Piecing Together the Cybersecurity Puzzle With Exabeam

TL; DR: Cybersecurity can often feel like you’re assembling a puzzle. You have to detect vulnerabilities, identify where they came from, and find solutions to remediate them. Often there is a lot of data or puzzle pieces to scour through. Exabeam helps teams detect and assess threats with AI capabilities, including a copilot and LLMs. It allows users to dive deeper into their data systems and logs to investigate and remediate faster and more efficiently.

I was never a puzzle person. I didn’t have them as a kid and frankly never had the patience to complete them when I would run across one at school or a friend’s house. But I always admired the finished products, especially the large, intricate ones that looked like pieces of art once joined together.

Working out puzzles certainly has its benefits. It helps with problem solving, stress management, and fine motor skills. For adults, it can help you improve your short-term memory. So OK, maybe working a puzzle here or there won’t hurt.

Piecing together the puzzle of cybersecurity offers other rewards. It allows businesses to safeguard their data, prevent damaging attacks, and maintain a clear view of their operations.

Unlike traditional puzzles though, navigating cybersecurity on your own is nearly impossible to do. But the folks at Exabeam can help in this case.

Exabeam specializes in AI-driven security operations, helping companies leverage AI to detect, assess, and remediate threats with more speed and accuracy. It enables users to pinpoint the highest-risk threats, find hard-to-spot insights, and effectively respond.

We spoke with Steve Wilson, Chief Product Officer at Exabeam, about the platform, its unique solutions, and how it uses AI to help users see beyond the big picture.

Exabeam offers a flexible range of AI-driven security solutions. In 2024, the team added new AI functionality to its platform, bolstering its already-strong AI background. One of the most prominent tools within that release was the Exabeam Copilot.

“The copilot is where the new generation of generative AI and large language models come into play. We’re able to take a lot of the information we previously presented as detailed web pages that an experienced security analyst could navigate and translate it into plain English,” said Steve.

The Exabeam Copilot allows users to navigate complex queries and security information with simplified threat communications. This way, anyone, no matter their skill level, can digest and sharpen their threat understanding.

The following are the primary capabilities of the Exabeam Copilot:

• Provides simple, detailed threat explanations
• Streamlines threat hunting with natural language search
• Accerelates threat knowledge and impact for new analysts
• Offers AI assistance with detailed context for complex queries in almost any language

Teams can use the copilot to identify and assess threats and determine next steps. It basically serves as your ever-present partner for threat investigations, enabling you to find answers faster and more efficiently.

“The copilot has the ability to just break down queries and interact with people in a very natural interchange, allowing them to even ask follow up questions. It has been really transformative,” said Steve.

Large language models have transformed how businesses gather and analyze information. It’s no different for Exabeam. The security provider leverages LLMs to provide users with the answers they need to make them more productive.

But Exabeam’s road to using LLMs started long ago. Steve said he has worked deeply with AI for years, since he started his first company in 1992. He has seen how technology evolved and how today security data has exploded into the terabyte and petabyte realm.

“You can’t practically process that kind of data with today’s large language models. They’re just not designed for that. But the high-speed machine learning algorithms that we’ve developed over the past ten years are designed to do just that,” said Steve.

What Exabeam accomplished yesterday helped it prepare for and succeed in the now. Its machine learning algorithms have the power to process high-speed streaming data and give you near real-time responses, where you can separate the wheat from the chaff in your data systems. Which leads us back to Exabeam’s LLM models.

“So that first set of real-time machine learning algorithms are paring your data down to a reasonable size. What we’re able to do now is take that petabytes of data and reduce it down to kilobytes of insight. We can then give that super dense insight to the large language model,” said Steve.

Steve told us Exabeam trains its large language models with the skill set of a security analyst. Combined with the ability to analyze large amounts of data, its security skill set allows the LLM to generate insights and outcomes to push threat detection and response forward.

The LLM uses natural language that makes it easy to interact, allowing users to query real-time and historical data with ease. Its sift through vast amounts of data enables users to be two to three times more efficient with their processes.

Steve compared the LLM to being an experienced Tier 3 analyst that can help inexperienced analysts with their questions. He said it can also assist more advanced analysts along their journey.

“The experienced analysts say the opposite in their feedback. They say it’s like having an enthusiastic new college grad who will do all their scut work and find the details that they don’t have time to look up,” said Steve.

Exabeam dives deep into security data to provide users with both the big picture and the nuances within their systems. Starting with its new Threat Center solution, it enables teams to have a consistent view of threats.

“The Threat Center is where we assemble all of the information that our AIs have gleaned about the possible threats and help present that to the analysts,” said Steve.

The Threat Center simplifies security operations by streamlining workflows and alert fatigue. It uses prioritization, automated evidence collection, and timeline creation to enable analysts to approach threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR) more efficiently.

Steve also told us about Exabeam’s SIEM solutions, which have been extended thanks to its merger with LogRhythm. LogRhythm specializes in self-hosted SIEM, allowing users to detect and remediate security incidents quickly.

SIEM takes different events happening in your environment and places them at your fingertips for you to search, understand, and store in one place. You can then analyze these events for different use cases, including compliance and cybersecurity.

“For example, with compliance, I might need to go back later and prove that something happened. You’ve logged all the events. So what you need to be able to do is search through that massive pile of data and find all those correlated pieces. And SIEM has been doing that for a long time,” said Steve.

When it comes to cybersecurity, teams are looking for specific events or incidents. Most SIEM solutions include simple rules to help users navigate event response and remediation. But these simple rules don’t always come in handy.

SIEMs collect small pieces of data from log files of applications. Over time, this database can grow immensely as data transfers pile up, making it harder to manage and sift through.

“It becomes an analytics problem of how do I deal with the use cases where I don’t have rules or I don’t know what the rules are. It’s that I’ll know it when I see it, but the human can’t see it because there’s billions of these events,” said Steve.

This is where Exabeam’s SIEM becomes crucial. It differentiates itself by allowing teams to spot different patterns that would be difficult to find otherwise.

“We specialize in spotting different kinds of patterns that will identify hard to deal with cybersecurity problems, such as insider threats and compromised credentials. Those are things where traditional cybersecurity technologies haven’t been effective defenses,” said Steve.

Steve also shared some tips for businesses considering implementing cybersecurity solutions. He said teams should first take an objective look at their needs, including the number of users and the amount of data they will need to cover. They should next think about whether they want to DIY their strategy or partner with a service provider.

Smaller companies may want a partner to help them integrate technology such as Exabeam into their systems. Larger organizations with more critical data may want full control. Whatever the company chooses, it should understand that cybersecurity is a long-term commitment.

“You want to think about where the future is going and how use cases will evolve. The landscape will get more and more complicated. So as you think about updating your tools, you want to think about future-proofing. How do I get somebody who’s thinking ahead completely?” said Steve.

Exabeam is also thinking ahead. One thing it has planned is a cross-pollination of its new-scale products and LogRhythm’s SIEM product.

“Beyond that, we’re going to put both companies on a quarterly cadence where we’re going to be bringing out big blocks of new functionality. So lots of exciting stuff is coming, including gen AI and a lot of new features that analysts are going to love,” said Steve.