Course Catalog

The ability to identify and understand how assets are being used in your network is critical to security. Not just for detecting devices, but building a dataset of historical information about assets and being able to track asset information across your network as it changes.

The goal of asset profiles is to bring all the information known about the assets in your network and update the data as new information is provided to QRadar. This allows administrators to more effectively report on, search, audit, and leverage rules to identify threats, vulnerabilities, and asset usage with relevant data.

In this course, you learn how assets can be discovered and then dynamically updated by QRadar, including network information, running applications and services, active users, vulnerabilities, and more.

In this video, you learn about using the IBM Security QRadar Advanced Query Language (AQL) in Advanced Searches. 

This IBM Security Support Open Mic is intended as a session for both new and experienced users to show a number of AQL examples that existing users might not know about.

• SQL Basics 
• Using Custom Properties in AQL 
• Using Reference Data in AQL 
• Quotation mark usage in AQL 
• Performance 
• Advanced AQL examples

In this course, we provide an introduction to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and discuss how QRadar Use Case Manager can help with adopting and using it to optimize your IT Security Operations.

IBM Security QRadar Pulse is a dashboard app that you can use to communicate insights and analysis. Dashboards contain widgets that can monitor and display events, counters, and a variety of other data important to your organization. Take the pulse of your SOC with dynamic real-time dashboards that provide meaningful insights into your security posture, threat landscape, and QRadar deployment health metrics. 

IBM Security QRadar enables deep visibility into network, endpoint, user, and application activity. It provides collection, normalization, correlation, and secure storage of events, flows, assets, and vulnerabilities. Suspected attacks and policy breaches are highlighted as offenses. In this course, you learn about the solution architecture, how to navigate the user interface, and how to investigate offenses. You search and analyze the information from which QRadar concluded a suspicious activity. Hands-on exercises reinforce the skills learned. This course is based on IBM Security QRadar 7.4.1.

• Describe how QRadar collects data to detect suspicious activities
  
• Describe the QRadar architecture and data flows
• Navigate the user interface
• Define log sources, protocols, and event details
• Discover how QRadar collects and analyzes network flow information
• Describe the QRadar Custom Rule Engine (CRE)
• Use the Use Case Manager app
• Discover and manage asset information
• Learn about a variety of QRadar apps, content extensions, and the App Framework
• Analyze offenses by using the QRadar UI and the Analyst Workflow app
• Search, filter, group, and analyze security data
• Use AQL for advanced searches
• Use QRadar to create customized reports
• Explore aggregated data management
• Define sophisticated reporting using Pulse Dashboards
• Discover QRadar administrative tasks

In IBM Security QRadar you need two components in order to parse logs correctly. One is a protocol, such as syslog, the other part is a DSM parser. When you are dealing with cloud-based deployments, the QRadar protocol portions are API-based. QRadar supports several API-based protocols out-of-the-box, such as AWS or Azure. 

Many cloud-based deployments or apps frequently change capabilities and configuration requirements. To better support these fast-paced environments, QRadar provides a Universal Cloud REST API Protocol, which enables you to keep ingesting log data from those cloud-based log sources.

In this course, Jose Bravo explains and demonstrates how to configure a setup using the Log Source Management app.

Overview

This video provides an overview of key Log Source Management app features. In addition to the overview, the video demonstrates how to bulk add and bulk edit log sources, how to update DSMs and protocols, and how to test log sources with the app.

Objectives

• Learn about the new Disconnected Log Manager feature
  
• Explore the Log Source Management app user interface
  
• Learn how to bulk add and edit log sources
• Learn how to update DSMs and protocols
  
• Learn how to test log sources to confirm whether they are configured correctly

The IBM Security QRadar Network Visibility content extension provides a set of dashboards that enable security and network operations analysts to get at-a-glance insights into the network traffic in their environment. These visualisations enhance the data in Network Activity to provide out-of-the-box metrics that align with a variety of MITRE ATT&CK categories.

In this video we demonstrate the following three dashboards included in this extension:

• Overview: Gain insights into activity across the entire network, focusing on metrics that uncover unusual behaviour
• Application/Protocol Details: Drill into a specific application or protocol of interest and identify suspicious or atypical behaviour
• IP Details: Drill into a specific IPv4 address, highlighting metrics that could indicate attacks associated with this address

IBM Security QRadar needs to provide precise information about captured log events and network flows that have been collected within your network. It can only do that sufficiently after you provided enough contextual information about your assets, rules, and how to handle false positives.  In this course you find resources that can help you to properly tune the following aspects:

• Server Discovery and Host Definition
• The Basics of Rules and Building Blocks
  
• Offense Basics
• Content Packs and the QRadar Assistant App
  
• SIEM Tuning Report
• False Positive Tuning

IBM Security QRadar needs to provide precise information about captured log events and network flows that have been collected within your network. It can only do that sufficiently after you provided enough contextual information about your network hierarchy and assets. 

