Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Security is an essential part of any modern IT foundation, whether in smaller shops or at enterprise-scale. It used to be sufficient to implement rules-based software to defend against malicious actors, but those malicious actors are not standing still. Just as every aspect of IT has become more sophisticated, attackers have continued to innovate as well. Building more and more rules-based software to detect security events means you are always one step behind in an unsustainable fight.

According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the money lost by businesses to fraudsters amounts to over $3.5 trillion each year. The ACFE's 2016 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse states that proactive data monitoring and analysis is among the most effective anti-fraud controls.

The importance of the security of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) networks is no secret (well, of course a lot of it is secret!). This is evidenced by the Department’s IT/cybersecurity budget request that annually tops $40 billion dollars. Last year’s IT and Cyberspace Activities Budget Overview perhaps said it best.

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.