The Splunk Threat Research team has researched two of the current payloads involved in these heinous campaigns against healthcare and first responder organizations such as Conti & REvil. In the first blog, we explored the REvil ransomware group and in this blog, we will explore Conti.

This release brings 56 enhancements, an increase from 50 in Kubernetes 1.21 and 43 in Kubernetes 1.20. Of those 56 enhancements, 13 are graduating to Stable, a whopping 24 are existing features that keep improving, and 16 are completely new. It’s great to see so many new features focusing on security, like the replacement for the Pod Security Policies, a rootless mode, and enabling Seccomp by default. Also, watch out for all the deprecations and removals in this version!

The SIEM is a central point where data is collected and correlated, and as we move to consume more cloud services and data sets the SIEM itself must also change in architecture. Architecture change is hard to make for existing products. Calling a product a ‘cloud solution’ is not the same as taking an on-premises product and hosting it for customers. It means building a new SIEM for a new world. There are a lot of reasons users seek new SIEMs.

Here at RapidSpike, we have an ever-growing list of integrations available to help manage incidents raised from all facets of our system. The latest addition to the roster being Splunk On-Call (formerly known as VictorOps).

Recently, we released our new “Calico Certified Operator: AWS Expert” course. You can read more about why we created this course and how it can benefit your organization in the introductory blog post. This blog post is different; it’s an opportunity for you, the potential learner, to get a glimpse of just a few interesting parts of the course. You won’t learn all the answers here, but you’ll learn some of the questions!

As we’ve shown in a previous blog, search-based detection rules and Elastic’s machine learning-based anomaly detection can be a powerful way to identify rare and unusual activity in cloud API logs. Now, as of Elastic Security 7.13, we’ve introduced a new set of unsupervised machine learning jobs for network data, and accompanying alert rules, several of which look for geographic anomalies.

SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. It's considered as a standard security technology, it serves as an Internet protocol by establishing an encrypted link between a browser and a web server. SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins thereby preventing hackers from accessing private data.

In any case, by using the MITRE ATT&CK framework to model and implement your cloud IaaS security, you will have a head start on any compliance standard since it guides your cybersecurity and risk teams to follow the best security practices. As it does for all platforms and environments, MITRE came up with an IaaS Matrix to map the specific Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) that advanced threat actors could possibly use in their attacks on Cloud environments.

The CVE-2021-33909, named Sequoia, is a new privilege escalation vulnerability that affects Linux’s file system. It was disclosed in July, 2021, and it was introduced in 2014 on many Linux distros; among which we have Ubuntu (20.04, 20.10 and 21.04), Debian 11, Fedora 34 Workstation and some Red Hat products, too. This vulnerability is caused by an out-of-bounds write found in the Linux kernel’s seq_file in the Filesystem layer.

In December 2020, we blogged about security issues in Go’s encoding/xml with critical impact on several Go-based SAML implementations. Coordinating the disclosure around those issues was no small feat; we spent months emailing the Go security team, reviewing code, testing and retesting exploits, coming up with workarounds, implementing a validation library, and finally reaching out to SAML library maintainers and 20 different companies downstream.

Picture this: It’s a normal day of working from home as usual since the COVID-19 outbreak. After that satisfying cup of coffee, you log in. But something is wrong. No matter how many times you click, your files don’t open. Your screen is frozen and refuses to budge. And then, you see one of the worst nightmares any IT admin can imagine: “Oops, your files have been encrypted. But don’t worry, we haven’t deleted them yet.

Welcome to another monthly update on what’s new from Sysdig! Happy 4th of July to our American audience, and bonne Bastille to our French friends. It’s been heating up in the northern hemisphere, so we hope you’ve all been managing to stay cool and safe. Our team continues to work hard to bring great new features to all of our customers, automatically and for free! The big news this month is our intent to acquire Apolicy, which has everyone full of excitement.

