Elastic brings AI-driven attack detection to SIEM

Elastic has introduced a significant enhancement to its security information and event management solution, part of its Elastic security offering. The new capabilities presented at the recent RSA conference represent a significant advance in the development of security operations centers.

The evolution of SIEM

Traditional SIEM systems are invaluable for collecting and analyzing security logs and events to detect threats. However, they rely heavily on manual processes and require significant human intervention for tasks such as alerting, dashboarding and threat hunting. Not only is this model resource-intensive, but it is also prone to inefficiencies as data volumes escalate.

In 2023, Elastic added Elastic AI Assistant for Security to its Elastic Security SIEM offering. This AI-powered co-pilot helps SOC analysts with rule creation, alert aggregation, and workflow and integration recommendations—an important first step toward integrating AI into everyday security operations.

Attack detection

Building on this foundation, Elastic introduced its new Attack Discovery feature, a patent-pending feature built on the Elastic Search AI platform. This new tool revolutionizes the way alerts are handled by prioritizing actual attacks over mere alerts. With a single click, Attack Discovery searches through hundreds of alerts, reduces them to the few that matter, and presents the results through an intuitive interface.

Attack Discovery uses large language models to analyze and prioritize security alerts. It filters out the noise by focusing on the most critical alerts based on various parameters such as severity, asset criticality, and risk scores. This prioritization helps SOCs focus their resources on the greatest threats.

The new feature leverages Elastic’s Search AI platform, which combines powerful search capabilities with on-demand generation. This integration allows Attack Discovery to access a comprehensive context of security data, ensuring alert prioritization is accurate and relevant.

Attack Discovery enables SOC teams to triage hundreds of alerts to the few that matter with a single press of a button. This functionality significantly reduces the time and effort typically required to identify potential threats in massive amounts of data.

The results are presented in a user-friendly interface, making it easier for security teams to quickly understand the nature of attacks and enable quick and informed decision-making for follow-up actions.

Analyst opinion

The updates to Elastic’s SIEM solution reflect a clear industry trend toward greater AI integration into cybersecurity tools and reflect the broader industry movement toward automation and advanced analytics.

Launched last year, AI Assistant and the newly introduced Attack Discovery capability, powered by Elastic’s proprietary Search AI platform, represent a strategic shift away from traditional, labor-intensive SIEM processes toward a model where AI controlled analyzes play a central role. This transition expands the capabilities of security analysts and addresses the scalability challenges presented by traditional SIEMs.

Elastic’s approach – integrating machine learning and on-demand generation directly into its SIEM system – positions the company well ahead of competitors like Splunk. The Attack Discovery feature’s ability to sift through and prioritize actionable information from a flood of alerts with minimal human intervention is groundbreaking. It increases operational efficiency and reduces response time, a critical factor in mitigating the impact of security breaches.

Elastic Security’s improvements to SIEM are not simply incremental improvements, but rather a comprehensive expansion of what SIEM can do. For companies, adopting such advanced tools leads to a better security posture and more efficient use of resources. For the cybersecurity industry in general, it sets new standards for integrating AI into security operations and forces competitors to innovate as well or risk obsolescence.