Book Image

Microsoft Sentinel in Action - Second Edition

By : Richard Diver, Gary Bushey, John Perkins
Book Image

Microsoft Sentinel in Action - Second Edition

By: Richard Diver, Gary Bushey, John Perkins

Overview of this book

Microsoft Sentinel is a security information and event management (SIEM) tool developed by Microsoft that helps you integrate cloud security and artificial intelligence (AI). This book will teach you how to implement Microsoft Sentinel and understand how it can help detect security incidents in your environment with integrated AI, threat analysis, and built-in and community-driven logic. The first part of this book will introduce you to Microsoft Sentinel and Log Analytics, then move on to understanding data collection and management, as well as how to create effective Microsoft Sentinel queries to detect anomalous behaviors and activity patterns. The next part will focus on useful features, such as entity behavior analytics and Microsoft Sentinel playbooks, along with exploring the new bi-directional connector for ServiceNow. In the next part, you’ll be learning how to develop solutions that automate responses needed to handle security incidents and find out more about the latest developments in security, techniques to enhance your cloud security architecture, and explore how you can contribute to the security community. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to implement Microsoft Sentinel to fit your needs and protect your environment from cyber threats and other security issues.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Design and Implementation
4
Section 2: Data Connectors, Management, and Queries
9
Section 3: Security Threat Hunting
15
Section 4: Integration and Automation
18
Section 5: Operational Guidance

Understanding connectors

Microsoft Sentinel relies on Log Analytics to store data for all ingested security sources, process that data, and find useful information about potential risks and security threats. The data required may be generated by many different types of resources across many different platforms, which is why we need many different options for connecting to those data sources. Understanding the options available, and how to configure them, is key to developing a strong data architecture to support the Microsoft Sentinel solution.

A summary of the connectors is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 3.3 – Microsoft Sentinel connector flow

Connectors can be categorized based on the method used to ingest data from the source. Currently, there are four main types:

  • Native connections
  • Direct connections
  • API connections
  • Agent-based (Windows Server Agent and Syslog)

Let's explore each of these types in more detail...