The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

Covid made the hypothetical necessity of IT risk planning a reality. Many organizations responded to the immediate need for remote workforces by adding more VPN licenses. But while adding more VPN capacity solved the problem of resource access, it also led to network bottlenecks and application latencies.

The 2010 Stuxnet malicious software attack on a uranium enrichment plant in Iran had all the twists and turns of a spy thriller. The plant was air gapped (not connected to the internet) so it couldn’t be targeted directly by an outsider. Instead, the attackers infected five of the plant’s partner organizations, hoping that an engineer from one of them would unknowingly introduce the malware to the network via a thumb drive.

Detecting and preventing malicious activity such as botnet attacks is a critical area of focus for threat intel analysts, security operators, and threat hunters. Taking up the Mozi botnet as a case study, this blog post demonstrates how to use open source tools, analytical processes, and the Elastic Stack to perform analysis and enrichment of collected data irrespective of the campaign.

SeriousSAM or CVE-2021-36934 is a Privilege Escalation Vulnerability, which allows overly permissive Access Control Lists (ACLs) that provide low privileged users read access to privileged system files including the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database. The SAM database stores users' encrypted passwords in a Windows system. According to the Microsoft advisory, this issue affects Windows 10 1809 and above as well as certain versions of Server 2019.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore why organizations should implement Zero Trust in 2021. In 2010, John Kindervag introduced the concept of “Zero Trust” which has become a touchstone for cyber resilience and persistent security. Zero Trust is not a security product, architecture, or technology.

Continuing to ride the waves of Summer of Security and the launch of Splunk Security Cloud, Splunk Security Essentials is now part of the Splunk security portfolio and fully supported with an active Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise license. No matter how you choose to deploy Splunk, you can apply prescriptive guidance and deploy pre-built detections from Splunk Security Essentials to Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud Platform, Splunk SIEM and Splunk SOAR solutions.

I’m a security analyst at Orange Business Services in Paris, and one of my current projects for the Orange Group is implementing a new SIEM based on the Elastic Stack. In this blog post, I’ll share why we chose Elastic and how we were able to integrate Elastic into our existing SIEM, resulting in faster investigations and saving our engineers’ time. So follow along.

While most businesses have an emergency preparedness plan in place, organizations have to wonder if their current plans are enough to defend against the growing list of major incidents and critical events affecting business. According to the 2020-21 Major Incident Management Annual report, an emergency preparedness plan isn’t enough to combat the growing threat landscape. To combat the rise in critical events, organizations must maximize operational resilience.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an increasingly popular method for securing user accounts that requires users to provide two or more pieces of identifying information when logging into an application. This information can consist of unique verification links or codes sent to the user’s phone or email address, as well as time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) generated by authenticator applications or hardware.

At the start of the pandemic, IT organizations had to undergo radical changes to support remote work. Given the urgency to shift to remote operations, IT admins opted for band-aid solutions to retain business continuity and stay connected to the core of their networks from remote locations. But now, many organizations are moving toward hybrid workforce options with employees choosing to work from both their home and office locations.

What can I say further about Ivanti’s mobile threat defense (MTD) solution for iOS, iPadOS and Android devices that has not already been mentioned in any of my previous blogs and quick video demos? If I was to state where Ivanti has a clear advantage over other unified endpoint management competitors, it is with Ivanti’s MTD solution.

We recently started using GitHub Security Advisories as part of our workflow for pushing out security releases. This post will give a brief introduction on how they work, how we use them, some of their limitations, and how we overcome them. We are still experimenting with this workflow, but the information could still be helpful for some while others might have suggestions how we could do things better.

The Splunk Threat Research Team has assessed several samples of Trickbot, a popular crimeware carrier that allows malicious actors to deliver multiple types of payloads.

On May 12, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to improve their cybersecurity practices. Following the recent SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline attacks, it is clear that security incidents can severely impact the economy and civilians' day-to-day lives and that cybersecurity needs to be a high-priority issue. We encourage you to read the full executive order.

