Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2021

Top In-Demand Cybersecurity Skills in the Upcoming Years

Hey there, We recently ran a series of webinars* on how different-sized cybersecurity teams modernized their security operations and embedded polling questions within the webinars to gather some feedback. A set of possible answers was selected based on the ENISA NIS Investments report. In this blog post I’d like to share the results of the polls and the conclusions we can draw from them.

Splunk SOAR Playbooks: Conducting an Azure New User Census

In January and February of 2021, the threat actor called Hafnium used a number of post-exploitation tools after gaining access to Exchange servers through a zero-day exploit. One of their persistence methods was creating new user accounts in the domain, giving them the ability to log back into the network using normal authentication rather than use a web shell or continue to re-exploit the vulnerability (which has since been patched).

Leading with Observability: Key Considerations for Technology Leaders

By 2022, Gartner estimates that more than 3 out of 4 global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. With this comes a new set of monitoring challenges — ephemeral, short-lived infrastructure, complex service interdependencies and on-call developers who now need access to data for fast troubleshooting, just to name a few.

Automated Clean-up of HAFNIUM Shells and Processes with Splunk Phantom

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably come across the recent Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities and its associated exploits.Stop!!! The first thing you should do is to go and patch any Exchange servers you may be running, then you can come back and finish reading this blog. Microsoft's blog provides links to various tools to help in this regard.

Analytics-Based Investigation and Automated Response with AWS + Splunk Security Solutions

Organizations are migrating an increasing amount of their infrastructure into the cloud. The cloud provides organizations with a number of benefits like greater scalability, improved reliability and faster time to value. However, these potential benefits can be offset if security is an afterthought.

Orchestrate Framework Controls to Support Security Operations with Splunk SOAR

Every security team should utilize security frameworks in their strategy and tactics to help reduce risk from common cybersecurity threats. Security frameworks guide organizations on how they should develop, build, and maintain their IT security policies and procedures while sharing best practices for meeting compliance requirements. Healthcare operations in particular are often presented with increasing regulatory scrutiny and obligations that must be met in order to be competitive.

How to Marie Kondo Your Incident Response with Case Management & Foundational Security Procedures

Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizational consultant, helps people declutter their homes in order to live happier, better lives. She once said: Similarly, in security, operational teams are constantly bogged down by a “visible mess” that inhibits their ability to effectively secure their organization.

DevSecOps is a Practice. Make it visible.

While DevSecOps feels like just another industry term, engineering teams everywhere are feeling greater and greater accountability for the security and stability of applications they build. DevSecOps is a practice, not a product. The practice consists of three primary use cases. For enterprises to be successfully implementing DevSecOps practices they need to focus on visibility, consistent communication, and data-driven incident response.

How Microsoft Used Splunk's Ethlogger to Turn Blockchain Data Into Supply Chain Insight

The way we ‘data’ is about to change, and Splunk’s Connect for Ethereum (aka EthLogger) is helping organizations to adapt. Splunk Connect for Ethereum enables organizations of all sizes to investigate, monitor, analyze and act upon their rapidly growing blockchain data sets across multiple chains.

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry .NET and OpenTelemetry Java v1.0.0

Recently we announced in our blog post, "The OpenTelemetry Tracing Specification Reaches 1.0.0!," that OpenTelemetry tracing specifications reached v1.0.0 — offering long-term stability guarantees for the tracing portion of the OpenTelemetry clients. Today we’re excited to share that the first of the language-specific APIs and SDKs have reached v1.0.0 starting with OpenTelemetry Java and OpenTelemetry .NET.

Visual Link Analysis with Splunk: Part 4 - How is this Pudding Connected?

I thought my last blog, Visual Link Analysis with Splunk: Part 3 - Tying Up Loose Ends, about fraud detection using link analysis would be the end of this topic for now. Surprise, this is part 4 of visual link analysis. Previously (for those who need a refresher) I wanted to use Splunk Cloud to show me all the links in my data in my really big data set. I wanted to see all the fraud rings that I didn’t know about. I was happy with my success in using link analysis for fraud detection.