This video series describes how to properly tune the following networking aspects:

• Introduction to QRadar and Tuning
  
• Domain Management
  
• Network Hierarchy Basics
  
• Structuring your Network Hierarchy
  
• Keeping the Network Hierarchy Updated 

In this foundational education event, Brian White, from the IBM Security Learning Academy, presents an introduction to IBM Security QRadar flows and QRadar Network Insights (QNI), and IBM QRadar Support Lead YiFeng You presents solutions to common customer issues with QNI. 

During this session, we explain how flows differ from events, and what types of investigations you can perform with flows. We then talk about the QRadar flow pipeline, and how QNI can enhance your flow insights. Next, we look at QNI workflows, including investigations into encrypted traffic.  Finally, we discuss common customer issues with QNI and how to resolve them. 

You can use the guided tips in IBM Security QRadar Use Case Manager to help you ensure that QRadar is optimally configured to accurately detect threats throughout the attack chain.

QRadar Use Case Manager includes a rule explorer that offers flexible reports related to your rules. The app also exposes pre-defined MITRE mappings to system rules and helps you map your own custom rules to MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques.

This course first addresses an overview of the new features that have been introduced with Version 2.3., and then provides more details on the updates around the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques.

The IBM Security QRadar SDK V2 includes many changes from the previous release. This video guides you through installation, new commands, requirements, and examples of building QRadar applications using the SDK V2.

In this video course, you learn about the concepts of the RESTful API and how to manage IBM Security QRadar domains and tenants by using the API endpoints. Use the GET request to retrieve information about domains and tenants. Learn how to create or update domain and tenant objects by using the POST request, and delete objects with the DELETE request. Investigate a response error from a request and find a solution for that.

In this course, you learn about domain and tenant management capabilities in IBM Security QRadar. Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) use these capabilities to provide services to their customers in a shared multi-tenant environment. Multi-divisional organizations can benefit from these features as well.

Domain and tenant management capabilities are essential when you want to provide services from a shared QRadar environment. Every internal customer becomes a tenant in your QRadar deployment and each has different requirements. To separate your tenants' data, you define domains.

You can use the guided tips in IBM Security QRadar Use Case Manager to help you ensure that QRadar is optimally configured to accurately detect threats throughout the attack chain.

QRadar Use Case Manager includes a rule explorer that offers flexible reports related to your rules. The app also exposes pre-defined MITRE mappings to system rules and helps you map your own custom rules to MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques.

This course first addresses an overview of the new features that have been introduced with Version 2.2 and 2.3., and then provides more details on the updates around the MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques.

Use the guided tips in the IBM Security QRadar Use Case Manager app to help you ensure QRadar is optimally configured to accurately detect threats throughout the attack chain.

In this video, you learn how to explore rules through visualization and generated reports, how to tune your environment based on built-in analysis, and how you can visualize threat coverage across the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

In this video, you learn about the following new capabilities and features of IBM Security QRadar 7.4:

• QRadar focus in 2020
• Platform updates
• Data management
• QRadar Network Insights 
• QRadar Vulnerability Manager 
• QRadar Apps
• QRadar Community Edition 

Overview

For each incoming event and flow, QRadar SIEM evaluates rules to test for indicators that suggest an attack or policy violation. In this lab, you learn how to create custom rules, building blocks, custom event properties, and a reference set to detect an example suspicious activity.

Objectives

• Create and use custom event properties
• Create and use a reference set
• Add tests to new custom rules and building blocks
• Leverage function tests
• Configure rule actions and responses

Duration

1 hour

This video series introduces the IBM QRadar advanced search capability using the Advanced Query Language, or AQL. 

Part 1 - Quick Filter and UI Searches

Part 2 - AQL Introduction

Part 3 - Where, Group, Having, Order

Part 4 - Counting

Part 5 - Ref Set, Assets and UBA

Part 6 - Health Metrics and X Force

Part 7 - More Health Metrics and API calls

Part 8 - Payload, Indexed and Regex Searches

IBM Security QRadar flows represent network activity by normalizing IP addresses, ports, byte and packet counts, and other data, into flow records, which are records of network sessions between two hosts. Flows are a differentiating component in QRadar that provide detailed visibility into your network traffic.

In this course, you learn how QRadar analyzes your flow data for applications, flow direction, and superflows. You also learn how to build a QRadar flow rule, and how to perform flow searches in QRadar.

A large volume of data aggregation can decrease your system performance. The IBM Security QRadar Ariel component uses a separate database for aggregated data in order to improve system performance and to make the data more readily available. Time series charts, report charts, and anomaly rules use aggregated data views. Learn how to use the Aggregated Data management tool to disable, enable, or delete aggregated data views.

In this video series, Jose Bravo explains how to use the IBM Security QRadar Use Case Manager App to keep your QRadar deployment properly tuned using the following parts:

• Introduction
  
• Noisy offenses
• Rules with the most CRE events
  
• Network Hierarchy
  
• Building Blocks and Reference Sets

Join the QRadar Development, Offering Managers, QA, and Support teams as they discuss important application framework changes in QRadar 7.4.2 that impact both administrators and app developers.