Old news: The pandemic changed the world. New news: Security operations still need to act as if the crisis continues. Here's why. Prior to the pandemic, organizations around the world were already moving forward with digital transformation. COVID-19 forced enterprises to scale like never before—adding public cloud services, new network devices, remote workers, and software as a service (SaaS) applications.

Today, we announced that Sysdig is acquiring Apolicy to enable our customers to secure their infrastructure as code. I could not be more excited because the innovation that Apolicy brings to bear is unique and highly differentiated, allowing customers to strengthen their Kubernetes and cloud security and compliance by leveraging policy as code and automated remediation workflows that close the gap from source to production.

Imagine being offered an electronic lock for your front door. One that allows you to open the door through a mobile application in the cloud, would you accept it? They promised that they would never lose the key, that with the app your would be able to open the door remotely and even through a webcam in the peephole, the device will be able to recognize your face and welcome you.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are among some of the most exciting technological revolutions of our time. An increasingly ubiquitous aspect of our digital environment, AI is changing how we interact with our devices and surf the internet. Most of us fall somewhere between the two poles of a utopian and a dystopian understanding of the new technology, seeing both its benefits for society and its inherent risks.

We’re constantly told to “Shift Left” and that Secure DevOps is the only way to have confidence in your cloud native applications. But speaking to end-users and industry colleagues, it’s clear that there are some major challenges in adopting Secure DevOps. If we read our history books, we know that DevOps wasn’t successfully adopted by buying tools, and a true cultural movement towards DevOps wasn’t established by having a small dedicated team of DevOps specialists.

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to take it apart and see how it works. This blog post will help you take the lid off your Calico eBPF data plane based Kubernetes cluster and see how the forwarding is actually happening. The bonus is, unlike home repairs, you don’t even have to try to figure out how to put it back together again! The target audience for this post is users who are already running a cluster with the eBPF data plane, either as a proof-of-concept or in production.

For the first time in its 30-year history, the 2021 RSA Conference was a virtual-only event, and not in its usual time during the spring. But, with 20,000 registrants joining for the various sessions, it was a testament to this year’s conference theme of resilience.

In this blog post, I will be looking at 10 best practices for Kubernetes security policy design. Application modernization is a strategic initiative that changes the way enterprises are doing business. The journey requires a significant investment in people, processes, and technology in order to achieve the desired business outcomes of accelerating the pace of innovation, optimizing cost, and improving an enterprise’s overall security posture.

Before apps can be installed in a customer’s Splunk Cloud deployments, these apps have to go through Splunk’s cloud vetting process. Cloud vetting helps ensure that apps are safe and performant for our mutual customers to use in Splunk Cloud. It’s important for us to make regular updates to our cloud vetting requirements in order to ensure apps running on Splunk Cloud are “up to snuff”.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) has generated a lot of buzz recently with press, analysts, and even customers. There’s no denying that, at face value, its promise of reduced complexity and cost while increasing detection and response is alluring. As security teams look to modernize their security tooling, they’re also looking for solutions to some of their largest challenges. Is XDR the answer? What is XDR, exactly, and how do you determine if it’s right for your organization?

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a combination of Security Information Management (SIM) and Security Event Management (SEM). A SIEM solution provides real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and networks. SIM is the collection, monitoring and analysis of security-related data such as log files into a central repository for trend analysis.

Today, we’re excited to announce that ManageEngine has been recognized in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for security information and event management (SIEM) for the fifth consecutive time. We are thrilled to be awarded this recognition yet again for our contribution to the world of cybersecurity. “Most enterprises were not prepared for the widespread changes in work environments following the COVID-19 pandemic.

With DevOps teams moving at ever greater speed, it’s vital for security teams to be deeply involved at all stages of the software development and delivery lifecycle. Breaking down silos between development, operations, and security teams ensures that security considerations are not overlooked, that vulnerabilities are caught early, and that security checkpoints do not slow down the delivery process.

