As organizations increase their cloud footprints, it becomes more and more important to implement access control monitoring for as many resources as possible. In previous playbooks, we have shown examples of AWS and Azure account monitoring, but the series would not be complete without also supporting Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Are you the type of person who loves the command-line? Is tab-complete your friend? Do you move faster on a keyboard than with a mouse? Then Phantom Slash Commands are for you!

The Splunk Threat Research team recently developed a new analytic story to help security operations center (SOC) analysts detect adversaries executing password spraying attacks against Active Directory environments. In this blog, we’ll walk you through this analytic story, demonstrate how we can simulate these attacks using PurpleSharp, collect and analyze the Windows event logs, and highlight a few detections from the May 2021 releases.

At Splunk, we’re constantly on the hunt for new and emerging threats — tirelessly developing detection techniques to zero in on bad actors, while sharing key intelligence around cybercrime activity. But because threat intelligence can relate to so many different things — ranging from spear phishing campaigns to dark web dealings — it can be a challenge to cover and define all the specifics of what (or who) to look out for.

On June 2nd, 2021, the White House released a memo from Anne Neuberger, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology. The subject? “What We Urge You To Do To Protect Against The Threat of Ransomware.” It outlines several recommendations on how to protect your organization from ransomware. The memo was a follow-up to President Biden’s May 12th Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity Order (EO14028).

If you’re an active Splunk Phantom user, it’s safe to assume you know what a playbook is. If not, here’s a quick summary: Phantom playbooks allow analysts to automate everyday security tasks, without the need for human interaction. Manual security tasks that used to take 30 minutes can now be executed automatically in seconds using a playbook. The result? Increased productivity and efficiency, time saved, and headaches avoided.

When running Splunk Phantom with AWS services, it can be tricky to make sure Splunk Phantom has the right access. When you’re managing multiple AWS accounts, the effort to configure Splunk Phantom’s access to every account can feel insurmountable. Fortunately, Amazon has the Security Token Service to solve this problem with temporary credentials, so we’ve integrated it with Splunk Phantom!