Hello Security Ninjas, Today's IT world is complex and can be challenging for security operations teams. Nowadays, more apps are being integrated and interconnected than ever before. Cloud services and SaaS solutions purchased all throughout the organization outside of the IT department add even more complexity. Communicating to application and service owners the kind of activities that need to be logged and sent to the SOC can be a daunting task.

Security teams are in a difficult position: they continue wrestling with persistent problems, such as overwhelming alert volumes and staff shortages, while confronting new ones driven by the abrupt shift to remote work. For instance, attaining real-time, deep visibility into cloud environments may have been on SOC roadmaps before 2020, but the capability is now a pressing need.

When you take a close look at the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) function at the heart of a successful cybersecurity program, you quickly realize that it all depends on integration. It isn’t that the individual components of the program aren’t absolutely essential. But with cyber-attacks gaining in number and sophistication, the true power of CDM is in the ability to overlay multiple datasets to create a single lens for tracking, assessing, and responding to threats.

As Denmark’s largest power, utility and telecommunications company servicing 1.5 million customers, Norlys understands the need for fast response to security alerts. When the company first started, the Norlys security team built their own log analytics and incident response capabilities from the ground up. This homegrown approach presented challenges, including manual workflows, too many repetitive tasks and difficult-to-maintain processes.

What is the benefit of combining the power of Data Stream Processor (DSP) and Splunk Phantom? I will give you a hint - the answer involves speed and extensibility. In today's security landscape, speed to detect and mitigate security attacks or outages is of the utmost importance. A slow response to a security incident can have a detrimental impact to your organization's bottom line.

I used to have a cat who loved ice cream. I think I may have given her some as a kitten, and from then on, anytime that she saw someone eating ice cream she would do her best to try and steal some from them. And even if she didn’t really seem to enjoy a particular flavor, she still seemed driven to try and steal that person’s ice cream. Like my cat stealing ice cream, bad guys are constantly trying to target organizations and their data for nefarious purposes.

A few weeks ago, researching another topic, I posed a question - Which domain within the security ecosystem has struggled to move the needle over the past few years? After trawling through a multitude of annual breach analysts reports (Verizon Breach Report, M-Trends, et al., I concluded that “identities accessing cloud infrastructure” was an irritatingly tough nut to crack.

With cloud computing growing at a phenomenal rate across the world, shifts in consumer behavior towards digital services are resulting in evolutionary changes for the banking, financial services and insurance industry. Cloud-based banking, for example, is regarded as a catalyst for business transformation and a turning point in financial services. Cyber safety, however, has become a key concern holding back cloud adoption in many organizations.

Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released Alert (AA20-302A) on October 28th called “Ransomware Activity Targeting the Healthcare and Public Health Sector.” This alert details TTPs associated with ongoing and possible imminent attacks against the Healthcare sector, and is a joint advisory in coordination with other U.S. Government agencies.

Several weeks ago, my good friend Katie Nickels (Director of Intelligence at Red Canary extraordinaire) and I were chatting about Ransomware. She was super interested and passionate about some new uses of a ransomware variant named “Ryuk” (first detected in 2018 and named after a manga/anime character) [1]. I was, to be honest, much less interested. It turns out, as usual, Katie was right; this was a big deal (although as you will see, I’m right too… still dull stuff!).