The GroundWork team has reviewed industry analysis of the recent Kaseya VSA incident, and while details are still being revealed, there are some useful take-aways we want to share. In particular, certain aspects of preparedness and indicators of active compromise can be monitored. We also want to talk a little bit about where GroundWork Monitor fits into security monitoring as a whole.

My colleague Lewis Pope, our head security herd, wrote an excellent blog last week about hardening N-able™ RMM. I thought it prudent, in light of recent developments, to do the same for the N-able N-central® product. A lot of it is common knowledge, but I wanted to put together a checklist so you can review the security of your N-central platform and ensure you’re meeting some of these best practices.

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are major inhibitors for organizations moving to the cloud—and for good reason. Cloud environments are complex, and even a single misconfigured security group can result in a serious data breach. In fact, misconfigurations were the leading cause of cloud security breaches in 2020. This puts a lot of pressure on developer and operations teams to properly secure their services and maintain regulatory compliance.

Since last week, I’ve been speaking with Splunk customers and our own team about the cyberattacks impacting the Kaseya software platform. While Splunk was not impacted by the ransomware attack, as a security leader we want to help the industry by providing tools, guidance and support. It’s critical that we work together as a community to counter cybersecurity threats and share information about events like these.

When considering the fact that 2020 was a record breaker in the number of cyberattacks that occurred and the resulting cost to organizations that was incurred, it is clear that the state of cybersecurity readiness is not very encouraging, to say the least.

For many businesses today, security automation is something of a paradox. It’s no secret that automation is important, and a large number of businesses have invested in security automation solutions. Yet the never-ending stream of headlines about major cybersecurity attacks suggests that, for most of these companies, security automation doesn’t end up delivering the intended results.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week let’s go back to security basics with password hygiene—the simplest, and yet often overlooked step in account security. Passwords have been the bane of many internet users since the inception of the world wide web.

Summer safety is usually all about life jackets, pool floaties, outfitting your boat with a carbon monoxide detector and slathering on plenty of SPF. I have one more thing to add to your list this summer: Security to protect your people, your brand and your data. In 2020, the business world struggled with the abrupt shift to remote work. Corners were cut. Compromises were made. Business leaders, IT staff and employees alike did the best they could with what they had.

We are super excited to announce updates to Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) with our latest 6.6 release. Get ready for the latest and greatest that Splunk Enterprise Security has to offer. Let's dive right into it.

As our enterprise customers build out large, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, they are encountering an entirely new set of complex security, observability, and networking challenges, requiring solutions that operate at scale and can be deployed both on-premises and across multiple clouds. New features in our latest release add to the already formidable capabilities of Calico Enterprise.

In a previous blog, we discussed how to monitor, troubleshoot, and fix high %CPU issues. We also revealed a system API that could have an unexpected impact on CPU consumption. In this episode, we’ll discuss another time-related performance aspect that is unique to security software: application startup time. You don’t need to be a developer to benefit from this article.

Crowdstrike is an innovator in the endpoint protection market with innovative approaches for the last decade. They specialize in depth of data collection and have uncovered many forensic mysteries in security over the last 10 years. We have many mutual customers with CrowdStrike, which is why we began working with them on a solution to analyze and correlate their data within Logz.io.

The recent Kaseya VSA cyberattack is an important reminder of how security works best when we approach it as a community. The adversarial pivot to supply chain-based attacks for delivering ransomware underscore the role we all must play in helping to keep each other protected.

Users of Elastic Security are protected through numerous layers of protections against the REvil ransomware that affected Kaseya VSA and its customers. Elastic Security’s layered protections prevented 100% of the REvil ransomware samples tested before damage and loss could occur to the business. We believe that detections and preventions must be layered, as no single protection works 100% of the time.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the Azure Private Link integration with Elastic Cloud. Azure Private Link provides private connectivity between your VNET (Virtual Network) and other Azure resources. Private Link simplifies your cloud network architecture and eliminates data exposure to the public internet by routing your data to private Azure service endpoints.

