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.

Malicious actors are constantly finding new ways to deliver their malicious payloads. With the recent migration of businesses moving to web application-based services, file storage, email, calendar, and other channels have become valuable means for delivering malicious code and payloads. In some instances, these services are abused as Command and Control infrastructure since many enterprises trust these services by default.

Quite often you are in the middle of a security incident or just combing through your data looking for signs of malicious activity, and you will want to trace the activity or relationships of a particular process. This can be a very time-consuming and frustrating task if you try to brute force things (copying/pasting parent and child process IDs over and over again). And in the heat of battle, you may miss one item that could have led you to something interesting.

What was once the thing of spy movies and industrial espionage news headlines is now, sadly, a common occurrence for public organizations and private enterprises around the globe. Insiders… employees, consultants, partners… have emerged as one of the most immediate and serious threats facing IT and cyber security teams and practitioners today. It is not however because every insider has turned malicious.

The Splunk Threat Research Team recently evaluated ways to generate security content using native Windows event logging regarding PowerShell Script Block Logging to assist enterprise defenders in finding malicious PowerShell scripts. This method provides greater depth of visibility as it provides the raw (entire) PowerShell script output. There are three sources that may enhance any defender's perspective: module, script block and transcript logging.

Security analysts know this situation well: inundated by alerts, alternating between 10 different security tools, and feeling the pressure of responding to each and every threat. It’s typically around this point that SOC teams realize it’s humanly impossible to process the amount of data that needs to be processed, and they should start looking for a solution. Gretchen White, Chief Information Security Officer at Minnesota Judicial Courts, experienced this firsthand.