Securing Data on Threat Detection by Using IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM QRadar: An Enhanced Cyber Resiliency Solution

Securing Data on Threat Detection by Using IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM QRadar: An Enhanced Cyber Resiliency Solution
Author: Boudhayan Chakrabarty
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2021-09-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 073846001X

Having appropriate storage for hosting business-critical data and advanced Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software for deep inspection, detection, and prioritization of threats has become a necessity for any business. This IBM® Redpaper publication explains how the storage features of IBM Spectrum® Scale, when combined with the log analysis, deep inspection, and detection of threats that are provided by IBM QRadar®, help reduce the impact of incidents on business data. Such integration provides an excellent platform for hosting unstructured business data that is subject to regulatory compliance requirements. This paper describes how IBM Spectrum Scale File Audit Logging can be integrated with IBM QRadar. Using IBM QRadar, an administrator can monitor, inspect, detect, and derive insights for identifying potential threats to the data that is stored on IBM Spectrum Scale. When the threats are identified, you can quickly act on them to mitigate or reduce the impact of incidents. We further demonstrate how the threat detection by IBM QRadar can proactively trigger data snapshots or cyber resiliency workflow in IBM Spectrum Scale to protect the data during threat. This third edition has added the section "Ransomware threat detection", where we describe a ransomware attack scenario within an environment to leverage IBM Spectrum Scale File Audit logs integration with IBM QRadar. This paper is intended for chief technology officers, solution engineers, security architects, and systems administrators. This paper assumes a basic understanding of IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM QRadar and their administration.

Cyber Resiliency Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale

Cyber Resiliency Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale
Author: IBM
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2019-09-16
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738457965

This document is intended to facilitate the deployment of the Cyber Resiliency solution for IBM® Spectrum Scale. This solution is designed to protect the data on IBM SpectrumTM Scale from external cyberattacks or insider attacks using its integration with IBM Spectrum ProtectTM and IBM Tape Storage. To complete the tasks that it describes, you must understand IBM Spectrum ScaleTM, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Tape Storage architecture, concepts, and configuration. The information in this document is distributed on an as-is basis without any warranty that is either expressed or implied. Support assistance for the use of this material is limited to situations where IBM Spectrum Scale or IBM Spectrum Protect are supported and entitled, and where the issues are specific to a blueprint implementation.

Securing IBM Spectrum Scale with QRadar and IBM Cloud Pak for Security

Securing IBM Spectrum Scale with QRadar and IBM Cloud Pak for Security
Author: IBM
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2021-12-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738460141

Cyberattacks are likely to remain a significant risk for the foreseeable future. Attacks on organizations can be external and internal. Investing in technology and processes to prevent these cyberattacks is the highest priority for these organizations. Organizations need well-designed procedures and processes to recover from attacks. The focus of this document is to demonstrate how the IBM® Unified Data Foundation (UDF) infrastructure plays an important role in delivering the persistence storage (PV) to containerized applications, such as IBM Cloud® Pak for Security (CP4S), with IBM Spectrum® Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA) that is deployed with IBM Spectrum scale CSI driver and IBM FlashSystem® storage with IBM Block storage driver with CSI driver. Also demonstrated is how this UDF infrastructure can be used as a preferred storage class to create back-end persistent storage for CP4S deployments. We also highlight how the file I/O events are captured in IBM QRadar® and offenses are generated based on predefined rules. After the offenses are generated, we show how the cases are automatically generated in IBM Cloud Pak® for Security by using the IBM QRadar SOAR Plugin, with a manually automated method to log a case in IBM Cloud Pak for Security. This document also describes the processes that are required for the configuration and integration of the components in this solution, such as: Integration of IBM Spectrum Scale with QRadar QRadar integration with IBM Cloud Pak for Security Integration of the IBM QRadar SOAR Plugin to generate automated cases in CP4S. Finally, this document shows the use of IBM Spectrum Scale CNSA and IBM FlashSystem storage that uses IBM block CSI driver to provision persistent volumes for CP4S deployment. All models of IBM FlashSystem family are supported by this document, including: FlashSystem 9100 and 9200 FlashSystem 7200 and FlashSystem 5000 models FlashSystem 5200 IBM SAN Volume Controller All storage that is running IBM Spectrum Virtualize software

IBM QRadar Version 7.3 Planning and Installation Guide

IBM QRadar Version 7.3 Planning and Installation Guide
Author: Elias Carabaguiaz
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2018-01-04
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738442879