We’re excited to share that Elastic Security has been recognized in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Elastic Security is the latest Elastic solution to be recognized in a 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant report, following the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines and 2021 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring.

Splunk was named a Leader for the eighth consecutive time this week in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)*. In our opinion, this recognition marks one of the longest running recognitions in the history of the SIEM market. The recognition comes on the heels of Splunk also being ranked No.

At ServiceNow, our people show up every day driven by a core set of values aligned to a single mission: Inspire our customers to workflow any challenge. This includes helping our customers be successful as they operate within a complex and dynamic regulatory landscape.

Calico was designed from the ground up with a pluggable data plane architecture. The Enterprise 3.6 release introduces an exciting new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) data plane that provides multiple benefits to users.

Kubernetes is a central part of modern IT infrastructure. Like any critical system, it is becoming a valuable target for attackers. In order to identify and respond to security threats, teams need metrics that indicate anomalous activity and can indicate a direction for investigation.

When Splunk told me we would have a “breach holiday” theme for the summer, I didn’t think it would be quite so on the nose… For those of you who have been working on this Kaseya REvil Ransomware incident over the weekend, I salute you. We’ve been doing the same. As usual, my team here at Splunk likes to make sure that we have some actionable material before posting a blog, and this time is no different.

AI monitoring technologies have the potential to introduce significant cost savings for CSPs. Based on machine learning and fully autonomous, these monitoring solutions provide high ROI by dramatically reducing Time to Detection (TTR), Time to Resolution (TTR), the total number of alerts, and the number of false positives and negatives.

JWT stands for JSON Web Token, is a famous technology that comes with its own controversy. Few people find it quite beneficial, while others feel one must never use it. Nonetheless, in this article, we shall discuss the reason behind this controversy, understand JWT in detail, and when and why one must use it. We'll cover the following section in this blog. JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication is a process or method used to verify the owner of JSON data.

I have often joked that IT, and in particular cybersecurity, is like fashion — not a lot is ever new, just reimagined and, in some cases, improved. As I sit pondering the beauty of my COVID-19 comb-over mullet, I have found myself thinking about how this fashion analogy applies to zero trust.

On Monday, June 21st, Microsoft updated a previously reported vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) to increase its severity from Low to Critical and its impact to Remote Code Execution. On Tuesday, June 29th, a security researcher posted a working proof-of-concept named PrintNightmare that affects virtually all versions of Windows systems. Yesterday, July 1, Microsoft assigned this flaw a new CVE, CVE-2021-34527.

For our latest expert interview on our blog, we’ve welcomed cybersecurity specialist Tom Kirkham to share his wealth of experience on the topic of cybersecurity. Tom is the founder and CEO of IronTech Security, a managed security service provider (MSSP) that focuses on educating and encouraging law firms, court systems, water utilities, and financial firms to establish a security-first environment with cybersecurity training programs for all workers to prevent successful attacks.

Security teams have the tough job of monitoring and securing every single workload in each cloud and for workloads in the development pipeline. Inevitably, these processes wind up being a bottleneck from the developer’s perspective, and developers get frustrated. Understandably, developers feel like security is simply making their jobs harder. But, on the other hand, security teams feel like they’re powerless to provide full coverage.

The ability for security teams to integrate threat data into their operations substantially helps their organization identify potentially malicious endpoint and network events using indicators identified by other threat research teams. In this blog, we’ll cover how to ingest threat data with the Threat Intel Filebeat module. In future blog posts, we'll cover enriching threat data with the Threat ECS fieldset and operationalizing threat data with Elastic Security.

Security scanning provides an opportunity to target, track, and trace vulnerabilities introduced to your packages as soon as Cloudsmith has received a complete package upload. However what happens when you want to intercept the results of a scan immediately. An early warning can make a difference when distributing vulnerable packages to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of developers, devices, or systems globally.