Splunk Phantom 4.10 introduced many new enhancements, including the ability to develop playbooks in Python 3. In fact, Python 3 is now the default for Splunk Phantom playbooks. In doing so, we needed to create two different “playbook runners” to ensure we could continue to support playbooks written in Python 2.7 while also supporting Python 3.

Organizations lose billions of dollars to fraud each year. For instance, the financial services sector projects losses to reach $40 billion per year in the next 5-7 years unless financial institutions, merchants, and consumers become more diligent about fraud detection and prevention. Splunk delivers integrated enterprise fraud management software that quickly defines behavior patterns and protects enterprise information from malicious actors.

On January 26th, 2021, Qualys reported that many versions of SUDO (1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2 and 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1) are vulnerable (CVE-2021-3156) to a buffer overflow attack dubbed Baron Samedit that can result in privilege escalations. Qualys was able to use this vulnerability to gain root on at least Ubuntu 20.04 (Sudo 1.8.31), Debian 10 (Sudo 1.8.27), and Fedora 33 (Sudo 1.9.2), some of the most modern and widely used Linux operating systems.

Every organization that uses AWS has a set of user accounts that grant access to resources and data. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) service is the part of AWS that keeps track of all the users, groups, roles and policies that provide that access. Because it controls permissions for all other services, IAM is probably the single most important service in AWS to focus on from a security perspective.

Fraud rates for Unemployment Insurance Benefits (UIB) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) are out of control. In May 2020, Brian Krebs of Krebsonsecurity published two articles detailing fraud that was occurring in several different state’s UIB portals. These states had been warned by the US Secret Service to be on the lookout for this. Reading the articles, the common theme is that many states are missing rudimentary controls for combating fraud.

The Splunk Security Team is excited to share some of the new and enhanced capabilities of Splunk Phantom, Splunk’s security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) technology. Phantom’s latest update (v4.10) makes automation implementation, operation and scaling easier than ever for your security team.

This blog is part two of Splunk's Sunburst Backdoor response aimed at providing additional guidance to our customers (you can read part one, "Using Splunk to Detect Sunburst Backdoor," by Ryan Kovar). In this blog, we’ll cover how to ingest threat indicators to combat Sunburst Backdoor in Splunk Enterprise Security (ES).

TL;DR: This blog contains some immediate guidance on using Splunk Core and Splunk Enterprise Security to protect (and detect activity on) your network from the Sunburst Backdoor malware delivered via SolarWinds Orion software. Splunk’s threat research team will release more guidance in the coming week. Also please note that you may see some malicious network activity but it may not mean your network is compromised. As always review carefully.

The global pandemic has fueled a rapid digital transformation — and led to permanent shifts in cybersecurity. In a recent joint webinar with Bryan McAninch, senior solutions engineer at Splunk, and guest speaker Chris Kissel from IDC, "Sp(e)lunking Security with MITRE ATT&CK® featuring IDC Research," they shared seven overarching trends in cybersecurity for 2021. One notable, but foundational, trend mentioned was the need to understand risk.

Well, it’s been a while since you read a blog dedicated to the latest release – okay, the latest several releases – of Splunk Security Essentials (SSE). We have been busy behind the scenes, however, so let’s catch you up on SSE’s latest features, which include the new version of our content API, and externally with updates from MITRE and the release of ATT&CK v7.2 (with Sub-Techniques) and ATT&CK v8.