Like most of us around the world, I’ve been shocked by the current situation in Ukraine. I’m saddened by the images of families being torn apart and fleeing their homes. This brings to mind the story of my own grandmother, who had to leave her native country of Austria, with nothing more than a small bag and my infant mother in her arms.

In this January 2022 release, The Splunk Threat Research (STRT) team focused on the recently released Sysmon for Linux technology addition to Splunk. This new add-on opens the door for new ways of monitoring, creating detections, and defending against Linux systems threats. Linux is the most commonly used operating system across the world with approximately 67% of the internet.

Enterprises continue to embrace cloud technology, some driven by the desire to offload rising hardware costs and operational overhead, others enticed by the promise of scalable, on-demand, practically infinite capacity and capability only a few clicks away.

The SURGe team at Splunk is always exploring new methods and tools to make our lives easier. Today we’d like to share some of that work with you. Before we dive into the what and how, I’d like to briefly explain the why.

The Splunk Threat Research Team is monitoring open channel intelligence and government alerts indicating the possibility of malicious campaigns using destructive software in relation to ongoing geopolitical events. Based on historical data of named geopolitical actors, the use of destructive payloads has been observed in past campaigns.

White House memo directs the Defense Department and Intelligence Community to implement its May 2021 Executive Order on improving national cybersecurity.

This weekend I spent some time with Okta’s Identity Engine product, learning about various ways to integrate it with Splunk and other external systems. When I got to Okta’s Event Hooks feature, I exclaimed “Aw, HECk!” (actually I said something a little stronger) and banged my head against my old copy of "Log4J 4 Me and U - A Complete Guide" for a few hours trying to get Event Hooks sending data properly into Splunk’s HTTP Event Collector, or HEC.

With the recent release of Sysmon (System Monitor) for Linux by Microsoft, new opportunities for monitoring, detection development, and defense are now possible. Sysmon for Windows is a very popular tool among detection developers and blue teamers as it provides extensive details from system activity and windows logs. Due to the extensive information this service/driver provides in Microsoft Windows, it is very useful when researching attacks and replicating malicious payloads on lab machines.

It would be hard to overstate the critical importance of security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) capabilities for the effective mission success of security operations centers (SOC). Without a solid SOAR capability in place, an SOC will be easily overwhelmed with routine and repetitive tasks that in and of themselves could become a vulnerability.