With the advances of technology and the reoccurrence of data leaks, cyber security is a bigger challenge than ever before. Cyber attacks evolve as quickly as the technology itself, and hackers are finding more innovative ways to break security controls to access confidential data and to interrupt services. Hackers reinvent themselves using new technology features as a tool to expose companies and individuals. Therefore, cyber security cannot be reactive but must go a step further by implementing proactive security controls that protect one of the most important assets of every organization: the company's information. This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides information about implementing IBM QRadar® for Security Intelligence and Event Monitoring (SIEM) and protecting an organization's networks through a sophisticated technology, which permits a proactive security posture. It is divided in to the following major sections to facilitate the integration of QRadar with any network architecture: Chapter 2, "Before the installation" on page 3 provides a review of important requirements before the installation of the product. Chapter 3, "Installing IBM QRadar V7.3" on page 57 provides step-by-step procedures to guide you through the installation process. Chapter 4, "After the installation" on page 77 helps you to configure additional features and perform checks after the product is installed. QRadar is an IBM Security prime product that is designed to be integrated with corporate network devices to keep a real-time monitoring of security events through a centralized console. Through this book, any network or security administrator can understand the product's features and benefits.

Privileged Access Management for Secure Storage Administration: IBM Spectrum Scale with IBM Security Verify Privilege Vault

Privileged Access Management for Secure Storage Administration: IBM Spectrum Scale with IBM Security Verify Privilege Vault
Author: Vincent Hsu
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2021-01-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738459313

There is a growing insider security risk to organizations. Human error, privilege misuse, and cyberespionage are considered the top insider threats. One of the most dangerous internal security threats is the privileged user with access to critical data, which is the "crown jewels" of the organization. This data is on storage, so storage administration has critical privilege access that can cause major security breaches and jeopardize the safety of sensitive assets. Organizations must maintain tight control over whom they grant privileged identity status to for storage administration. Extra storage administration access must be shared with support and services teams when required. There also is a need to audit critical resource access that is required by compliance to standards and regulations. IBM® SecurityTM Verify Privilege Vault On-Premises (Verify Privilege Vault), formerly known as IBM SecurityTM Secret Server, is the next-generation privileged account management that integrates with IBM Storage to ensure that access to IBM Storage administration sessions is secure and monitored in real time with required recording for audit and compliance. Privilege access to storage administration sessions is centrally managed, and each session can be timebound with remote monitoring. You also can use remote termination and an approval workflow for the session. In this IBM Redpaper, we demonstrate the integration of IBM Spectrum® Scale and IBM Elastic Storage® Server (IBM ESS) with Verify Privilege Vault, and show how to use privileged access management (PAM) for secure storage administration. This paper is targeted at storage and security administrators, storage and security architects, and chief information security officers.

Proactive Early Threat Detection and Securing SQL Database With IBM QRadar and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management Using IBM FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy

Proactive Early Threat Detection and Securing SQL Database With IBM QRadar and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management Using IBM FlashSystem Safeguarded Copy
Author: Tejas Sapkar
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2022-10-14
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738460850

This IBM® blueprint publication focuses on early threat detection within a database environment by using IBM QRadar®. It also highlights how to proactively start a cyber resilience workflow in response to a cyberattack or potential malicious user actions. The workflow that is presented here uses IBM Spectrum® Copy Data Management as orchestration software to start IBM FlashSystem® Safeguarded Copy functions. The Safeguarded Copy creates an immutable copy of the data in an air-gapped form on the same IBM FlashSystem for isolation and eventual quick recovery. This document describes how to enable and forward SQL database user activities to IBM QRadar. This document also describes how to create various rules to determine a threat, and configure and start a suitable response to the detected threat in IBM QRadar. Finally, this document outlines the steps that are involved to create a Scheduled Job by using IBM Spectrum® Copy Data Management with various actions.

IBM Spectrum Discover: Metadata Management for Deep Insight of Unstructured Storage

IBM Spectrum Discover: Metadata Management for Deep Insight of Unstructured Storage
Author: Joseph Dain
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738457868

This IBM® Redpaper publication provides a comprehensive overview of the IBM Spectrum® Discover metadata management software platform. We give a detailed explanation of how the product creates, collects, and analyzes metadata. Several in-depth use cases are used that show examples of analytics, governance, and optimization. We also provide step-by-step information to install and set up the IBM Spectrum Discover trial environment. More than 80% of all data that is collected by organizations is not in a standard relational database. Instead, it is trapped in unstructured documents, social media posts, machine logs, and so on. Many organizations face significant challenges to manage this deluge of unstructured data such as: Pinpointing and activating relevant data for large-scale analytics Lacking the fine-grained visibility that is needed to map data to business priorities Removing redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data Identifying and classifying sensitive data IBM Spectrum Discover is a modern metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale file and Object Storage, storage on premises, and in the cloud. This software enables organizations to make better business decisions and gain and maintain a competitive advantage. IBM Spectrum Discover provides a rich metadata layer that enables storage administrators, data stewards, and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data. It improves storage economics, helps mitigate risk, and accelerates large-scale analytics to create competitive advantage and speed critical research.

