Security Incident Management in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Incident Management in Azure Sentinel

Incident management is a complete process of incident investigation, which starts from creation, while processing in-depth investigation, and finally to resolution providing a complete incident management environment to perform these steps. Azure Sentinel can be used to review the following:
  • detailed incident information, 
  • assign an incident owner, 
  • set and maintain incident severity,
  • and manage incident status. 

Explain Evidence & Entities

Various sources of security information are extensively used by Azure Sentinel to create incidents and as the lead system engineer at Contoso, there will always be a need to understand these sources to the best utilization of  incident management in Azure Sentinel.

Incident Evidence

Incident evidence provides security event information and related Azure Sentinel assets that can identify threats in the Azure Sentinel environment. They can display how a threat has been identified in Azure Sentinel as well as link you back to the specific resources that can be used to increase your awareness of incident details.

Events

Events links you back to one or more events from the Log Analytics workspaces associated with Azure Sentinel. These workspaces are composed of thousands of events that are too many to manually parse. If a query returns the events which are attached to Azure Sentinel analytics rules, they can be easily attached to the generated incident for further review while also using the events to understand the scope and frequency of the incident before investigating further.

Alerts

Most of the incidents are generated because of an analytics rule alert, for examples detection of suspicious files, detection of suspicious user activities, and attempted elevation of privilege. Alerts can be generated by Analytics rules, are either based on KQL queries or direct connection to Microsoft Security solutions such as Azure Security Center or Microsoft Defender 365. If alert grouping is enabled, then  Azure Sentinel can include any related alert evidence for incident.

Bookmarks

If you want to identify the events that you need to track or mark for later investigation while investigating an incident, then you can easily preserve the queries run in Log Analytics by choosing one or more events and designating them as bookmarks while also recording notes and tag them to better inform later threat-hunting processes. Bookmarks are available to both you and your teammates.

Incident Entities   

An entity refers to a network or user resource involved with an event and can be used as an entry point to explore all the alerts and correlations associated with that particular entity. You can readily use the entities to observe any alerts associated with a particular user, host, or address in your environment instead of analyzing identity alerts, network alerts, and data access alerts individually. Some of the entity types includes:
  • Account
  • Host
  • IP
  • URL
  • FileHash

Entities can help you identify all of the alerts associated with a specific user at Contoso, the user's host machine, and other hosts connected to the user.

Manage Incident Ownership, Status, & Severity

Each incident created in Azure Sentinel has a manageable metadata attached to it which can help you to:
  • Set and track the status of an incident from creation to resolution.
  • Set and review severity.
  • Assign and track ownership for the incident.

Ownership

Ideally, an owner should be assigned to each incident from a particular security team that is responsible for overall management of the incident, including investigation and status updates. Ownership can also be changed at any time to assign the incident to another security team member for further investigation or escalation.

Status

Every new incident that created in Azure Sentinel is assigned a status of New, for the incidents under investigation the status is Active and when an incident is fully resolved the status can be set to Closed, after which you will have to choose one of the following from a drop-down list:
  • True Positive: Suspicious activity
  • Benign Positive: Suspicious but expected
  • False Positive: Incorrect alert logic
  • False Negative: Incorrect data
  • Undetermined

Severity

Incident severity is set up by the rule or Microsoft Security source from which the incident is generated and in the most cases, it always remains unchanged. But the severity can be manually set in some cases if you decide that the particular incident is more or less severe than initially classified. Severity options includes- Informational, Low, Medium, and High.







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