During this session, we discuss important timelines that can impact your application development, such as the new Universal Base Install operating system for apps, migrating your existing applications, best practices, SDK changes, and more. We explain the importance of updating your applications and how software upgrades can impact applications you might rely on. If you have custom applications or your team is thinking about writing QRadar applications, this is an important session for you.

The IBM Security QRadar Log Source Management app provides a new and redesigned interface for viewing, creating, editing, and deleting log sources. Watch this webinar replay where IBM Security development and support teams talk about the QRadar Log Source Management app and how this application can improve log source visibility and help troubleshoot log sources in QRadar.

Device Support Modules (DSM) enable IBM Security QRadar SIEM to normalize events from raw logs received from various source types. These events must be parsed, normalized, and correlated into offenses to alert you to suspicious activities.

In this virtual lab, you use the DSM Editor to create a log source type for an unknown source of events. You also configure the new log source type to parse and normalize its properties and create unique identifiers and mappings so that QRadar SIEM can name, rate, and categorize the events from the unknown log source.

In this video, you learn about log source parsing order and how to manage it. See how to solve parsing problems by changing the log source parsing order and how to reduce parsing problems.

Custom log sources enable QRadar SIEM to normalize events from raw logs that have been received from various source types. These events must be parsed, normalized, and correlated into offenses to alert you to suspicious activities. Based on a business scenario, you will learn how to perform each step in the process of creating custom log sources.

Reports in IBM QRadar SIEM condense data to statistical views on your environment for various purposes, in particular to meet compliance requirements. In this lab, you run an a report from an existing template, then create a new report based on a saved search, and finally create a new report from a new search.

This course provides useful information for administrators to understand how the Console deploys user changes to managed hosts. See the difference between Deploy Changes and Deploy Full Configuration and what impact they have on events, flows and offenses. Discover how to audit users that initiated changes and monitor the progress of deployment actions. Learn about troubleshooting steps when a Deploy Changes does not complete. 

IBM Security QRadar Network Insights (QNI) provides deep, real-time investigations into your network traffic.  In this course, you learn about the increased level of data that QNI provides for searches, rules, and building blocks.  You also learn about QNI inspection levels.  You learn how to create a rule that raises an offence when your traffic contains data from a QNI property.  You also investigate flow properties for an email exchange.

WinCollect is a syslog event forwarder that collects Windows-based events from local and remote Windows-based systems and sends them to QRadar for processing and storage. In this video you learn about the two different WinCollect deployment models and how to manage them.

Using the table of contents menu in the video you can navigate to each one of these topics individually, or you can explore the content altogether:

• WinCollect overview
• WinCollect deployment models
• Installing and configuring a managed deployment
• Generating an authentication token
• WinCollect agent GUI installation
• WinCollect agent command line installation
• Upgrading all WinCollect agents to V7.2.8
• Troubleshooting a faulty WinCollect installation

In this course, you learn about the high availability (HA) design for QRadar, including setup and synchronization of HA hosts, and how to work with host states in a failover situation.

With indicators of compromise or concern, you specify which activities you consider suspicious. Derive indicators from threat modeling while considering which kind of data QRadar SIEM can use to test for indicators. This course addresses the following topics:

• Getting started with threat modeling
  
• Using observables for indicators
  
• Using context for indicators
  
• Using external data for indicators 

Anomaly detection aims to alert to threats that are undocumented and therefore cannot be detected by methods that monitor for well defined indicators. Such threats can be detected by monitoring for an unusual volume of activities. With IBM® QRadar® SIEM, create anomaly detection rules to monitor for deviations from the baseline of expected activities.

In these exercises, you develop an anomaly detection rule of type Anomaly. It tests for the deviation of the number of events matching a grouped search from the weighted moving average. The rule fires in the exercise because the sample data spikes above the deviation percentage configured in the anomaly rule.

Join the IBM Security Learning Services team for an in-depth tour of the Security Learning Academy, with a focus on IBM Security QRadar Security Intelligence course offerings. During this webinar, you will see how to navigate the platform, search the course catalog, enroll in a course, view your enrollments on your dashboard, create progress reports, and see how Security Learning Academy is integrated with IBM VIP Rewards for Security.

Contents

• Introduction
• Content requirements process
• Tour the IBM Security Learning Academy home page
• Take a deeper look at QRadar Security Intelligence courses and course roadmaps
• Your personal dashboard
• Progress reports
• Integration between the Academy and the IBM VIP Rewards for Security program

Each QRadar Custom Rules Engine instance evaluates hundreds of test conditions on thousands of events and flows per second in real-time. The resource consumption of testing can cause a high system load so that real-time processing degrades. Therefore, rule developers need to consider the computational cost of tests and optimize accordingly. This guide helps rule developers to write efficient custom rules and building blocks.

