This blog post is part twenty-four of the "Hunting with Splunk: The Basics" series. I've been dealing with viruses for years, but this is the first time I've written a blog post where we are dealing with actual viruses. Ever since the 2004 tsunami, I have witnessed cyber-baddies using current events to trick users into opening documents or clicking on links. The COVID-19 breakout is no different.

A lot has changed in the past few weeks. And the percentage of us working from home (WFH) has increased tremendously. With increased WFH, we rely more on email communication, and this increases the opportunities for abuse by others. One thing that has stayed constant: bad people want to do bad things. As we have seen in the past, when one avenue of attack is restricted, the fraudsters redouble their efforts in other areas, and online fraud attempts are already increasing during our new normal.

Welcome to the new world, my friends. Now that working from home is our new reality, we've found that many of our customers are taking a much closer look at the technology that binds us all together and allows us to access corporate resources: the humble VPN. In the spirit of enablement, I’ve put together a quick list of dashboards that can help add that extra bit of visibility for our faithful Splunk Enterprise Security customers.

Today, we are facing an unprecedented situation. The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting everything we know -- our families, our businesses, our communities, and our way of life. In these tough times, many organizations have resorted to mandatory remote working for employees so they can still be productive and safe. Saas productivity tools like Zoom, Slack, G-Suite and Office 365 became seemingly mandatory in this new distributed workplace.

Alcide recently introduced Alcide kAudit, an automatic tool for analyzing Kubernetes Audit logs. This tool focuses on detecting non-compliant and anomalous behavior of users, automated service accounts and suspicious administration operations. Alcide’s recent integration with Sumo Logic enables users to gain full access to insights and real-time alerts from Alcide kAudit.

Last month, we hosted a webinar, Hunting for persistence using Elastic Security, where we examined some techniques that attackers use in the wild to maintain presence in their victim’s environment. In this two-part blog series, we’ll share the details of what was covered during our webinar with the goal of helping security practitioners improve their visibility of these offensive persistence techniques and help to undermine the efficacy of these attacks against their organization.

Building an in-house SOC represents a significant commitment, both financially and strategically, to securing your enterprise. In a report from the Ponemon Institute—based on a survey sponsored by Devo of more than 500 IT and security practitioners—67 percent of respondents said their SOC was “very important” or “essential” to their organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy.

In 2019 multiple cities, hospitals and educational institutions in the U.S. were crippled by ransomware, including Baltimore, Atlanta, New York City, Regis University in Denver and Monroe University in New York. In the the last 12 months, the infosec community has seen these ransomware operators seriously upping their game (see Ryuk ransomware).

The first means to collect security-relevant information at Cloud SIEM Enterprise (CSE) was our Network Sensor. It was built to analyze network traffic and provide visibility beyond traditional SIEM's down to the network-level. Beyond organizing packets into flows, the sensor supports more advanced features such as decoding of common protocols, file carving, SSL certificate validation, OS fingerprinting, clustered deployment and more.

The evolution of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is deeply intertwined with cloud computing, both in terms of technological breakthroughs the cloud provided and from its inherent security challenges. With the rise of cloud computing, we no longer rely on long-lived resources. An ephemeral infrastructure obscures the identity of the components and, even if you do have the visibility it doesn’t necessarily mean you can comprehend the meaning behind the components.