The city of Lewiston, in north central Idaho, has a population of around 32,000 and an information systems budget of around $800,000 a year.
But it wasn't too small for attackers. For example, the city council meetings, streamed online, were being watched by people in Russia.
"Why are they watching this?" said Danny Santiago, the city's information systems administrator.
Then there were the phishing attempts.
"We are negotiating a $2 million contract for road work, and we had spearphishing attacks," he said. "Luckily it's a small town, and everyone knows everyone, so people called us."
The city needed a security information and event management (SIEM) system, but the price was a major obstacle.
"Most of the software that we looked at was six figures," he said.
Plus, the city would have to hire at least one new employee, which would have been a $70,000-a-year position not including benefits. Santiago and his team didn't have the time to become full-time security admins, he said.
The city began looking at options last year, and finally went with the AlienVault USM platform, which has SIEM built-in.
Before signing the contract, AlienVault conducted a proof of concept for the city where they installed a virtual machine and let it run for two weeks to collect data.
"Two weeks later, they go back on and they do a demo with real live data, and they said, you have a live attack going on right now," said Santiago. "I said, 'Are you kidding me?' 'No, brute force, here it is.'"
The attacker was in town, trying to log in with old access credentials.
"It turned out, after we got the police involved, that it was a former sysadmin who left under very bad terms," Santiago said.
The city decided to move ahead with the service, and installed the AlienVault appliance in February.
The first month was tough, as Santiago spent around six to eight hours a day fixing outstanding issues, on top of his regular responsibilities.
"I had a dashboard with the things you need to worry about, this machine may be vulnerable, this machine has a problem, and I worked my way down to the bottom, through the environment variables, and the patches," he said. "After the first month, I would spend about an hour or two a day. Now it's about 30 minutes a day."
As an unexpected side benefit, network speeds improved dramatically when orphaned software was removed. In one case, for example, an obsolete VPN client on a user machine had been trying to connect to servers that were replaced several years ago.
AlienVault also caught an attack from China, where a hacker tried to brute force his way in, with 20 login attempts per second for nine months.
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"AlienVault support took me through it, showed me how to find it, and how to stop it," Santiago said.
AlienVault's pricing starts at $5,050 a year, and goes up based on the number of assets monitored.
"It's incredibly cost-effective compared to everything else, even for tight budgets," he said. "And it was very easy to prove its value."
Smaller firms still need big security
Today, more than half of all companies have SIEM systems, according to 451 Research.
And last year, SIEMs were the fastest-growing segment of the security market, according to Gartner.
"It's growing at 15 to 20 percent a year," said Gartner analyst Oliver Rochford.
However, traditional SIEMs are expensive, difficult to setup, and hard to manage. Many companies also struggle with having enough trained staff to run the SIEMs.
That has historically put SIEMs out of reach of many small and midsized organizations.
That's a problem, said Vijay Basani, CEO at EiQ Networks, a security-as-a-service vendor that just released its own SIEM platform built from the ground up to work in the cloud.
"Small to medium-sized enterprises very much need a SIEM solution or some kind of security monitoring solution in place," he said. "The majority of attacks are taking place in the mid-market segment right now. As much as people love talking about reading about large companies, the majority of the action is actually taking place in the mid market."
So it's no surprise that the growth in the SIEM market is coming from the smaller vendors.
According to Gartner, the software revenue market share of the top five suppliers fell by 3 percent last year, to 38 percent of the market, after falling the previous year, as well.
The managed security services category is also becoming very important, said Gartner's Rochford.
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"When we talk to companies about SIEM, we're talking about managed security service providers about 40 percent of the time," he said.
"Some of the biggest SIEM vendors are actually offering services themselves," he added. "IBM would be an example. Others are partnering with MSSPs."
Machine learning and advanced analytics help the providers become more efficient and support more customers, lowering prices overall, he said.
"We also have automation around incident response, containment and remediation," he said. "And the majority of clients have something in the cloud -- it makes things easier for MSSPs."
SIEMs moving off-premises
Some companies still prefer to run their own SIEMs, on their premises.
"No one knows your business better than you," said Joseph Blankenship, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Security requires a certain amount of business context, especially for monitoring, so you understand whether a behavior you're seeing is normal business activity or abnormal to the business."
For external vendors, however, the economies of scale kick in when many clients are using the same systems and services.
Extensive personalized support hurts that business model. Plus, the outside vendor might not have the best understanding of how individual companies work.
"They might not know what certain systems are utilized for, and the roles that certain users are playing in the organization," he said.
When setting up an on-premises SIEM, however, the up-front price of the technology is only part of the total cost. Staffing is a significant burden, especially for smaller companies.