When you send your log file data to IBM Security QRadar, it is first parsed inside a Device Support Module (DSM) so that QRadar can fully utilize the normalized data for event and offense processing. Sometimes you encounter data that cannot be correctly parsed, or you are dealing with multiple log sources running on one physical system. 

In this course, Jose Bravo reviews the basic processes inside a QRadar DSM and explains how events are flagged. He demonstrates how to find the correct parser for your log source, and how to handle the parsing order in case you have deployed more than one log source on a physical machine.

Using the attached additional resources, you can run these scenarios on your own QRadar Community Edition (or other QRadar) deployment.

• Introduction
  
• When parsing does not work
• SIM Generic
• Stored and Unknown
• Parsing order intro and examples 
• Syslog redirect
• Property formats
• Setting the lab up

The IBM Security QRadar DSM for Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudTrail supports audit events that are collected from Amazon S3 buckets by using the Amazon AWS S3 REST API protocol and a Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue. This method is very useful when collecting CloudTrail logs from multiple accounts or regions in an Amazon S3 bucket and reduced the chance of missing files by using ObjectCreate notifications. It is an alternative to the prefix method to collect data because it does not require that the file names in the folders be in a string sorted in ascending order based on the full path. In this course, you learn which services you need properly configured in your AWS environment to make this method work. Following this, you learn how to add an Amazon AWS CloudTrail log source, and at the end, you see how a successfully configured log source receives events from AWS.

Threat Simulator is part of the QRadar Experience Center App. It contains five use cases for common threats, and for each of them, it generates a set of pre-defined logs in real time. These logs are displayed on the Log Activity tab of the Console as they are being received so that you can learn how to analyze them.

In this course, you learn how to run and analyze the results of each use case in the Threat Simulator.

QRadar Deployment Intelligence is a monitoring application built to give users a birds-eye-view of the health of their QRadar deployment. The app consolidates the following historical data points on a per-host basis: 

• Status
• Up-time
• Notifications
• Event and flow rates
• System performance metrics
• QRadar specific metrics and more

In this course, you learn how to use the interactive app, by first displaying initial overviews for all hosts, and then drilling down and investigating specific hosts to see detailed health and status information.

In this video, you learn how coalescing works in IBM QRadar. 

In this course, you learn how to create IBM Security QRadar domains and tenants using both the user interface and the RESTful API. You send events to QRadar and see how they get assigned to domains and why. You understand the difference between domain aware and domain unaware rules. You create a shared data rule and perform tests to see how this rule works in comparison with QRadar rules without a domain assignment.

For QRadar SIEM 7.3.2, an App Host can take over the running of apps. The App Host replaces the App Node that was available for previous versions of QRadar SIEM. This course teaches how to add an App Host to a QRadar SIEM 7.3.2 installation.

Similar to the if-then statement in programming languages, custom rules consist of a boolean operation and statements. If the QRadar custom rule engine (CRE) evaluates the boolean operation to true, then the CRE performs the configured rule actions and rule responses. 

This course addresses the following rule actions: 

• Changing severity, credibility and relevance of the event or flow 
• Adding the event or flow to an offense 
• Annotating the event or flow 
• Dropping the event or flow by rule action and routing rule

Determining the rules that triggered can provide valuable insight into your IT environment and guide you for further rule development and improvement. In this course, you learn how to gain different perspectives on matching rules. 

• Sorting rules by their contributions to offenses
• Grouping dispatched events by event name
• Grouping events by rules that triggered for them
• Grouping flows by rules that triggered for them
• Filtering by rules that triggered

Use the QRadar Experience Center App to learn about the QRadar capabilities, simulate common threats, work with log samples in real time, and learn how to analyze your logs. The QRadar Experience Center App is designed for educational purposes, and its menu includes useful videos, links, an FAQ section, and more. 

In this video, you learn how to navigate the Experience Center App.

QRadar dashboard items allow the user to focus on different areas of interest. This step-by-step demonstration introduces how to perform network analysis with dashboard items.

The IBM Security App Exchange is a collaborative platform that can help integrate and utilize the collective knowledge of security professionals through code sharing.  The App Exchange offers enhancements and integration between IBM Security products, and can include other security vendors, such as Trend Micro, Cisco, Qualys, and so on.
The majority of the security integration offerings today is available for the IBM® QRadar® product line.  The IBM Security App Exchange provides an expanded hub of QRadar content. IBM QRadar provides a RESTful API that allows access to the QRadar resources and data.

This lab guide demonstrates the tools that can help you to develop new apps for QRadar.  You can use two type of tools for your app development:

• QRadar App Editor
• QRadar SDK

The labs are using IBM QRadar Community Edition, or IBM QRadar CE.

This course teaches you how to avoid many common issues when configuring log sources for QRadar that use the Log File protocol.  In addition, you also learn how to configure both FTPS and passwordless SCP authentication for Log File log sources.  Finally, you learn how to configure and test Log File log sources in the QRadar Log Source Management app.

