On August 5, 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the standup of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) , a new agency effort to lead the development of cyber defense operations plans.

Cybersecurity remains an ever-growing concern in our digitized, post-pandemic world. While rapid digitization opens doors to ample benefits and business opportunities, companies also have to deal with an uptick in cybercrimes, as criminals and other threat actors raise their game, making cyber attacks more frequent and complex than ever before. Consequently, businesses have suffered serious losses resulting from ransomware attacks, data breaches, and theft of trade secrets.

As a (fairly) new member of Splunk’s Threat Research team (STRT), I found a unique opportunity to train machine learning models in a more impactful way. I focus on the application of natural language processing and deep learning to build security analytics. I am surrounded by fellow data scientists, blue teamers, reverse engineers, and former SOC analysts with a shared passion and vision to push the state of the art in cyber defense.

If you haven’t heard the news, Splunk Phantom is now Splunk SOAR – available both on-prem and in the cloud. What does this mean to you? You can deploy SOAR in the way that best supports your business needs. No matter what deployment you choose, you can automate from anywhere, and truly “SOAR your own way!” Hot on the heels of our cloud release is another exciting announcement: Splunk SOAR’s new Visual Playbook Editor.

The Splunk Threat Research Team (STRT) has detected the resurface of a Crypto Botnet using Telegram, a widely used messaging application that can create bots and execute code remotely. The STRT has identified attacking sources from China and Iranian IP addresses specifically targeting AWS IP address space. The malicious actors behind this botnet specifically target Windows server operating systems with Remote Desktop Protocol.