Halloween is just around the corner and we’re looking forward to trick-or-treating, donning our best costumes, and watching movies. A few of my favorite movies that I watch around Halloween time remind me of our most recent Splunk SOAR updates. Is that a stretch? Possibly. But hey it’s Halloween, let’s have some fun and I’ll try to make it as humerus as possible 💀

Over the last year, many of us have been introduced to the term “Software Supply Chain”. For better or worse, it is now part of our defense vernacular and won’t be going away any time soon. If anything, it has consumed us in many ways and has been the cause of many nights of lost sleep. Well, that could just be us on the SURGe team here at Splunk.

The Biden Administration’s May 2021 Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO) emphasizes cybersecurity as a national priority. It represents a bold step towards concrete actions to strengthen national security and address increasingly sophisticated threats facing federal agencies and the entire digital ecosystem.

The security landscape is ever-changing, intensified by more sophisticated threats, and an increasing number of employees working from home leading to an expanding attack surface. Security professionals are tasked with maintaining a secure environment against a plethora of threats, manifested in thousands of alerts and events that are generated by security controls every day.

If you’re like me, you’ve occasionally found yourself staring at the Splunk search bar trying to decide how best to analyze a series of data, iterating against one or more fields. If your brain gravitates towards traditional programming syntax, the first thing that pops into your mind may be application of a for or while loop (neither of which follow Turing convention in SPL). With commands like stats, streamstats, eventstats, or foreach at your disposal, which one should a hunter use?

For those who have played our Boss of the SOC competition or attended our security workshops, you are undoubtedly aware of Frothly, but in case you are not, here is a quick primer. Frothly is a fictional brewing supply company based in San Francisco who has successes and challenges, just like any other organization.

The Splunk threat research team recently developed a new analytic story to help security operations center (SOC) analysts detect adversaries executing discovery and reconnaissance tasks within Active Directory environments. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through this analytic story, demonstrate how we can simulate these attacks using PoshC2 & PurpleSharp to then collect and analyze the resulting telemetry to test our detections.