IBM QRadar enables you to minimize the time gap between when a suspicious activity occurs and when you detect it. Attacks and policy violations leave their footprints in log events and network flows of your IT systems. To connect the dots, QRadar SIEM correlates these scattered events and flows into offenses that alert you to suspicious activities. Using the skills taught in this course, you will be able to thoroughly understand and configure QRadar rules, work with reference data, and create and manage uncommon log sources.

• Create and manage uncommon log source types
• Leverage reference data collections
• Develop and manage custom rules
• Develop and manage custom action scripts
• Develop and manage anomaly detection rules

QRadar SIEM Foundation

The IBM QRadar SIEM Foundation badge focuses on the foundation skills that are required for IBM QRadar customers in different roles: architects, administrators, and security analysts.

To earn the IBM QRadar SIEM Foundation badge, you must complete each of the 19 required courses and pass a 63 question quiz with a score of 80 percent or higher. 

All courses are free of charge and can be found on the Security Learning Academy in the QRadar Security Intelligence > SIEM category. 

Note: The two hours time estimate on the front page of this course refers to the time it can take to complete the quiz. The 19 required courses, which can be taken separately from this course, add up to 13 - 14 hours of learning.

In the IBM Security QRadar Console, you can use the Index Management tool to control database indexing on event and flow properties. By adding an indexed field in your search query, it helps to improve the speed of searches in QRadar by narrowing the overall data. Learn how to modify database indexing in the Index Management tool by making use of statistics before and after you enable or disable indexing on multiple properties.

IBM Security QRadar flows represent network activity by normalizing IP addresses, ports, byte and packet counts, and other data, into flow records, which are records of network sessions between two hosts. Flows are a differentiating component in QRadar that provide detailed visibility into your network traffic.

In this course, you learn the difference between QRadar events and flows. Learn about the packet header and payload: which information is available in the header and packet, and which technologies to use to investigate header and payload information.

In this course, we demonstrate how to use Anomaly Rules in IBM Security QRadar to detect abnormal behavior patterns throughout your IT infrastructure and user population.

In this video, you learn about the different update types in QRadar and how to use the Auto Update function. In addition, you learn how to take advantage of the QRadar Assistant app to keep your content packs and QRadar apps up-to-date.

License keys entitle you to use specific IBM Security QRadar products and control the event and flow capacity for your QRadar deployment. You can add licenses to your deployment to activate other QRadar products, such as QRadar Vulnerability Manager.

This self-paced course provides you the foundations of license management, their components, and explain how they are managed within QRadar.

Course Objectives

• Define ways to upload and maintain license keys in the QRadar SIEM console.

• Obtain hands-on experience with viewing license details, uploading a license key, allocating a license key to a host, deleting licenses, and exporting license information.

Stateful tests in rules, which are configured as local, are evaluated by the CRE instance that receives the events and flows. Stateful tests in rules, which are configured as global, are evaluated by the CRE instance on the Console. In this course you learn about both of these options, which allows you to make an informed decision on whether to configure a rule as local or global. This course addresses the following topics:

• Configuring rules as local or global
• Examining the effects on rules with only stateful tests
• Examining the effects on rules with only stateless tests
• Examining the effects on rules with both stateful and stateless tests
• Examining the effects on rule responses
• Considering pros and cons
  

In this course, we demonstrate how to create an offense for monitoring an internal IBM Security QRadar Log Source.

In this video, you review how to use the DSM Editor to select a log source type, configure property parsing, and create new event categories and mapping. You also examine the new features of the DSM Editor, which are contained in the Configuration section. 

This video focuses on the new features: log source autodetection and properties. These features are available with QRadar SIEM 7.3.3.

This course focuses on two conceptual log source components. Protocols, which ingest event data into the QRadar ecosystem, and Device Support Modules, which act on this ingested data. You will learn about the roles of these components, and how they are aligned in the event pipeline.

This video is intended for new administrators, or users, who have inherited QRadar responsibilities in their organization and want a crash course on how to maintain and manage QRadar. The goal of this video is to give administrators an idea, of what to review on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to prevent support calls and understand QRadar as a new administrator. 

This IBM QRadar Support Open Mic session was recorded on Thursday, 25 April 2019.

•     Defining rules
•     Introducing the QRadar rules engines
•     Enabling rules
•     Duplicating rules
•     Editing rules
•     Creating rules
•     Navigating rule groups

In this video series, you learn how QRadar can map your network flows to applications using different techniques. 

In part 1, we configure QRadar to assign an application name to flow records when a specific source IP address and port combination is detected. In parts 2 and 3, we configure QRadar to assign an application name to flow records based on various information found in the payload of the flow data.

In this video, you learn how to create building blocks and how they differ from QRadar custom rules. You will be able to leverage building blocks for their typical purposes of reducing complexity and resource consumption, facilitating reuse of functionality and information, as well as reflecting your organization's IT environment.

