For more information on how to respond to the Log4j vulnerabilities using Splunk products, please see our Log4Shell response overview page. Like most cybersecurity teams, the Splunk Threat Research Team (STRT) has been heads-down attempting to understand, simulate, and detect the Log4j attack vector. This post shares detection opportunities STRT found in different stages of successful Log4Shell exploitation.

SOAR use cases come in all shapes and sizes, but almost all of them rely on threat intelligence to determine the risk posed by the various indicators in the event. Our two new community playbooks leverage Splunk Intelligence Management (previously TruSTAR) to gather intelligence about indicators and enable rapid manual response by an analyst within a single prompt.

The Splunk Threat Research Team recently updated the Active Directory Lateral Movement analytic story to help security operations center (SOC) analysts detect adversaries executing these techniques within Windows Active Directory (AD) environments. In this blog post, we’ll describe some of the detection opportunities available to cyber defenders and highlight detections from the analytic story.

Authors and Contributors: As always, security at Splunk is a family business. Credit to authors and collaborators: Ryan Kovar, Shannon Davis, Marcus LaFerrera, John Stoner, James Brodsky, Dave Herrald, Audra Streetman, Johan Bjerke, Drew Church, Mick Baccio, Lily Lee, Tamara Chacon, Ryan Becwar. If you want just to see how to find detections for the Log4j 2 RCE, skip down to the “detections” sections.

This blog post is part thirty of the "Hunting with Splunk: The Basics" series. Shannon Davis provided the first half of this blog on pipe hunting in part twenty-nine, and will now run through the second half! – Ryan Kovar

If you haven’t already read the episode on process hunting, I recommend that you go back and do so, at least for a couple of my jokes, and to help keep our clicks/metrics up. Where that episode concentrated on tracking processes, this blog will concentrate on, you guessed it, pipes. And due to the depth I tried to go with this one, it has been split into a two-part series, so make sure to come back for the second part after you’ve finished this one.

Owners and operators of Operational Technology (OT) environments are being increasingly tasked with providing more information and security controls for their OT Environments, whether those demands are driven by the board, executive orders, or new regulations. One of the biggest fallacies that we encounter when our customers begin monitoring their OT environment is the idea that OT systems are air gapped and completely isolated from IT systems.