In the context of incident management, correlation involves identifying and analyzing relationships between different security incidents by examining common patterns across:

• Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) - such as malicious IP addresses, file hashes, or malware signatures that appear across multiple incidents
• Assets - systems or resources that may be targeted in different incidents
• Accounts - user accounts or credentials that may be involved in multiple incidents

By tracking correlations between incidents, analysts can:

• Better understand the scope of security threats
• Identify potential attack patterns or methodologies
• Make more informed decisions about incident response and mitigation strategies

graph TD
  1[Incident 1] --> T1[Timeline]
  T1 --> IOC_DB[IOC Database]
  T1 --> HOST_DB[Hosts Database]
  T1 --> ACC_DB[Accounts Database]
  2[Incident 2] --> T2[Timeline]
  T2 --> IOC_DB
  T2 --> HOST_DB
  T2 --> ACC_DB
  
  1 --> |Correlation| T2
  2 --> |Correlation| T1