Rules can use threat intelligence data from sources outside your organization to test for known threats. Learn about the options to leverage threat intelligence data and make an informed decision on how to get started. This course addresses the following topics:

• Describe how threat intelligence data fits into the bigger picture
  
• Use external data
  
• Use built-in Remote Networks
  
• Use X-Force threat intelligence feeds
  

Understanding the architecture of the IBM QRadar ecosystem is viable for everyone in IT Security who is concerned with solutions within the security immune system. By learning how the central Security Intelligence components are designed to take in and process log events and flow data, you will be better equipped to holistically work as a Security Analyst with IBM QRadar. This course includes three videos:

1. QRadar functional architecture and deployment models
   
2. QRadar SIEM component architecture
   
3. Dissecting the flow of a captured event
   

This Open Mic video first explains the different cloud deployment architecture models for IBM QRadar and then spends some time to discuss the installation procedures for various cloud offerings. Take a look at the overall agenda:

• Third Party Cloud Vendors
  
• AWS Deployment Architecture Examples
  
• Azure Deployment Architecture Examples
  
• Installing QRadar in AWS Today
  
• Installing QRadar CE in AWS
  
• Installing QRadar in AWS (Soon)
  
• Instance Log Ingestion from Auto-Scaling Groups
  
• Resources
  

In this set of videos, we provide you with an overview of the IBM QRadar Deployment Architecture.

• Part one talks about the different QRadar appliance models and explains how they can be used in a variety of deployment architectures.
• Part two investigates how to deploy QRadar in remote locations. It also introduces the concepts of high availability, disaster recovery, and deployment options in virtual environments.
• Part three explains deployment options in cloud-based environments. 
• The final part compares deployment options for VMware and QRadar on the Cloud (QRoC)

In this video series, we investigate various Ransomware, phishing, and malware attack use cases in QRadar.

• Stopping Ransomware in its tracks
  
• Discover Hidden Malware with QRadar
  
• QRadar and Bigfix Stop Ransomware
  
• Using QRadar and X-Force Exchange to protect against WannaCry ransomeware attack

In this QRadar Open Mic you learn about domains and tenants, and how these concepts are implemented and used. You also hear about tips and other helpful information for QRadar administrators.

QRadar collects network activity information, or what is referred to as "flow records".  Flows represent network activity by normalizing IP addresses, ports, byte and packet counts, as well as other details, into "flows", which effectively represent a session between two hosts. QRadar can collect different types of flows, which differ greatly in the collected details. In this video series, we explain and demonstrate the differences between the following network flow capture mechanisms:

• Cisco Netflow
• QRadar QFlow
• QRadar Network Insights (QNI)
  

This course teaches you how to configure a QRadar Retention Bucket within QRadar Administration. First, you learn about QRadar data retention and how to retain event and flow data in IBM QRadar. Then, you run an interactive simulation to configure QRadar Retention Buckets.  

With IBM QRadar SIEM, you can monitor and display network events in real time or perform advanced searches.

The Log Activity tab displays event information as records from a log source, such as a firewall or router device. Use the Log Activity tab to do the following tasks:

• Investigate events that are sent to QRadar SIEM in real time
• Search events
• Monitor log activity by using configurable time-series charts
• Identify false positives to tune QRadar SIEM

IBM QRadar uses the network hierarchy objects and groups to organize network activity and monitor groups or services in your network.

When you develop your network hierarchy, consider the most effective method for viewing network activity. The network hierarchy does not need to resemble the physical deployment of your network. QRadar supports any network hierarchy that can be defined by a range of IP addresses. You can base your network on many different variables, including geographical or business units.

In this course, you learn about the following Network Hierarchy fundamentals:

• Part 1 - Network Hierarchy Basics 
• Part 2 - Structuring your Network Hierarchy
• Part 3 - Keeping the Network Hierarchy Updated

In this video, you learn about how QRadar rules perform tests on events, flows, or offenses. If all the conditions of a test are met, the rule generates a response.

QRadar SIEM includes rules that detect a wide range of activities, including excessive firewall denies, multiple failed login attempts, and potential botnet activity. 

The following list describes the two rule categories:

• Custom rules perform tests on events, flows, and offenses to detect unusual activity in your network
  
• Anomaly detection rules perform tests on the results of saved flow or event searches to detect when unusual traffic patterns occur in your network

Employees in every organization are granted different levels of clearance to access information and classified or restricted areas based on their job profiles, such as different network locations, applications, or data. This process includes users who manage and have access to IT security products that protect the organization's critical resources, such as QRadar. 

Every organization implements its own security policies to provide users with different permissions according to their roles. In this context, QRadar provides the ability to segment users' access based on a combination of factors, which can yield granular results. The information contained in QRadar includes network hierarchy and topology, assets, log and flow sources, event and flow data, offenses, scanning activity, management activity, and more. 

This course introduces QRadar user management foundations, where you learn about user accounts and the different methods to authenticate, and how to implement granular user controls, such as user roles, security profiles, domains, and tenants.

The capacity of a deployment is measured by the number of events per second (EPS) and flows per minute (FPM) that IBM QRadar can collect, normalize, and correlate in real time. The event and flow capacity is set by the licenses that are uploaded to the system. In this video, you learn about the features of managing the license event and flow capacity.

