See what's happening
on your network.

5 Windows Event IDs every system administrator should be monitoring

By Arden Security • April 2026 • 3 min read

If you're managing Windows machines, your event logs are already recording thousands of events every hour. The challenge isn't a lack of data — it's that you're too busy keeping things running to know which events actually matter. The good news: you don't need to monitor all of them. According to Microsoft's own security monitoring guidance, a small set of event IDs covers the most critical attack patterns — and they're already being recorded on every Windows machine in your environment. Here are the five we think every system administrator should start with.

These five events won't catch everything, but they cover brute force, lateral movement, persistence, privilege escalation, and anti-forensics. According to the Picus Security Red Report 2026, which analyzed over one million malware samples, Defense Evasion and Persistence are the dominant tactics used by attackers today, with 80% of the top 10 MITRE ATT&CK techniques focused on staying hidden and maintaining long-term access. The MITRE ATT&CK framework documents these phases based on real-world observations from thousands of intrusions. You can monitor these event IDs manually with Event Viewer, or let Arden do it automatically with 71 detection rules that cover the full ATT&CK kill chain.

How to spot lateral movement without a SOC

By Arden Security • April 2026 • 3 min read

Lateral movement is how a small breach becomes a full compromise. An attacker lands on one workstation — maybe through a phishing email — and then moves across your network to find domain controllers, file servers, and backup systems. If you catch it early, you contain a single machine. If you miss it, you're rebuilding your entire domain.

The good news: every lateral movement technique leaves traces in standard Windows event logs. Here are the four patterns to look for.

The pattern across all of these: one machine reaching out to another in a way it normally doesn't. If WORKSTATION-05 suddenly authenticates to your file server, your DC, and three other workstations within ten minutes — and it's never done that before — that's lateral movement. Arden automates this detection with 13 lateral movement rules that flag exactly these patterns in real time.

The $29/month alternative to a six-figure SIEM

By Arden Security • April 2026 • 3 min read

With new attack vectors, zero-day exploits, and nation-state sponsored threat actors making headlines every week, the question every IT team faces isn't if they'll be targeted — it's whether they'll know when it happens. The cybersecurity adage "prevention is ideal, but detection is a must" has never been more relevant.

So you start looking at detection tools. Splunk Enterprise runs $1,800+ per year per GB of daily ingestion. IBM QRadar starts around $800/month for basic deployments. Microsoft Sentinel charges per GB of log data ingested into Azure. Elastic SIEM is open source but requires dedicated infrastructure to run. LogRhythm, Securonix, Exabeam — all assume enterprise budgets and dedicated security staff to configure and maintain them. You look at the pricing, look at your team of two, and close the tab.

But the need doesn't go away. You still need to be able to see what's happening on your network. You need detection — not next quarter when the budget allows it, but now, on the machines you're already managing. That's where Arden comes in: a simple, affordable, portable solution that gives you direct insight into Windows event logs without the infrastructure, the cloud dependency, or the six-figure price tag.

What you actually need vs. what they're selling you

Enterprise SIEMs do three things: collect logs, run detection rules, and show you a dashboard. For that, you're paying for log ingestion by the gigabyte, agents on every endpoint, a cloud subscription, and usually a professional services engagement to configure it. Most SMBs end up paying $500 to $5,000 per month and still have rules they never tuned and alerts they never check.

What if you could get the detection part — the part that actually finds attacks — without the infrastructure? That's the idea behind Arden. It's a single Windows executable that reads your event logs directly, runs 71 detection rules covering the full MITRE ATT&CK kill chain, and serves a real-time dashboard on localhost. No server. No database. No cloud. No agents (unless you want them for multi-host monitoring).

What $29/month gets you

The Standalone tier runs on a single machine and analyzes its local event logs. In 30 seconds, you go from "I have no idea what's happening on this machine" to a prioritized list of security findings sorted by severity, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, with contextual explanations of what each alert means and what to do about it. You can import EVTX files from other machines, export findings as CSV or JSON for your records, and suppress false positives so they don't clutter future scans.

For $49/month, the Network tier adds the ability to deploy lightweight agents to every Windows machine on your network, scan your network for hosts, collect logs remotely via admin share or WinRM, and monitor everything from a single dashboard. It's the same detection engine — you're just running it across more machines.

Is it a replacement for CrowdStrike or Sentinel? No. Those tools do real-time endpoint protection, cloud telemetry, and managed threat hunting. But if your alternative is nothing — which is the reality for most SMBs — then 71 detection rules running on your actual logs is infinitely better than hoping your antivirus catches everything.

Join the early access list to be first in line when Arden launches.