Socio-Technical SIEM (ST-SIEM)

This article discusses the design and specifications of a Socio-Technical Security Information and Event Management System (ST-SIEM). This newly-developed artifact addresses an important limitation identified in today incident response practice—the lack of sufficient context in actionable security information disseminated to constituent organizations. ST-SIEM tackles this limitation by considering the socio-technical aspect of information systems security. This concept is achieved by correlating the technical metrics of security warnings (which are generic in nature, and the sources of which are sometimes unknown) with predefined social security metrics (used for modeling the security culture of constituent organizations). ST-SIEM, accordingly, adapts the risk factor of the triggered security warning based on each constituent organization security culture. Moreover, the artifact features several socio-technical taxonomies with an impact factor to support organizations in classifying, reporting, and escalating actionable security information. The overall project uses design science research as a framework to develop the artifact.