• Define functions of event and flow processing capacity, such as shared license pool, capacity sizing, and internal events
• Define burst handling

This IBM Security Support Open Mic video explains how QRadar uses log source protocols to collect event data, capturing configuration properties, error messages, and other use cases for data collection.

Objectives:

• Events FAQ and terminology
• Listening protocols (Syslog)
• Polling protocols (JDBC / Log File)
• Tips and performance Suggestions
• Specialty protocols (APIs)
• Questions and discussion
  

This course provides general tips on log source configuration. Learn how to gather information about DSMs. Understand the capabilities of the QRadar UI to configure log sources. See what else can help you do this task and get linked to it.

With the advances of technology and the occurrence 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 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:

•     "Before the installation" provides a review of important requirements before the installation of the product.
•     "Installing IBM QRadar V7.3" provides step-by-step procedures to guide you through the installation process.
•     "After the installation" helps you to configure additional features and perform checks after the product is installed.

Using a particular use case, this video demonstrates how to take advantage of reference data collections in QRadar SIEM.

QRadar administration encompasses many different tasks. The installation and upgrade management course provides information about the following topics:

• QRadar Installations and Upgrades - Best Practices Open Mic (2014)
  
• Replacing a QRadar Console in your deployment
• Replacing a Managed Host in your deployment (non-HA)
  
• Installing a QRadar content pack from IBM Fix Central
  
• Performing a QRadar v7.3 software installation on your own appliance
  
• Performing a clean install of QRadar v7.3
  
• Upgrading to QRadar v7.3
  
• Upgrading QRadar Appliances in parallel
  
• Migrating a console to a new QRadar appliance with the same IP address
  
• YUM vs RPM Installation commands in QRadar
• How to mount an ISO image using IMM
  

The QRadar SIEM Analyst has to perform many different tasks when it comes to the investigation of offenses, events, and flows. In this video series you learn about the following topics: - Detecting fraud and account takeover - Detecting communication to a malicious Command & Control Server - Detecting a remote scan followed by attempts to login - Detecting multiple Login Failures to Compliance Server - Detecting Chat to a malicious Site - Detecting UDP scan in flows from an IBM XGS Network Security appliance - Detecting phishing e-mails - Detecting awakening dormant Accounts - Detecting Fraud from a URL with Keyword from a bad IP - Detecting jailbroken iPhones using QFlows - Detecting insider threat - USB inserted and bad website visited

You can enhance the Windows log collection capability by using a publicly available tool called System Monitor (Sysmon). In combination with QRadar SIEM you can now process much more detailed events to protect your deployment from malicious attacks.

• Sysmon Introduction 
  
• Use Case 1 - Malicious File Injection and Execution 
  
• Use Case 2 - In memory attack 
  
• Use Case 3 - Base64 encoded data obfuscation 
  
• Use Case 4 - Hiding behind a common Windows service process 
  
• Use Case 5 - Malicious file injection using encrypted HTTPS 
  
• Use Case 6 - Detecting Other Libraries
  
• Use Case 7 - Privilege Escalation Detection
  
• Use Case 8 - More Privilege Escalation Detection
  
• Use Case 9 - Even More Privilege Escalation Detection
  
• Use Case 10 - Creating an Admin Account
  
• Use Case 11 - Detecting Name Pipe Impersonation
  
• Use Case 12 - Detecting Mimikatz
• Use Case 13 - Sysmon Lateral Movement Detection, Example One
• Use Case 14 - Sysmon Lateral Movement Detection, Example Two
• Use Case 15 - Sysmon Lateral Movement Detection, Example Three
• Use Case 16 - Sysmon Detecting BadRabbit
• Use Case 17 - Sysmon and Watson chasing BadRabbit

Use the representational state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) to make HTTPS queries and integrate QRadar with other solutions. In this series of videos you learn how to make best use of the QRadar API. 

Two major capabilities of QRadar SIEM are to integrate with many other solutions and platforms, and to provide an API platform that can be utilized to build powerful extensions. 

In this video series we focus on the QRadar extension capabilities. We address the following topics: 

• QRadar App Exchange Foundations
  
• QRadar App Development and Troubleshooting (Open Mic)
• Installation and configuration of the Incident Overview App
• Configuration of the X-Force Threat Intelligence feed
  

An offense represents a security incident related to a suspicious attack or policy violation. As event and flow data passes through QRadar SIEM, it tests different conditions to generate an offense if such tests results are positive.

In this 2-part video course you learn about investigating offenses that are based on either events or flows.

When working with custom QRadar Log Sources, you often have to deal with collected information that falls outside the standard normalized data, and this data might be considered important. The Custom Properties are a way to collect this information and use it for your ongoing for your investigations.

This IBM Support Open Mic video covers topics around QRadar software updates and a best practice admin checklist.

