Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

SIEM is a platform that centralizes logs from across an environment, normalizes them, and correlates them in real time to surface threats and satisfy compliance audits. Gartner's 2024 reprint records SIEM market growth from $5.03 billion in 2022 to $5.7 billion in 2023, a 13% annual growth rate (Gartner's SIEM definition). You're likely dealing with the problem SIEM was built to solve.

The most popular advice about GLBA security requirements is also the least useful: review the policy annually, collect signatures, and keep the evidence in an audit folder. That approach may prove that someone approved a program. It doesn't prove that multifactor authentication protects every relevant system, that logs capture unauthorized access, or that the incident response team can identify a reportable event quickly enough to act.

“Install antivirus and enable the firewall” is still common security advice. It's also incomplete. Those controls can block malicious code and unwanted traffic, but they don't automatically connect an endpoint detection to the firewall event that preceded it, identify a compromised identity, or tell an analyst whether a policy change was legitimate.

Tactics, techniques, and procedures are the behavioral language of an adversary: tactics explain why, techniques explain how, and procedures describe the specific implementation. MITRE created the first ATT&CK model in September 2013 and publicly released it in May 2015 with 96 techniques organized across 9 tactics. That origin matters because TTPs turn scattered security events into an operational model.

Your SOC dashboard shows a successful login from a normal user account. The connection uses HTTPS, the destination is an approved web server, and the network firewall allows it. Inside the request, however, an attacker has placed a SQL injection payload in a login parameter. Nothing is wrong with the perimeter firewall. It has been asked to answer a question it wasn't designed to answer.

You're in the middle of a normal week, and a partner calls because a client can't open a shared matter folder. Then the help desk finds encrypted files, a strange login from overnight, and an inbox rule that forwarded privileged emails outside the firm. That's the starting point for cyber security for lawyers, not a policy memo, and it's why your firm needs controls that protect confidentiality, preserve evidence, and prove due care when the pressure is on.

You are already in the meeting, and the question on the table sounds simple: can the SOC detect a technique tied to a noisy intrusion path? Three analysts answer three different ways because each one is staring at a different dashboard, a different log source, and a different mental model. The MITRE ATT&CK framework gives those people one shared way to describe adversary behavior, so the discussion starts with evidence instead of guesswork.

You're in the middle of a noisy SOC shift, and a firewall alert lands late. The device was supposed to send logs over syslog, but the path was UDP-based and the network dropped the messages under stress. By the time an auditor asks for proof, the team has an investigation, a gap in the timeline, and no clean evidence trail to show what happened.

You open an inbox and spot the kind of email every SOC team knows too well, a message that looks routine, lands with a harmless subject line, and asks someone to click, open, or approve something they shouldn't. That's where what is the cyber kill chain stops being an abstract term and starts being a practical way to think about intrusion, because the attack usually isn't one event, it's a sequence of choices an adversary makes before the damage shows up.

You're usually not thinking about retention when the week starts. You're thinking about alert noise, an audit request from compliance, and a storage bill that keeps climbing because logs are piling up in your SIEM, EDR, or XDR stack. Then someone asks a simple question, and the answer isn't simple at all. Which logs must be kept, for how long, and where do you stop using hot storage and start preserving evidence for HIPAA?