Authentication-Event Processing for Enhanced SOC Investigations

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) receive thousands of security alerts each day, and analysts are responsible for evaluating each alert and initiating corrective action when necessary.Many of these alerts require consulting user authentication logs, which are notoriously messy and designed for machine use rather than human interpretability.We apply a novel methodology for processing raw logs into interpretable user authentication events in a university SOC dashboard tool.We review steps for data processing and describe views designed for analysts.To illustrate its value, we utilized the dashboard on a 90-day sample of alert logs from a university SOC.We present two representative alerts from the sample as case studies to motivate and demonstrate the generalized workflows.We show that enhanced data from the dashboard could be utilized to completely investigate over 84% of alerts in the sample without additional context or tools, and a further 13% could be partially investigated.