• Before you begin 
• Patch and upgrade checklist 
• Firmware 
• Troubleshooting
  
• Reference
  

In this Open Mic you learn about the enhanced Windows endpoint monitoring capability with Sysmon and QRadar. The IBM Security Support explains why you want to use Sysmon, and how to properly set it up.

This video series provides insight to troubleshooting activities for your IBM QRadar deployment.

• System Notifications and Error Messages (Open Mic)
• Understanding and troubleshooting IO errors when searching in QRadar
• How to use tcpdump for troubleshooting in QRadar
• Collecting QRadar System Logs
• QRadar Dynamic Systems Analysis

The QRadar SIEM Troubleshooting Tools course contains the following videos:

• The QRadar SIEM Troubleshooting Tools: Introduction to Log Files Part 1 and Part 2 provides an overview of the various log files available and when to use the each log file for troubleshooting.
• The QRadar SIEM Troubleshooting Tools: get_logs shows you how to collect logs for troubleshooting. It also details how to use some of the logs in troubleshooting QRadar issues

In this video, a panel of IBM QRadar experts talk about tuning QRadar, focusing on the following:

• Network hierarchy
  
• Host definition building blocks and reference data
  
• Server discovery
  
• QRadar content extensions
  
• Tuning methodology
  
• False positive rules
  

This video is intended for administrators who update and maintain their QRadar deployment.  The goal is to provide details for having a smooth QRadar upgrade by discussing various upgrade pre-checks, upgrade methods, and offer tips and tricks to help you have a quick and trouble free upgrade.

This hands-on lab is intended to review the configuration of a security profile, a user role, and a user account so that you can understand how these concepts are related to each other and how they can provide you with granular control of a user's access to information in your Console.

In this QRadar WinCollect Troubleshooting Open Mic video, you will learn about the following topics:

• About WinCollect
  
• Managed vs standalone deployment
• Troubleshooting tuning issues 
• Error messages 
• General WinCollect troubleshooting 
• Troubleshooting with IBM Support 
• Q&A

With the QRadar Experience Center App, you run a scenario that simulates an attack triggered by a spam email that allows the launch of a command shell, which helps a suspicious OS to log into an Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and starts creating multiple instances on this cloud environment. It ends with the downloaded backup data from an S3 bucket.. 

In this video, you learn how to investigate this type of situation by using the provided sample data in QRadar SIEM.

Sysmon stands for System Monitor. It is a Windows service that monitors and logs system activity, such as the creation of new processes, network connections, and changes to the Windows registry. By using IBM Security QRadar to collect the events that Sysmon generates and then analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. In this Powershell attack scenario, a user in your network opens a file that runs a Powershell command, which installs a piece of malware. The malware then steals users' credentials, which allow it to move laterally to other endpoints in your network, infecting them and starting the process over again.

In a targeted attack, a user inside a company receives malicious software that allows an attacker to infiltrate the corporate network and compromise information. 

With the QRadar Experience Center App, you run a scenario that simulates the execution of malware by a user, which then downloads additional tools to steal credentials, scan the network, connect to a local database, and download sensitive data. 

In this video, you learn how to investigate this type of situation by using the provided sample data in QRadar SIEM.

The Ariel Query Language (AQL) is a structured query language that you use to communicate with the Ariel databases. You can use AQL to extract, filter, and perform actions on event and flow data that you extract from the Ariel database in IBM Security QRadar.

AQL is used for advanced searches to get data that might not be easily accessible from the user interface. This provides extended functionality to QRadar's search and filtering capabilities.

In this lab you learn how to utilize AQL for some advanced search tactics inside QRadar SIEM.

Each event and flow is a record of an activity in you IT environment. For some events, and all flows, this activity includes a network connection. Many rules need to test, if this network connection is approved in your organization. The rules do this by testing whether the event or flow has been tagged by building blocks with names beginning with BB:HostDefinition and BB:HostReference. Their purpose is to signal QRadar SIEM, which network connections are approved in your organization. In this course, you learn how to approve network connections using these building blocks.

Reference data collections can be used to store and manage important data that you want to correlate against the events and flows in your QRadar environment. You can add business data or data from external sources into a reference data collection, and then use the data in searches, filters, rule test conditions, and rule responses.

In this course, you first get an overview of the different reference data types and what they can be used for. Next, you learn how to manage reference data collections and how to use them.

This 2-part video course explores the following topics:

Part 1: QRadar reference data types overview

• General purpose of reference data collections 
  
• Reference set
• Reference map
• Reference map of sets
• Reference map of maps
• Reference table

• Using the QRadar UI 
  
• Using the CLI
• Using the RESTful API
• Reference data in queries (AQL)
• Reference data in Rules (test conditions, rule responses)

You can back up and recover IBM QRadar configuration information as well as event and flow data by using the backup and recovery feature. However, you must restore event and flow data manually. There are two types of backups: configuration backups and data backups.

Objectives

• View backup archives
• Create an on-demand configuration backup archive
• Delete a backup archive
• Schedule nightly backup
• Import a backup archive