Safety Info and Occasion Administration (SIEM) programs act as the first instruments for detecting suspicious exercise in enterprise networks, serving to organizations determine and reply to potential assaults in actual time. Nonetheless, the brand new Picus Blue Report 2025, primarily based on over 160 million real-world assault simulations, revealed that organizations are solely detecting 1 out of seven simulated assaults, displaying a crucial hole in menace detection and response.
Whereas many organizations imagine they’re doing every part they’ll to detect adversary actions, the fact is that a big variety of threats are slipping by way of their defenses unnoticed, leaving their networks far too weak to compromise. This hole in detection creates a false sense of safety when attackers have already accessed your delicate programs, escalated their privileges, or are actively exfiltrating your worthwhile information.
Which begs the query: why, in any case this time, cash, and a spotlight, are these programs nonetheless failing? Particularly when the stakes are so excessive. Let’s have a look at what The Blue Report 2025 tells us about a number of lingering core points relating to SIEM rule effectiveness.
Log Assortment Failures: The Basis of Detection Breakdowns
SIEM guidelines act like a safety guard who screens incoming and outgoing visitors for suspicious habits. Simply as a guard follows a set of directions to determine threats primarily based on particular patterns, SIEM guidelines are pre-configured to detect sure actions, comparable to unauthorized entry or uncommon community visitors. When a selected occasion matches a rule, it triggers an alert, permitting safety groups to reply swiftly.
For SIEM guidelines to work successfully, nonetheless, they should analyze a set of dependable and complete logs. The Blue Report 2025 discovered that one of the crucial widespread causes SIEM guidelines fail is because of persistent log assortment points. The truth is, in 2025, 50% of detection rule failures have been linked to issues with log assortment. When logs aren’t captured correctly, it is all too straightforward to overlook crucial occasions, resulting in a harmful lack of alerts, a false sense of safety, and a failure to detect malicious exercise. Even the simplest guidelines shortly grow to be ineffective with out correct information to investigate, leaving their organizations weak to assaults.
Frequent log assortment points embrace missed log sources, misconfigured log brokers, and incorrect log settings. For instance, many environments fail to log key information factors or have issues with log forwarding, stopping pertinent logs from reaching the SIEM within the first place. This failure to seize crucial telemetry considerably hampers a SIEM’s capability to detect an attacker’s malicious exercise.
Misconfigured Detection Guidelines: Silent Failures
Even when logs are collected correctly, detection guidelines can nonetheless fail as a consequence of misconfigurations. The truth is, in 2025, 13% of rule failures have been attributed to configuration points. This contains incorrect rule thresholds, improperly outlined reference units, and poorly constructed correlation logic. These points may cause crucial occasions to be missed or set off false positives, undermining the effectiveness of the SIEM system.
For instance, overly broad or generic guidelines can result in an awesome quantity of noise, which frequently leads to vital alerts being buried within the sign, missed solely, or mistakenly ignored. Equally, poorly outlined reference units may cause guidelines to overlook vital indicators of compromise.
Efficiency Points: The Hidden Culprits of Detection Gaps
As SIEM programs scale to deal with extra information, efficiency points can shortly grow to be one other main hurdle. The report discovered that 24% of detection failures in 2025 have been associated to efficiency issues, comparable to resource-heavy guidelines, broad customized property definitions, and inefficient queries. These points can considerably decelerate detection and delay response instances, making it more durable for safety groups to behave shortly after they’re actively beneath assault.
SIEM programs usually wrestle to course of massive volumes of knowledge, particularly when guidelines usually are not optimized for effectivity. This results in sluggish question efficiency, delayed alerts, and overwhelmed system sources, additional decreasing the group’s capability to detect real-time threats.
Three Frequent Detection Rule Points
Let’s take a better take a look at the three commonest log assortment points highlighted within the Blue Report 2025.
One of the crucial important issues impacting SIEM rule effectiveness is log supply coalescing. This happens when occasion coalescing is enabled for particular log sources like DNS, proxy servers, and Home windows occasion logs, resulting in information loss. On this case, vital occasions could also be compressed or discarded, leading to incomplete information for evaluation. In consequence, crucial menace behaviors can simply be missed, and detection guidelines can shortly grow to be much less and fewer efficient.
One other prevalent problem is unavailable log sources, which account for 10% of rule failures. This usually occurs when logs fail to transmit information as a consequence of community disruptions, misconfigured log forwarding brokers, or firewall blocks. With out these logs, the SIEM system can’t seize crucial occasions, leading to detection guidelines failing to set off alerts.
Lastly, delaying the implementation of cost-effective check filters is a standard reason behind detection failures. When detection guidelines are too broad or inefficient, the system processes extreme quantities of knowledge with out efficient filtering. This will overwhelm the system, slowing efficiency and risking your safety groups lacking key occasions. In line with the report, 8% of detection failures are associated to this problem, highlighting the necessity for optimized, cost-effective filtering.
Steady Validation: Guaranteeing SIEM Guidelines Keep Efficient Towards Evolving Threats
Whereas detection guidelines are foundational to SIEM programs, they’ll shortly lose relevance with out steady validation. Adversaries are continually evolving their ways, strategies, and procedures (TTPs), and SIEM guidelines designed to detect recognized patterns grow to be ineffective if they don’t seem to be being repeatedly examined towards real-world threats.
The Blue Report 2025 emphasizes that, with out ongoing testing, even well-tuned SIEM programs can simply grow to be weak to assaults. Steady validation ensures that safety groups do not simply depend on static configurations, however repeatedly show that their detection capabilities are working towards the most recent adversary behaviors. This proactive strategy closes the hole between the theoretical safety provided by detection guidelines and the sensible, real-world effectiveness organizations want towards ever-evolving threats.
By simulating real-world adversary behaviors, safety groups can consider whether or not their detection guidelines are countering the latest assault strategies, ensuring they’re correctly tuned for particular environments, and that they are figuring out malicious behaviors in a well timed method.
Common publicity validation, by way of instruments like Breach and Assault Simulation, permits organizations to all the time be testing and fine-tuning their controls. This strategy makes it simpler to determine their blind spots and enhance their defenses, making certain that SIEM guidelines are efficient, not simply at detecting previous assaults, however at stopping future ones as nicely. With out steady validation, organizations threat their information, model fame, and backside line to outdated or ineffective defenses, placing their most crucial property at pointless threat.
Closing the Gaps in SIEM Detection
Uncared for SIEM guidelines will inevitably fail to detect trendy threats. Log assortment failures, misconfigurations, and efficiency bottlenecks create blind spots, whereas static guidelines shortly lose effectiveness towards evolving attacker ways and strategies. With out steady validation, organizations threat working beneath a false sense of safety, leaving crucial programs and information uncovered to compromise.
To remain forward, safety groups should repeatedly check and tune their SIEM guidelines, simulate real-world assaults, and validate detection pipelines towards the most recent adversary behaviors. Instruments like Breach and Assault Simulation allow organizations to uncover hidden gaps, prioritize high-risk exposures, and make sure that their defenses are working when it issues most.
See the place your SIEM is succeeding and the place it is likely to be silently failing. Obtain the Blue Report 2025 at present for actionable insights and proposals to strengthen your detection and prevention methods towards tomorrow’s assaults.
