I’ve been working with Splunk customers around the world for years to help them answer security questions with their data. And, like you probably know, sometimes it’s hard to know where to start for specific security use cases. We all know Splunk’s data platform is capable of delivering incredible analytics and insights at scale, but how do we tie that power with all of the content and premium solutions for security that Splunk provides?

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.

Public sector organisations are in the middle of a massive digital transformation. Technology advances like cloud, mobile, microservices and more are transforming the public sector to help them deliver services as efficiently as commercial businesses, meet growing mission-critical demands, and keep up with market expectations and be more agile.

Criminal gangs are constantly improving their ways of delivering malicious code to victims. The delivery of this code is fundamental in order to subsequently install payloads that maximize the effect of exploitation and allows them to move laterally, and install further crimeware to quickly reap profits such as crypto mining, ransomware, data exfiltration, or even more sophisticated payloads such as banking fraud web injects.

The Splunk Threat Research team has researched two of the current payloads involved in these heinous campaigns against healthcare and first responder organizations such as Conti & REvil. In the first blog, we explored the REvil ransomware group and in this blog, we will explore Conti.

SeriousSAM or CVE-2021-36934 is a Privilege Escalation Vulnerability, which allows overly permissive Access Control Lists (ACLs) that provide low privileged users read access to privileged system files including the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database. The SAM database stores users' encrypted passwords in a Windows system. According to the Microsoft advisory, this issue affects Windows 10 1809 and above as well as certain versions of Server 2019.