The great Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights once said, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” Whether we’re talking about a NASCAR race or responding to a security alert, being able to quickly discover attacks and adversaries and respond rapidly is critically important to reducing risks and managing threats to your organization. How do we suggest you do that? With a SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation & Response) tool.

The ransomware campaign against the Colonial Pipeline highlights the dangers and real-life consequences of cyberattacks. If you want to understand how to use Splunk to find activity related to the DarkSide Ransomware, we highly recommend you first read “The DarkSide of the Ransomware Pipeline” from Splunk’s Security Strategist team. In short, according to the FBI, the actors behind this campaign are part of the “DarkSide” group.

Every career has defining moments. Most are spread out over years or even decades, but the cybersecurity world has had two career-defining moments just in the past year. It started with the global shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, many organizations were forced to support employees working remotely. CISOs, like me, were expected to keep both our company and its employees safe in a completely unpredictable world.

Despite the myriad pathways to initial access on our networks, phishing remains the single most popular technique for attackers. The open nature of email and our reliance on it for communication make it difficult for defenders to classify messages, so it is no surprise that suspicious email investigation is a top use case for automation. Today, we are releasing a new community playbook for Splunk SOAR (previously Splunk Phantom) to help enrich suspicious email events.

Clop Ransomware has been active since 2019 and has been mostly associated with financially-driven criminal groups. However, lately this ransomware payload has been observed in campaigns against universities and other institutions in the education vertical.

Financial crime has become a red-hot topic over the last 12 months, as fraudsters have sought to exploit the monitoring gaps between people, process and technology across an ever-widening attack surface – driven by the growth in usage of remote (digital) channels. Even before its recent growth, the cost of fraud and financial crime was significant.

The past year has challenged us in unimaginable ways. We kept our distance for the greater good, while companies faced the daunting task of transforming their workforce from in-person to remote — practically overnight. This presented a unique challenge for cybersecurity teams. How would they ensure employees retained access to critical data in a secure way? Working in the cloud has made remote work easier for many organizations, but has also presented new risks.

Vulnerabilities are weaknesses in the security infrastructure that bad actors can exploit to gain unauthorized access to a private network. It is nearly impossible for security analysts to patch 100% of the vulnerabilities identified on any given day, but a vulnerability management plan can ensure that the highest risk vulnerabilities (those that are most likely to cause a data breach), will be addressed immediately.

To immediately see how to find potential vulnerabilities or exploits in your Pulse Connect Secure appliance, skip down to the "Identifying, Monitoring and Hunting with Splunk" section. Otherwise, read on for a quick breakdown of what happened, how to detect it, and MITRE ATT&CK mappings.

It’s more critical than ever to secure your company data and protect your workloads in the cloud. This blog post is a roundup of the latest technical resources and product capabilities by both Google Cloud and Splunk to enhance your threat prevention, detection, and response techniques, regardless of where you are in your business-transforming cloud journey.