Splunking AWS ECS And Fargate Part 3: Sending Fargate Logs To Splunk

Welcome to part 3 of the blog series where we go through how to forward container logs from Amazon ECS and Fargate to Splunk. In part 1, Splunking AWS ECS Part 1: Setting Up AWS And Splunk, we focused on understanding what ECS and Fargate are, along with how to get AWS and Splunk ready for log routing to Splunk’s Data-to-Everything Platform.

Improve Business KPIs with Splunk APM Business Workflows

One of the biggest challenges that DevOps teams face is how to connect their efforts with the priorities of business leaders. In conversations we’ve had, developers and SREs discussed how they need to show business and engineering leaders that they are investing their time solving the right problems, and how solving these problems lead to overall better business outcomes.

Splunk for OT Security V2: SOAR and More

In the last 90 days, the news of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure has been stunning. From the unprecedented breach represented by Sunburst to the more recent bone-chilling attack at the Oldsmar water facility, the urgency to secure critical infrastructure in transportation, utilities, energy, water, critical manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, government facilities and the defense sector has never been higher.

Why Observability Is the Key Ingredient to Success

Digital transformation is accelerating at a staggering pace. Consider these statistics. In December 2019, Splunk partner Zoom had 10 million monthly active users. By the end of last year, that number was estimated to be closer to 300 million. It was part of an explosion of technological growth replicated across many industries and businesses in 2020. As Splunk CEO Doug Merritt said.

Splunk SOAR Playbooks: Crowdstrike Malware Triage

The combination of Crowdstrike and Splunk Phantom together allows for a more smooth operational flow from detecting endpoint security alerts to operationalizing threat intelligence and automatically taking the first few response steps – all in a matter of seconds. In this video, distinguished Phantom engineer Philip Royer will walk you through an out-of-the-box playbook that you can set up in Phantom to triage malware detections from Crowdstrike and automate a variety of responses based on an informed decision by an analyst.

Observability and Monitoring for Modern Applications

I drive a 2005 Ford diesel pickup truck. Most of the time my truck runs great. But occasionally an orange light on the dashboard will flicker on to alert me that something is wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no information about what is wrong and why. My truck has a monitoring solution, but not an observability solution. In many cases, IT has the same problem as my truck.

Building a Superstar SOC with Automation and Standardization

When you have a team of security analysts that have a wide range of expertise, knowledge, and experience, it is natural to see the difference in the quality of work performed. One of the biggest challenges that security operation managers face when auditing the work performed is that some team members may execute different steps at different levels of rigor when investigating and remediating threats.

Enriching Splunk Contact Center Analytics with uberAgent Endpoint Monitoring

Like many other industries, contact centers are increasingly relying on employees working from home. The WFH trend poses new challenges, but it also surfaces issues that were largely ignored before. This article explains how holistic monitoring with Splunk Contact Center Analytics and uberAgent help drive exceptional customer service.

Exploring the Value of your Google Cloud Logs and Metrics

With our ability to ingest GCP logs and metrics into Splunk and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, there’s never been a better time to start driving value out of your GCP data. We’ve already started to explore this with the great blog from Matt here: Getting to Know Google Cloud Audit Logs. Expanding on this, there’s now a pre-built set of dashboards available in a Splunkbase App: GCP Application Template for Splunk!

From the SecOps Kitchen: Why Operators of Essentials Services Need to Prepare Now

Hey there, The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has recently published its NIS Investment report - a survey conducted on European organisations identified as Operator of Essentials Services (OES) and Digital Service Providers (DSP).

As Funding Cuts Arrive, Can CDM Deliver on the Value of Its Promises?

For anyone who works in cybersecurity, getting a tough job done with severely limited resources is all in a day’s work. But when funding allocations suddenly shift after essential programs are already under development, it can be hard for even the most creative, resilient CIOs and CISOs to keep up.

Automating With Splunk Phantom: How Norlys Does It

Some tasks are better off automated. Paying bills on time? Automated payments. Orchestrating a coordinated response to security alerts and triaging security events? There’s Splunk Phantom for that. Monotonous tasks, in our work and personal lives, should and can be automated in order to free up time and energy to focus on the things that matter.