IBM Spectrum Scale Best Practices for Genomics Medicine Workloads

IBM Spectrum Scale Best Practices for Genomics Medicine Workloads
Author: Joanna Wong
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2018-04-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738456756

Advancing the science of medicine by targeting a disease more precisely with treatment specific to each patient relies on access to that patient's genomics information and the ability to process massive amounts of genomics data quickly. Although genomics data is becoming a critical source for precision medicine, it is expected to create an expanding data ecosystem. Therefore, hospitals, genome centers, medical research centers, and other clinical institutes need to explore new methods of storing, accessing, securing, managing, sharing, and analyzing significant amounts of data. Healthcare and life sciences organizations that are running data-intensive genomics workloads on an IT infrastructure that lacks scalability, flexibility, performance, management, and cognitive capabilities also need to modernize and transform their infrastructure to support current and future requirements. IBM® offers an integrated solution for genomics that is based on composable infrastructure. This solution enables administrators to build an IT environment in a way that disaggregates the underlying compute, storage, and network resources. Such a composable building block based solution for genomics addresses the most complex data management aspect and allows organizations to store, access, manage, and share huge volumes of genome sequencing data. IBM SpectrumTM Scale is software-defined storage that is used to manage storage and provide massive scale, a global namespace, and high-performance data access with many enterprise features. IBM Spectrum ScaleTM is used in clustered environments, provides unified access to data via file protocols (POSIX, NFS, and SMB) and object protocols (Swift and S3), and supports analytic workloads via HDFS connectors. Deploying IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Elastic StorageTM Server (IBM ESS) as a composable storage building block in a Genomics Next Generation Sequencing deployment offers key benefits of performance, scalability, analytics, and collaboration via multiple protocols. This IBM RedpaperTM publication describes a composable solution with detailed architecture definitions for storage, compute, and networking services for genomics next generation sequencing that enable solution architects to benefit from tried-and-tested deployments, to quickly plan and design an end-to-end infrastructure deployment. The preferred practices and fully tested recommendations described in this paper are derived from running GATK Best Practices work flow from the Broad Institute. The scenarios provide all that is required, including ready-to-use configuration and tuning templates for the different building blocks (compute, network, and storage), that can enable simpler deployment and that can enlarge the level of assurance over the performance for genomics workloads. The solution is designed to be elastic in nature, and the disaggregation of the building blocks allows IT administrators to easily and optimally configure the solution with maximum flexibility. The intended audience for this paper is technical decision makers, IT architects, deployment engineers, and administrators who are working in the healthcare domain and who are working on genomics-based workloads.

Early Threat Detection and Safeguarding Data with IBM QRadar and IBM Copy Services Manager on IBM DS8000

Early Threat Detection and Safeguarding Data with IBM QRadar and IBM Copy Services Manager on IBM DS8000
Author: IBM
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738460400

The focus of this blueprint is to highlight early threat detection by IBM® QRadar® and to proactively start a cyber resilience workflow in response to a cyberattack or malicious user actions. The workflow uses IBM Copy Services Manager (CSM) as orchestration software to start IBM DS8000® Safeguarded Copy functions. The Safeguarded Copy creates an immutable copy of the data in an air-gapped form on the same DS8000 system for isolation and eventual quick recovery. This document also explains the steps that are involved to enable and forward IBM DS8000 audit logs to IBM QRadar. It also discusses how to use create various rules to determine a threat, and configure and start a suitable response to the detected threat in IBM QRadar. Finally, this document explains how to register a storage system and create a Scheduled Task by using CSM.

Cyber Resilient Infrastructure: Detect, Protect, and Mitigate Threats Against Brocade SAN FOS with IBM QRadar

Cyber Resilient Infrastructure: Detect, Protect, and Mitigate Threats Against Brocade SAN FOS with IBM QRadar
Author: IBM Storage
Publisher: IBM Redbooks
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2022-03-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0738460265

Enterprise networks are large and rely on numerous connected endpoints to ensure smooth operational efficiency. However, they also present a challenge from a security perspective. The focus of this Blueprint is to demonstrate an early threat detection against the network fabric that is powered by Brocade that uses IBM® QRadar®. It also protects the same if a cyberattack or an internal threat by rouge user within the organization occurs. The publication also describes how to configure the syslog that is forwarding on Brocade SAN FOS. Finally, it explains how the forwarded audit events are used for detecting the threat and runs the custom action to mitigate the threat. The focus of this publication is to proactively start a cyber resilience workflow from IBM QRadar to block an IP address when multiple failed logins on Brocade switch are detected. As part of early threat detection, a sample rule that us used by IBM QRadar is shown. A Python script that also is used as a response to block the user's IP address in the switch is provided. Customers are encouraged to create control path or data path use cases, customized IBM QRadar rules, and custom response scripts that are best-suited to their environment. The use cases, QRadar rules, and Python script that are presented here are templates only and cannot be used as-is in an environment.