001, and more.
IBM QRadar
IBM QRadar is a great detection tool that enables security teams to understand the threats and prioritize the responses. The Qradar takes the asset, user, network, cloud, and endpoint data, then correlates it against the threat intelligence and vulnerability information. After this, it applies advanced analytics to detect and track threats as they penetrate and propagate through the systems.
The solution creates intelligent insights into the detected security issues. This shows the root cause of the security issues together with the scope, thereby allowing the security teams to respond, eliminate the threats, and stop the spread and impact quickly. Generally, IBM QRadar is a complete analytics solution with a diversity of features, including a risk modeling option that allows security teams to simulate potential attacks.
IBM QRadar is suitable for medium and large businesses and can be deployed as software, hardware, or virtual appliance on an on-premise, cloud, or SaaS environment.
Other features include
- Excellent filtering to produce desired results
- Advanced threat hunting ability
- Netflow analysis
- Ability to quickly analyze bulk data
- Recreate the purged or lost offenses
- detect hidden threads
- User behavior analytics.
Better Uptime
Better Uptime is a modern incident response tool, that combines incident management, monitoring, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product.
The setup takes 3 minutes. After that, you get a call, email, or Slack alert, whenever an incident occurs, depending on your on-call alerting setup. The main features are:
- Unlimited phone call alerts
- Incident management and escalations
- Easy on-call scheduling in the calendar
- Screenshots & error logs of incidents
- Uptime, Ping, and other monitors built-in
- Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, and 100+ other integrations
SolarWinds
SolarWinds has extensive log management and reporting abilities, real-time incident response. It can analyze and identify exploits and threats in areas such as the Windows event logs hence allows the teams to monitor and address the systems against threats.
Security Event Manager has simple to use visualization tools that allow users to easily identify suspicious activities or anomalies. It also has a detailed and easy to use the dashboard in addition to great support from the developers.
Analyses events and logs for on-premise network threat detection, the SolarWinds also has an automated threat response in addition to the monitoring USB drives. Its log and event manager has advanced log filtering and forwarding, and events console and node management options.
Major features include
- Superior forensic analysis
- Fast detection of suspicious activity and threats
- Continuous security monitoring
- Determining the time of an event
- Supports compliance with DSS, HIPAA, SOX, PCI, STIG, DISA, and other regulations.
The SolarWinds solution is suitable for small to large businesses. It has both on-premise and cloud deployment options and runs on Windows and Linux.
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic is a flexible cloud-based intelligent security analytics platform that works on its own or alongside other SIEM solutions on multi-cloud as well as hybrid environments.
The platform uses machine learning for enhanced threat detection and investigations and can detect and respond to a wide range of security issues in real-time. Based on a unified data model, Sumo Logic allows security teams to consolidate security analytics, log management, and compliance and other solutions into one. The solution improves the incidence response processes in addition to automating various security tasks. It is also easy to deploy, use, and scale without costly hardware and software upgrades.
Real-time detection provides visibility into the organization’s security and compliance and can quickly identify and isolate threats. Sumo logic helps to enforce the security configurations and continue to monitor the infrastructure, users, applications, and data on the legacy and modern IT systems.
- Allows teams to easily and manage security alerts and events
- Make it easy and less costly to comply with HIPAA, PCI, DSS, SOC 2.0, and other regulations.
- Identify security configurations and deviations
- Detect suspicious behavior from malicious users
- Advanced access management tools that help to isolate risky assets and users
AlientVault
AlienVault USM is a comprehensive tool combining threat detection, incident response, as well as the compliance management to provide comprehensive security monitoring and remediation for on-premise and cloud environments. The tool has multiple security capabilities that also include intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, asset discovery and inventory, log management, event correlation, email alerts, compliance checks, etc.
[Update: AlienVault has been acquired by AT&T]
This is a unified low cost, easy to implement and use USM tool that relies on lightweight sensors and endpoint agents and can also detect threats in real-time. Also, the AlienVault USM is available in flexible plans to accommodate any size of organizations. Benefits include
- Use a single web portal to monitor the on-premise and on-cloud IT infrastructure
- Helps the organization to comply with PCI-DSS requirements
- Email alerting upon detecting security issues
- Analyze a wide range of logs from different technologies and manufacturers while generating actionable information
- An easy to use dashboard that shows the activities and trends across all the relevant locations.
LogRhythm
LogRhythm, which is available as a cloud service or an on-premise appliance, has a wide range of superior features that range from log correlation to artificial intelligence and behavioral analysis. The platform offers a security intelligence platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze logs and traffic in windows and Linux systems.
It has flexible data storage and is a good solution for fragmented workflows in addition to providing segmented threat detection, even in systems where there no structured data, no centralized visibility, or automation. Suitable for small and medium-sized organizations, it allows you to sift through the windows or other logs and easily narrow down to network activities.
It is compatible with a wide range of logs and devices in addition to integrating easily with Varonis to enhance threat and incident response capabilities.
Rapid7 InsightIDR
Rapid7 InsightIDR is a powerful security solution for incident detection and response, endpoint visibility, monitoring authentication, among many other capabilities.
The cloud-based SIEM tool has a search, data collection, and analysis features and can detect a wide range of threats, including stolen credentials, phishing, and malware. This gives it the ability to quickly detect and alert on suspicious activities, unauthorized access from both internal and external users.
The InsightIDR employs advanced deception technology, attacker and user behavior analytics, file integrity monitoring, central log management, and other discovery features. This makes it a suitable tool to scan the various endpoints and provide real-time detection of security threats in small, medium, and large organizations. The log search, endpoint, and user behavior data provide insight that helps teams to make quick and smart security decisions.
Splunk
Splunk is a powerful tool that uses AI and machine learning technologies to provide actionable, effective, and predictive insights. It has enhanced security features together with its customizable asset investigator, statistical analysis, dashboards, investigations, classification, and incident review.
Splunk is suitable for all types of organizations for both on-premise and SaaS deployments. Because of its scalability, the tool works for almost any type of business and industry, including financial services, healthcare, public sector, etc.
Other key features are
- Quick threat detection
- Establishing the risk scores
- Alerts management
- Sequencing of events
- A fast and effective response
- Works with data from any machine, either from on-premise or cloud.
Varonis
Varonis provides useful analysis and alerts about the infrastructure, users, and data access and usage. The tool provides actionable reports and alerts and has flexible customization to even respond to some suspicious activities. It provides comprehensive dashboards that give security teams an added visibility into their systems and data.
Also, Varonis can get insights into the email systems, unstructured data, and other critical assets with an option to respond automatically to resolve issues. For example, blocking a user who attempts to access files without permissions or using an unfamiliar IP address to log into the organization’s network.
The Varonis incident response solution integrates with other tools to provide enhanced actionable insights and alerts. It also integrates with LogRhythm to provide enhanced threat detection and response abilities. This enables the teams to streamline their operations and to easily and quickly investigate threats, devices, and users.
Conclusion
With the increasing volume and sophistication of cyber threats and attacks, security teams are, most of the time, overwhelmed and sometimes unable to keep track of everything. To protect critical IT assets and data, organizations need to deploy the appropriate tools to automate repetitive tasks, monitor and analyze logs, detect suspicious activities, and other security issues.