Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

In early 2020, threat actors breached the build systems of Solarwinds and used this access to add malicious code into one of SolarWinds products. The product, called “Orion”, is very widely used and deployed by tens of thousands of companies, including many Fortune 500 companies.

For a long time, the Internet has been an easily accessible place for most people around the world, full of information, fun, and in general, it is an almost indispensable tool for most companies, if not all, and very useful in many other areas, such as education, administration, etc. But, since evil is a latent quality in the human being, this useful tool has also become a double-edged sword.

When it comes to malware attacks, one of the more common techniques is “living off the land” (LOtL). Utilizing standard tools or features that already exist in the target environment allows these attacks to blend into the environment and avoid detection. While these techniques can appear normal in isolation, they start looking suspicious when observed in the parent-child context. This is where the ProblemChild framework can help.

SQL injection is one of the most destructive ways an application can be attacked. This kind of attack is targeted toward the application database, which can result in consequences that are irreversible, lead to loss of money, and reduce user trust in your company. There are far too many application data breaches happening every day, usually when a malicious agent attacks the database.

Last year, during the Magecart attacks saga, I was constantly flooded by calls from e-entrepreneurs – all sounding worried and anxious. The attacks were brazen, and the digital trust was taking a beating. After the initial shock waned, the entire conversation shifted gears. I still remember having long discussions with my clients about eCommerce security threats and their solutions. It now focused solely on building a reliable security system.