Everyone at Splunk is very proud of the amazing things that our customers and partners do with their data. It is always extra special when one of those organisations is really doing good and looking after us all in our daily lives. I’m delighted to share one of those stories from the Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service (DFRS) who is using Splunk as its data-driven SIEM.

One of the great things about developing for Splunk Security Essentials is that most of the features and capabilities are requested from customers and the security community. In this latest release (3.1), we added a feature that has been requested frequently: the ability to filter the ATT&CK Matrix for Cloud and SaaS Techniques. The MITRE ATT&CK Framework consists of multiple matrices such as Enterprise, Mobile, and ICS.

The Kubernetes framework has become the leading orchestration platform. Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes is a "platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts" * . The kubernetes platform is used in all Cloud platform provider vendors as a tool that allows orchestration, automation and provision of applications and specific needs computing clusters and services.

Even with tough economic times, e-commerce is up 25% since the beginning of March. But, fraud has increased as well; according to Malwarebytes online credit card skimming has increased by 26% in March alone. In our April “Staff Picks for Splunk Security Reading” blog post, I referenced a story about an e-commerce site getting hacked with a “virtual card skimmer” (thanks Matthew Joseff for sharing this with me).

The Splunk Security Research Team has been working on new improvements and additions to the Splunk Attack Range, a tool that allows security researchers and analysts to quickly deploy environments locally and in the cloud in order to replicate attacks based on attack simulation engines. This deployment attempts to replicate environments at scale, including Windows, workstation/server, domain controller, Kali Linux, Splunk server and Splunk Phantom server.

You don’t need us to tell you that fraud and financial crime is on the rise. A quick google search will give you endless stats to support this claim. Fraud losses are increasing as a percentage of revenue, and that direct impact on the bottom line isan area of laser focus for senior execs.

In a world full of threats targeting data as well as stringent compliance mandates, it’s never been more important to create a strong unified cloud security strategy. But as cloud environments become more complex and diverse, it’s also never been more difficult. Even if you’re partnering with a notably secure provider, it’s still important to understand your security responsibility and to be proactive about protecting your data in the cloud.

Many people are working from home (WFH) now and will be for at least the next few weeks. The VPN and TLS connections that remote workers rely on allow for secure access, and although these are not new connection types to monitor, the current WFH situation has created a significant increase in the number of these connections you must monitor. This new WFH scenario has made one thing easier: mobile users are no longer mobile.

As the responsibilities of the Security Operation Center (SOC) continue to increase, SOC teams are experiencing increased demand on their time and resources. Scaling a security team with little resources and funds can prove extremely difficult, especially when the incident response team spends most of their time chasing alerts.