You may be surprised to learn that a particular malware is responsible for data theft in over 20% of financial institutions and other verticals in 2019. Watering hole attacks involve a web server that hosts files or applications where the website or files on the site become weaponized with malware. While recent news cycles have shined a spotlight on ransomware and crimeware, malware is not a new concept.

The cloud has become ubiquitous in all we do, and the line between the perimeter and the cloud continues to shrink as most enterprise organizations are looking to shift their cloud strategy to a multi-cloud approach. Moving to the cloud comes with plenty of benefits like performance optimization, improved reliability and overall cost savings, but cloud adoption is not without its risks and challenges.

What if you could get your hands on a force multiplier that got rid of the repetitive, routine work that was tying down your team, got more productivity out of your assembled work force, and gave everyone a more challenging, meaningful to-do list that made better use of their knowledge, experience, and passion?

A growing attack surface and the exponential rise of data has opened the floodgates for breaches, leading to increased scrutiny by regulatory agencies. It’s not surprising that in recent years, regulators have had to double down with compliance mandates that are more stringent and punitive than ever before.

When we discuss Splunk Phantom with customers here at Splunk, we end up talking about phishing pretty frequently. As discussed in a recent blog post, "Phishing Emails — Don’t Get Reeled In!," phishing is a super common issue that almost everyone deals with ad nauseum. It’s also a nuisance to investigate. The good news is that automation excels at dealing with repetitive, mind-numbing workflows like phishing investigations.

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.