Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If you’ve been doing digital forensics, detection engineering, or threat hunting for some time, you already know how essential Windows event logs are for spotting malicious activities. Although Windows’ default logging has improved over the years, it still falls short of delivering the depth of visibility needed to catch sophisticated threats. That’s where Windows Advanced Audit Policies come into play. It offers additional, high-value events that are crucial for detection and hunting.

Security operations teams face increasing threats, staffing shortages, and gaps in automation and orchestration. These challenges lead to alert fatigue, slower investigations, and increased risk. Enter Splunk SOAR 6.4, designed to streamline and enhance your security operations.

Let’s start with an obvious statement, and then let’s dig into it. Security incident investigations are expensive. Period. Especially when multiple highly-skilled team members are involved. Every hour spent hunting down threats or false alarms carries a real dollar cost. Industry research shows that the fully-loaded labor rate for IT security staff averages about $62.50 per hour.

The market-leading momentum of our partnership and ongoing engineering roadmap with Microsoft continues! Splunk Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) is now available as a native SaaS solution on Azure, enabling customers to even further improve their security posture and create greater digital resilience. Splunk SOAR on Azure acts as the efficiency engine for SOC analysts by connecting Azure services and third-party tools, automating workflows and tasks, and speeding response times.

Are you worried about your privacy online? You're not alone. In one U.S. survey, three out of every four respondents expressed growing concerns about their data privacy. In the past five years, the vast majority of businesses and organizations have been victim to cyberattacks, and the average cost of data breaches has increased by $137,000.

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital security, staying ahead of threats and ensuring organizational protection is paramount. Enter OpenSSL3.0—a major step forward in modernizing cryptographic standards and compliance. OpenSSL3.0 is redefining how organizations and developers safeguard their digital environments.

Let’s be real—running Security Operations is like trying to drink from a firehose while juggling chainsaws blindfolded at the same time. The threats don’t take weekends, the alerts never stop, and just when you think you’ve seen it all, some new attacker decides to get creative. And let’s not forget we are simultaneously managing the needs of the business and managing a global team seated all over the world.

Sequenced event templates are pretty cool, but they were developed around the time that Risk-based Alerting (RBA) was developed in Splunk Enterprise Security. Additionally, they don’t have all the great context we can generate with the holistic picture provided by risk, so I want to provide guidance on how we would implement its equivalent in the RBA context as they are now deprecated in Splunk Enterprise Security 8.0. There are two approaches we can utilize that do slightly different things.

When people hear “SOAR,” they often think of Security, Orchestration, Automation and Response, a powerful solution for streamlining security operations. But SOAR’s capabilities don’t stop there. By driving efficiency and automation in IT operations, infrastructure management and cloud optimization, SOAR empowers teams across the organization to work smarter and respond faster.

In the final entry of this blog series, we will discuss the challenges of managing assets and risks across multiple data systems. Then, we will discuss how Asset and Risk Intelligence integrates with multiple platforms to provide centralized visibility. From there, we will summarize the content of this blog post and go into a step by step guided demo. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first, second, and third entries in this series for more deep dives into Splunk ARI and its features.